Are false rape allegations really "that tiny"?

GenderNeutralLanguag · 2015-08-14T04:56:44+00:00

The real question here is what counts as a false rape allegation. If we look at cases where the complaint is not only provably false beyond a reasonable doubt but provably intentionally false, that number is rather small. Only 1 in 2.7 million men will face this.

If we look at cases where there was no malicious intent, the accuser was reporting in good faith but the claim is still provably fase, that number jumps from 2%ish to 10%ish.

If we look at cases where the accused can't be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, that number is closer to 90% of rape allegations being false.

If we take our best guess for including women lying in "He said/She said" situations, around 40% of rape allegations are false.

The numbers are all over the board depending on how you parse the data and what you count as "false rape allegations"

As a true affirmative statement the best that can be said is that somewhere between 2% and 95% of rape allegations are false.

thefinn12345 · 2015-08-14T11:22:09+00:00

Please consider. This study was done before the Internet boom in the 90's and way before tumblr or crazy talking 3rd wave feminists could get together on the net to become the narcissistic crazy bitches they are today. And it still comes out at 45%... It was BEFORE gender studies university courses, and before ideas like "patriarchy" or "rape culture" took hold at all...

Charles P. McDowell, a researcher in the United States Air Force Special Studies Division, studied the 1,218 reports of rape that were made between 1980 and 1984 on Air Force bases throughout the world (McDowell, 1985). Of those, 460 were found to be "proven" allegations either because the "overwhelming preponderance of the evidence" strongly supported the allegation or because there was a conviction in the case. Another 212 of the total reports were found to be "disproved" as the alleged victim convincingly admitted the complaint was a "hoax" at some point during the initial investigation. The researchers then investigated the 546 remaining or "unresolved" rape allegations including having the accusers submit to a polygraph. Twenty-seven percent (27%) of these complainants admitted they had fabricated their accusation just before taking the polygraph or right after they failed the test. (It should be noted that whenever there was any doubt, the unresolved case was re-classified as a "proven" rape.) Combining this 27% with the initial 212 "disproved" cases, it was determined that approximately 45% of the total rape allegations were false.

McDowell, C. P. (1985). False allegations. Forensic Science Digest, 11(4), 56-76.

However I will add my voice to bigharry below - "We have no idea."

BigHarryDeal · 2015-08-13T23:55:33+00:00

The only honest answer is "we have not idea".

It is a question that cannot be answered. Take your average "rape" situation. Typically she says it happened and was unconsensual. He either says it never happened or it did, but was consensual.

Unless one of the parties admits that they are lying, or if there is audio/video of the entire event, there is literally no way to know whether the even represents a rape, or a false rape accusation. All you know is that one of the two is lying/wrong and the other this telling the truth/right. There's literally no way to know for certain which is which.

_Lautremont · 2015-08-14T01:58:06+00:00

Here's an interesting way of looking at it: how many of the rape accusations against black men in the south prior to the civil rights movement were actually true? Black men were afraid to look white women in the eye, let alone sexually assault them, yet false rape accusations were the most common means of justifying lynching.

If I'm not mistaken a study put the number of probable false accusations at 40%. Personally I think it's probably double that. How many men go around trying to rape women? Vanishingly few unless you're living in a war zone. Aside from the fact that 99% of men find rape to be morally repugnant, the punishments are severe. Even under Sharia Law (which is supposedly "anti-woman") the punishment for rape is death.

Most MRA's will not share my opinion that the majority of rape accusations are false. However I'm not just talking about malicious false accusations, I'm talking about confusion over consent. Well before the "yes means yes" bullshit there was supposedly a "date rape epidemic." Scores of women came forward claiming they had been raped after being given a drug. Well, a study in the UK determined that 0% -- that's right -- zero percent of these cases actually involved drink spiking. Rather, the woman had gotten drunk and couldn't remember what happened the previous night. She woke up next to some guy in a bed and determined that he had spiked her drink.

