I wanted to start a discussion on here about false rape accusations, since it seems to be a hot button topic for both men's rights group (who believe it's a serious issue) and feminists (who believe it's not common enough to warrant any attention).

I'd like to get out of the way that obviously rape is bad, should be punished, and is a morally reprehensible thing. I am not denying rape exists, nor am I seeking to explain why those who DO commit rape do so, or apologize for their behavior. How to prevent rape is a topic for a different discussion.

So, since being told that false rape accusations were entirely made up by rape apologists, I decided to try to find the sources for these claims. I was certainly open to the fact that maybe, even though I personally felt like it was an important issue, it was in fact entirely overblown. The problem is, finding rape statistics seems to be hard. What isn't hard is finding pithy summaries that seem to go out of their way to beg the question. For example, this:

http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/reporting-rates

Starts from the assumption that EVERY rape accusation is true. It starts with "for every 100 rapes", not "for every 100 rape accusations". It already assumes that every people who has reported a rape AND every person that has answered a survey question in a way that could be construed as them having been raped was actually raped. That seemed a little harsh to me.

Anyway, I did find some false rape statistics on Wikipedia. A lot of the studies have been discredited, or have serious objections to them, and the rape percentage seems to be someone between 2% and 50%. The last study (Lisak) seemed the most credible to me, and that found that 6% of all rape claims were classified as false. That actually seems to support the feminist position that it isn't actually a huge deal (though may be for that 6%).

I read into how the study was performed, and it seemed to be fair. Basically, when the police investigated claims of rape, if they found significant evidence that the rape had NOT occured (witnesses, security camera, etc) the case was dismissed and logged as a false report. Dropping the case was not sufficient to have it tagged like that.

Now, on the surface, that 6% doesn't look that large, until you see what it actually means. Effectively, that 6% is reported rapes that have evidence FOR a false accusation. Now, if we go back to the simplified infographic above, it's claiming that only 9 out of 46 cases brought forth are sent to trial. Though the point it's trying to make is about our poor conviction rate, what it's ACTUALLY saying is that only 9 of 46 (or about 19%) have sufficient evidence for a rape occurring to pursue it. Now, there may be many reasons for that, but I'd image the biggest is the simple he said/she said problem. If a alleged rape occurs behind closed doors, between 2 people who are ostensibly on good terms, there will be little evidence either way.

But that's beside the point. The point is, out of 100 rape accusations, 19 have evidence that a rape occured, and 6 have evidence that a rape DIDN'T occur. The other 75 have no evidence to make a judgement either way. So, if you take that at face value, that means that 6/25, or 24% of rape accusations could be considered to be false, assuming that the 75% of rape accusations with no evidence were distributed in the same way.

Is that a good assumption? I honestly don't know. I think there's arguments to both sides (that they would be more or less likely to be real rapes) so I will call it a wash.

So, MensRights, what are your thoughts on this question? Where have I gone wrong with my analysis, and do any of you have better sources? I want to discuss this, because I think that it's a very important question to answer. If a significant number of reported rapes are false claims (which they appear to be) that's an issue that needs to be addressed.