I've often heard claims that most rapists don't get convicted. Usually it's said that "90 something percent of rapists don't get convicted". If you push them on how they know that they usually try to say that there are only a certain number of people convicted of rape who are in prison, and then try to compare that to surveys of people who said they were raped, and that's how we know the amount of rapists who get away with it.

First of all, only aggravated assault and murder have higher clearance rates than rape. So even if what was being said was true, "the system" isn't treating rape in a non serious way. So it's not anything you can blame "the system" for.

https://np.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/prl9mu/the_myth_that_rapists_dont_get_convicteddont_get/

But on top of that, the main problem with this line of reasoning is that we don't know how many rapists are serial rapists. For all we know, a large portion that we assume weren't caught based on surveys, actually were caught for another rape they did. We don't know. But you can't just state as a fact that a majority of rapists aren't caught, because we just don't know one way or the other.

This is then sometimes combined with dumb graphs like this:

https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/01/the-enliven-project-s-false-rape-accusations-infographic-great-intentions-but-it-isn-t-accurate.html

We don't know how many rape accusations are for sure false either. I might as well just take the amount of rape accusations proven to be true and just declare the rest as false to "prove" the vast majority of rape accusations are false, which would be just as dumb. I personally suspect more than half of rape accusations are false, but I don't see any definitive way to prove that.

So ultimately, the graphs like that combine bad methodology for the amount of "rapists" there are and bad methodology for the amount of "false rape accusations" there are and use these garbage methodologies to produce a garbage graph. So now you know better.