 |
I don't need feminism because I'm not a manipulative idiot playing victim. |
Wednesday 31 December 2014
Manipulative idiot playing victim
False rape claims 'devastating' say wrongly accused
Two people a month are being prosecuted for making false allegations of rape and wasting police time, new figures show.
It's the first time details for England and Wales have been compiled, showing how unusual the problem is. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) looked at a period of 17 months finding that in that time 35 people were charged.
Keir Starmer QC, head of the CPS, called the cases "serious but rare".
Jason, 21, was accused of raping his ex-girlfriend.
"It was devastating," he said. "I was getting harassed outside of work, harassed in work, it's just terrifying.
"Someone approached me and told me to stay away from my ex or basically he'd come back and finish me off completely. He punched me twice in the face and once in the stomach."
There have been calls to allow those accused of rape to remain anonymous, until they are found guilty but the government has ruled that out.
Criminal record
Nottinghamshire Police have successfully prosecuted two women in the last 18 months for making false rape allegations.One was Rosie Dodd, 20, who was jailed for two years after accusing three men of raping her.
Police say she made the claim because she was embarrassed she'd slept with them in one night.
The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) confirmed that details of an accusation and the fact it was proved to be a lie, would remain on a police record for six years.
However, they say it would not be revealed to anyone doing a background check.
Dianne Whitfield from Rape Crisis England & Wales says the number of men wrongly accused is small compared to the number of women who are actually being raped.
She believes false allegations aren't as common as people think.
"There is a difference between 'false accusations' and 'not enough evidence'," said Dianne. "False accusations account for only 5% of all reported cases."
Dianne says young women should feel sure their story will be believed when they come forward.
Supt Helen Chamberlain, who leads investigators in Nottinghamshire, says they will always believe the story they are told by a victim, but warns every detail will be investigated.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/21016808
Tuesday 30 December 2014
I need feminism because my 12-year-old sister already cares about how much she eats
 |
I need feminism because my 12-year-old sister already cares about how much she eats. |
 |
The patriarchy forces us to care about how much we eat. Nature intended us to eat constantly without any self-control until we end up looking like this. |
The Truth About False Rape Accusations That All Men Should Know
It was my first year of undergrad. I hooked up with a girl and
laughed in her face when she suggested we hang out again. Predictably,
she got upset.
She went to visit her don (floor captain/residence adviser), and poured her heart out. In a sane world, they would have shared some tears, some hugs, and some sisterly advice to watch out for smooth-talking boys with a copy of Roosh’s Bang in their back pocket.
But this particular don was a gender studies major with a persecution complex and a close resemblance to late-career Roseanne Barr. She let out a deep Social Justice Warrior battle cry, and spent the semester trying to bully my consensual conquest into accusing me of rape. Fortunately for me, the girl was a decent human being with a strong enough personality to resist the allure of petty revenge. I am a free man.
This was almost a decade ago. If that girl had been weaker, dumber, or more vindictive, my life may have turned out very different. I once thought that my story was unique, but I’ve since learned that it’s much more common than you might think.
American men have started to realize that falsified rape claims are a serious threat to us, even though the issue is completely ignored by mainstream media sources.
Here are three reasons why you should be aware of the danger of false rape accusations:
A meta-analysis by Rumney (2006) suggests that between 10-50% of rape allegations are false. Kanin (1994) arrived at an estimate of 40%, using methodology that strikes me as more trustworthy than a simple count of police-recorded ‘malicious accusations’, since many false rape claims are ignored. Kanin’s unique process was as follows:
Most convincing to me, and more trustworthy than anything put out by any modern academic, is the claim by Danger and Play that more than 50% of ‘date rape’ accusations are false. I’ll take the word of one man I trust over a dozen corrupt and career-climbing academics, but in this case the academics seem to agree with the anecdotes: False rape claims are extremely common.
Hilariously, the tagline in that second article is: “Mother-of-two wasted 100 hours of police time by inventing the assaults.” As if the wasted police resources, and not the act of trying to imprison an innocent man for the rest of his life, is her most newsworthy crime.
There is no real penalty for women who make false rape accusations, despite the fact that it is at least as severe of a crime as rape itself. Personally, I would much rather be raped than spend a decade or more in prison, especially since there is a good chance that an American man charged with rape will wind up being raped quite a bit. I suspect very few people, male or female, would choose to spend decades in prison, over a single incidence of rape. And yet, false accusations are treated like parking fines – accumulate enough, and you might get a slap on the wrist.
Today, articles like this argue that a “weak yes” can also be considered a “No”. Feminists are actively working to re-define the definition of consent to make it as subjective and open to manipulation as possible. The days of “No Means No” are long gone, replaced by a new paradigm of “If I Wake Up and Feel Uncomfortable With What Happened, Well I Guess I Must Have Been Feeling No.”