The important thing for women to understand is that there was never a time when rape was considered A-okay and there never will be. It has always been regarded as one of the gravest crimes. We don't live in a "rape culture" unless you apply the term to female-on-male rape or prison rape. The only exception is during war/genocide, when rape is indeed common.

Most people would find the idea that the majority of rape accusations are false to be offensive, which itself demonstrates that we don't live in a "rape culture."

The Innocence Project has seen scores of supposed rapists vindicated by DNA testing. Most of those cases didn't even involve confusion over consent, the wrong guy just got accused.

I'm guessing that your average MRA would put the percentage of false accusations somewhere between 10-40%. But it doesn't matter if it's 0.1%. The bedrock of our legal system is innocent until proven guilty. Alarmingly, feminists are attempting to reverse due process rights for men accused of rape. Men are supposed to somehow prove that they are innocent of an accusation. That's how powerful gynocentrism is. We're willing to overturn our entire legal system in order to "protect the womynz" even though rape rates are diminishing. I have a cynical view of "yes means yes": basically, feminists have already won all their battles, so they're desperately trying to create a conflict where none exists. It reminds me of the neocon philosopher Leo Strauss, who argued that if no enemy exists, leaders must create one. He justified this view on the basis of "social cohesion."

Equally alarming, feminists are attempting to turn consensual sex into rape. They are basically encouraging women to think that being uncomfortable during a sexual encounter or having too much to drink or regretting it the next day (or even hearing a sexist joke!) is "sexual assault." The ultimate effect of this campaign will be that actual rape victims will be viewed with much more suspicion.

Tmomp · 2015-08-14T01:35:29+00:00

Are false rape allegations really "that tiny"?

Ask the Duke lacrosse team, Mattress Girl's accused victim, the fraternity Jackie and Rolling Stone accused/victimized, the Hofstra accused victims, etc.

How many people get convicted of treason? Probably not that many. Should we drop it?

ralphswanson · 2015-08-14T05:52:03+00:00

The 2-8% range from the FBI is very dishonest because it assumes all rape claims are legitimate unless they are proven false. Only a few percent are proven true, usually by a conviction. That leaves around 90% with an unknown truthfulness. Feminists categorize these as true rapes. It would be just as legitimate to group these as false, and claim that according to the FBI, over 90% of rape accusations are false.

Rumney (2006) summarized dozens of controlled studies on false-rape reports given to the police. Averaging these reports shows that in around 1/3 accusations, no rape took place. Since there is no way to determine, in general, whether a rape took place, there is uncertainty on these numbers. These studies vary wildly in their conclusions, resulting in false report rates from 2% to 90%. Radical feminists dishonestly round this to 2%, then cite this 'fact' whenever rape is discussed. They use it to 'justify' the elimination of due process after a rape accusation, especially at educational institutions.

2015-08-14T14:16:34+00:00

On the official FB page of the Helsinki Police they estimated that over half of the accusations last summer didn't lead anywhere. The number of false or withdrawn accusations has been rising which is why they decided to write about it.

The number includes such accusations that never end up in any statistics, namely those when a woman wants to cause a little trouble, wants to get away from a situation or is so drunk that can't think straight and so forth. Those the police can often filter out quickly.

This is just one city - where young women tend to drink almost like young men - but I still think that the real number could about 50%. Nobody, of course, knows.

elwahrio · 2015-08-14T04:27:25+00:00

www.datagoneodd.com/blog

There are several articles on here examining what data we have about false rape. Spoiler: It's not what I'd call a small percentage, in fact it's one of the most lied-about crimes.

bertreapot · 2015-08-14T06:52:53+00:00

There are different studies, Lisak's being on the low end at 2-8% (which feminists dishonestly portray at 2%) up to the 40% range. The 40's were a study from a medium sized-town where they polygraphed every complainant, and from a study on an Air Force base in the 90's.

What's more important IMO is the expansion of the definition of "sexual assault" in the last couple of decades and the narrowing of the definition of consent. Sexual assault used to be defined as not only non-consensual, but also under force or threat of force. Many states have removed the force component, which sounds good on paper, but really muddies the water when you're determining whether someone was raped or not. A woman who doesn't say no to sex but doesn't resist either can now be considered a rape victim, when they wouldn't have been in the past. Making out with a girl, and you touch her butt? Congratulations, you're now a sex offender because the touching was "non-consensual."

So when you consider legitimate claims of rape versus false claims, you have to think about these claims in the middle which most of us wouldn't consider sexual assault, but feminists have no trouble defining as such.

2015-08-13T23:22:31+00:00

No, they happen all the time.

GenderNeutralLanguag · 2015-08-14T05:01:50+00:00

On the bright side, these articles are brining light to a very real issue of men's rights. If they can get the rape of men into the mainstream discussion on rape by shitting on the problem of false rape allegations I'm behind this.

Hell, once the rape of men gets noticed, men filing false rape accusations against women will get the issue of false rape allegations the attention it deserves.

SAGReiss · 2015-08-14T06:10:58+00:00

No way to know, as the other gentlemen have said, but I would add a couple of other factors:

Some men who are innocent are nevertheless convicted, logically more so than other crimes, which tend to turn on physical evidence.
Some men who are guilty are nevertheless acquitted, logically more so than other crimes, which tend to turn on physical evidence.
Some women (again impossible to count) are raped but do not file a complaint.
There are more incentives (regret, shame, revenge, custody & ease) to file a false complaint for rape than say for someone stealing your car.

double-happiness · 2015-08-14T11:34:55+00:00

False rape accusations are strongly correlated with race, see...

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2010/oct/04/sd-rape-accusations-have-racial-implications/

http://falserapesociety.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/when-rape-lies-tap-into-racial.html

estimates for the percentage of false reports begin to converge around 2-8%

http://www.ndaa.org/pdf/the_voice_vol_3_no_1_2009.pdf

OP, please use archive.is to deny these clickbait sites advertising revenue:

https://archive.is/PEDbr

https://archive.is/rCDli

McFeely_Smackup · 2015-08-14T22:52:42+00:00

11x More Likely to Be Killed by Asteroid or Comet (1 in 250,000)

uh...has anyone EVER been killed by an asteroid or comet? How does this stat even make the slightest sense?

ThePigmanAgain · 2015-08-14T02:20:53+00:00

8-20 percent are false. This is according to the FBI. The higher figure comes from federal rape cases in which the DNA is found to not match the accused. How many of these false accusations are the result of malice -- Jackie at Rolling Stone -- and how many are just unfortunate mistakes we do not know. If they are the doing of malice, the scum responsible should end up in jail.

2015-08-14T06:15:12+00:00

Around 9 in 10 rape cases reported to police are not prosecuted, despite evidence or witnesses not being required to prosecute rape unlike every other crime, so that gives you a rough guide.

AloysiusC · 2015-08-14T07:50:36+00:00

The exact number is impossible to know but what we can do is determine a range of numbers. We know that the minimum possible number is all those that are proven to be false accusations. That's of course a fairly small number and the one our ideological opponents like to stick to.

And the maximum possible number is the number of all rapes minus the number of proven rapes.

If you include unreported cases (actual or false), then it gets more complicated again.

The actual number is going to be somewhere between those two. All we can do to narrow it down is look at trends and tendencies but those will also never give us a precise number.

One thing is for sure, to assert that it hardly ever happens is intellectually dishonest. We don't say "murder hardly ever happens" in response to an attempt to deal with it. Anyone who says that is just trying to skew justice in favor of the accusers.

2015-08-14T13:54:03+00:00

What is true is that cases of rape going to court and resulting in a successful prosecution that convicts the man, and is later proven to be false, is very unlikely.

That's about the only way to definitively identify 'false accusations' though. Lots of allegations don't make it. Some of them are fake. Some allegations make it, yield a conviction and are never proven false, even though they are. Some allegations make it and fail to convict but it can't be proven that they're false.