Historically, if a girl is passed-out drunk and a guy has sex with her while she’s unconscious – that’s rape.
But what if a girl is just pretty drunk? What if the man has also been drinking? Are both guilty of rape? In a sane world, drunk people would be held responsible for whatever decisions they made while intoxicated. Drunk people still have agency, otherwise “I was drunk” would be always be a valid defense for drunk driving. The idea that a girl can wake up the morning after a night of enthusiastic sex and claim that she was too drunk to consent, is absolutely ridiculous.
College-aged men are put in an especially precarious position by the murkiness of rape laws, and the lack of consequences for women who make false accusations. It’s easy enough for me, as a twenty-eight year old man with a lot of dating experience, to avoid unstable drunk girls. But consider a young man on the college hook-up scene, in which the majority of girls he meets are impulsive, immature, and a heavy drinkers. Such a man should immediately learn How To Avoid A False Rape Accusation and start taking the precautions in that article.
Conclusion
These are the reasons why smart young men are aware of the growing threat of false rape accusations. It’s why men with options don’t date feminists. It’s why smart men send an ‘I didn’t rape you’ text. And it’s why men are disregarding the bullshit mainstream news sources that completely ignore issues like this, and reading sites like Thumotic and Return of Kings instead.
http://www.returnofkings.com/22079/the-truth-about-false-rape-accusations-that-all-men-should-know
She went to visit her don (floor captain/residence adviser), and poured her heart out. In a sane world, they would have shared some tears, some hugs, and some sisterly advice to watch out for smooth-talking boys with a copy of Roosh’s Bang in their back pocket.
But this particular don was a gender studies major with a persecution complex and a close resemblance to late-career Roseanne Barr. She let out a deep Social Justice Warrior battle cry, and spent the semester trying to bully my consensual conquest into accusing me of rape. Fortunately for me, the girl was a decent human being with a strong enough personality to resist the allure of petty revenge. I am a free man.
This was almost a decade ago. If that girl had been weaker, dumber, or more vindictive, my life may have turned out very different. I once thought that my story was unique, but I’ve since learned that it’s much more common than you might think.
American men have started to realize that falsified rape claims are a serious threat to us, even though the issue is completely ignored by mainstream media sources.
Here are three reasons why you should be aware of the danger of false rape accusations:
1. False rape accusations are very common
Statistics on politicized issues like this are often untrustworthy. Many police departments resolve even the most obvious cases of false rape accusation by sending both parties home, recording no crime, and making the girl pinky swear never to do it again. But to my surprise, several decent studies have been done on the frequency of false rape accusations.A meta-analysis by Rumney (2006) suggests that between 10-50% of rape allegations are false. Kanin (1994) arrived at an estimate of 40%, using methodology that strikes me as more trustworthy than a simple count of police-recorded ‘malicious accusations’, since many false rape claims are ignored. Kanin’s unique process was as follows:
Kanin investigated the incidences of false rape allegations made to the police in one small urban community between 1978 and 1987. He states that unlike those in many larger jurisdictions, this police department had the resources to “seriously record and pursue to closure all rape complaints, regardless of their merits.” He further states each investigation “always involves a serious offer to polygraph the complainants and the suspects” and “the complainant must admit that no rape had occurred. She is the sole agent who can say that the rape charge is false.”Other studies have arrived at figures as high as 90%, such as Stewart (1981), who considered one case disproved because: “It was totally impossible to have removed her extremely tight undergarments from her extremely large body against her will.” I wonder if she lives near Nigel?
The number of false rape allegations in the studied period was 45; this was 41% of the 109 total complaints filed in this period. The researchers verified, whenever possible, for all of the complainants who recanted their allegations, that their new account of the events matched the accused’s version of events.
Most convincing to me, and more trustworthy than anything put out by any modern academic, is the claim by Danger and Play that more than 50% of ‘date rape’ accusations are false. I’ll take the word of one man I trust over a dozen corrupt and career-climbing academics, but in this case the academics seem to agree with the anecdotes: False rape claims are extremely common.
2. There are no penalties for women who bring false rape charges
A false rape accusation is not merely an attack on a man’s character. It is an attempt to kidnap, imprison, torture, and perhaps murder an innocent man. It is a profoundly evil act, and yet there are often no consequences for women who make false rape accusations. Consider the case of Leanne Black, who accused five different men of rape before she was sentenced to two years in prison. Or Ashleigh Loder, who spent just six months in jail for a false rape accusation.Hilariously, the tagline in that second article is: “Mother-of-two wasted 100 hours of police time by inventing the assaults.” As if the wasted police resources, and not the act of trying to imprison an innocent man for the rest of his life, is her most newsworthy crime.