In my view, for the most part our due process system ensures that false allegations mostly don't get convictions. I think it's important that we maintain that, but to strip due process in the criminal courtroom would require a constitutional amendment, so it's not likely that this will change.

But in college tribunals, it has changed, and it's a Title IX violation to deny due process to the accused. And that is an area to fight over. It's important to make the distinction that the data showing criminal court convictions from false rape allegations are tiny is NOT descriptive of all allegations, and certainly not those made in an environment where due process is not being maintained--that's what keeps it tiny, after all!

DevilishRogue · 2015-08-14T14:11:02+00:00

You'll want to read this and this.

Ithinknotttt · 2015-08-15T00:17:54+00:00

The people in this subreddit are not concerned with the amount. The concern is the ability to use laws to levy unjust trials and convictions. Many ideas new and young feminist have been taught are indoctrinating them into classifying situations that are not rape as rape. They have this notion that everyone thinks rape is something that happens in a dark alley, and while I agree with them that getting a girl shitfaced and then fucking her is wrong and rape because it is essentially druging in many cases two drunks people having sex is not rape and we are seeing more and more people classifying their mutual experience as rape. The core of that problem is that feminist insist that we should simply believe women without question and that is grossly out of line and completely in conflict with the system of justice we have in the united states.

2015-08-14T04:38:13+00:00

The ratio is irrelevant.

Do people say rape doesn't matter because most sex is not rape?

Celda · 2015-08-14T15:15:58+00:00

No, they are not.

Please see my FAQ I wrote about false rape claims.

A minimum of 5-8% of rape claims to police are false - those are only the ones quite sure to be false. Read the whole thing though, there is a lot of good information I dug up.

The buzzfeed article is quite dishonest - it compares the chance of being falsely accused per act of sex versus the lifetime likelihood of other things.

E.g., an average man has sex 2000 (or whatever) times in a ~~year~~ lifetime, so the dishonest author divides the chance of being falsely accused by 2000. Then compares it to the chance of being struck by ~~lighting~~ lightning in a lifetime.

MRSPArchiver · 2015-08-13T23:22:21+00:00

Post text automatically copied here. (Why?) (Report a problem.)

RedditorJemi · 2015-08-15T01:46:01+00:00

Here's an article that might put things in perspective:

http://www.angryharry.com/Truth-About-Rape.htm

Archerbro · 2015-08-15T17:08:55+00:00

I think another issue too is that the victims (those who are falsely accused) don't really ever fight back legally.

The state should be going after them, but they typically don't.

This is why I'm such a fan of the rolling stones court case, since they perpetuated the false allegation with crummy journalism. I hope they lose millions.

steagles1 · 2015-08-15T23:37:33+00:00

As long as there is the potential, every man will live in fear. Feminists will tell you that the percentage is so tiny (if they even admit there is a percentage at all) and you are stupid to worry as they turn around and live in fear of the tiny percentage of men who are rapists. #YesAllMen live in fear of being falsely accused.

Lethn · 2015-08-14T20:00:44+00:00

ROFL!

Sorry, I know you're asking a genuine question and there's nothing wrong with that, but Buzzfeed and Vice are some of the worse news sources imaginable for this kind of thing.

Vice in particular has a heavy feminist leaning when it comes to that sort of thing and anyone can post on Buzzfeed ( I think they pay people for article views too ) so they'll always choose the 'women can do no wrong' angle. Be sure to always look at multiple sources, I even look at the sides I don't like because if even they're confirming something exists or has happened then it must be true.

I was a bit baffled by Vice's reporting but like the BBC they pick and choose certain issues to be partisan on.

Title	Are false rape allegations really "that tiny"?
Author	SpongeRelief
Upvotes	57
Comments	57
Date	August 13, 2015 11:21 PM UTC (10 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/3gwsrw/are_false_rape_allegations_really_that_tiny/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/are-false-rape-allegations-really-that-tiny.973348 https://theredarchive.com/post/973348

Comments