There is no real penalty for women who make false rape accusations, despite the fact that it is at least as severe of a crime as rape itself. Personally, I would much rather be raped than spend a decade or more in prison, especially since there is a good chance that an American man charged with rape will wind up being raped quite a bit. I suspect very few people, male or female, would choose to spend decades in prison, over a single incidence of rape. And yet, false accusations are treated like parking fines – accumulate enough, and you might get a slap on the wrist.
3. The Definition of Rape Is Subjective
What is rape, anyways? Once upon a time it was when a man had sex with a woman even while she was saying ‘No.’Today, articles like this argue that a “weak yes” can also be considered a “No”. Feminists are actively working to re-define the definition of consent to make it as subjective and open to manipulation as possible. The days of “No Means No” are long gone, replaced by a new paradigm of “If I Wake Up and Feel Uncomfortable With What Happened, Well I Guess I Must Have Been Feeling No.”
Historically, if a girl is passed-out drunk and a guy has sex with her while she’s unconscious – that’s rape.
But what if a girl is just pretty drunk? What if the man has also been drinking? Are both guilty of rape? In a sane world, drunk people would be held responsible for whatever decisions they made while intoxicated. Drunk people still have agency, otherwise “I was drunk” would be always be a valid defense for drunk driving. The idea that a girl can wake up the morning after a night of enthusiastic sex and claim that she was too drunk to consent, is absolutely ridiculous.
College-aged men are put in an especially precarious position by the murkiness of rape laws, and the lack of consequences for women who make false accusations. It’s easy enough for me, as a twenty-eight year old man with a lot of dating experience, to avoid unstable drunk girls. But consider a young man on the college hook-up scene, in which the majority of girls he meets are impulsive, immature, and a heavy drinkers. Such a man should immediately learn How To Avoid A False Rape Accusation and start taking the precautions in that article.
Conclusion
These are the reasons why smart young men are aware of the growing threat of false rape accusations. It’s why men with options don’t date feminists. It’s why smart men send an ‘I didn’t rape you’ text. And it’s why men are disregarding the bullshit mainstream news sources that completely ignore issues like this, and reading sites like Thumotic and Return of Kings instead.
http://www.returnofkings.com/22079/the-truth-about-false-rape-accusations-that-all-men-should-know
What’s the fallout from a false accusation of rape?
THE accusations are gruelling to read, the details bitterly sad.
You can’t help but feel for the teenager describing the abuse which began, she wrote, when she was just 10 years old. The family friend had seemed “nice and pretty genuine” when she first met him. Then he started abusing her, ordering her to remove her clothes, running his hands over her body, silencing her with the words: “I will hurt your mum if you make a noise.”
Within a year, she wrote in her police statement, the abuse had escalated to rape. On some occasions he was at the house while her mother was out. He would shut her in her bedroom and assault her, even though her brothers and sisters were in the house and could run in and out of each other’s rooms at will. Sometimes, she wrote, the abuse took place when her mother was home, oblivious to what was happening in her oldest daughter’s bedroom. The abuser’s actions, even his words, are repeated throughout the statement; he did the same thing to her each time he attacked her and he verbally abused her with the same obscenities every time. These assaults, she said, continued for years. “It almost became a bit of a routine,” the teenager wrote with seemingly weary resignation.
The statement of any abuse victim is painful to read and this is no exception. As I scan the 21 pages of accusations, the man sitting opposite me in a western Sydney cafe watches me closely. “You know what makes me angriest?” he says eventually, his finger jabbing at the statement. “This bit.” The first paragraph. The paragraph that reads: “The statement is true … and I make it knowing that … I will be liable to prosecution if I have wilfully stated in it anything that I know to be false.”
“The statement isn’t true,” says Stephen Black. “None of it. I can disprove every point she made but I was never given the chance. I was just sent to jail.”
Black, 46, spent 10 months in prison on remand, charged with sexually assaulting the girl from the time she was 10 until she was 14 years old. He was freed 10 days before he was due to stand trial, when the Director of Public Prosecutions re-examined his case after a separate allegation by the then 17-year-old girl against a number of other men was found to be false. “If it wasn’t for the other rape case falling apart, I would probably be serving 15 years in prison,” says Black. “As it is, everything in my life has been destroyed.”
Rape is a despicable crime, rendered even more vile when the victim is a child. Historically, this has been one of the hardest of crimes to prove because the evidence of children was often regarded as too unreliable to prove a case in court. Sometimes children were not believed by their families or the institutions tasked with protecting them. Sometimes the allegations were years old with no corroborating evidence aside from faded memories. Now, thanks to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and the brave people who have stepped forward, more victims are speaking out. They are being listened to. Believed.
But what if an allegation is false? If police are not rigorous enough in their investigation – or the system is so determined to give the victim a voice that crucial evidence that could prove a person’s innocence is overlooked? And what if, because of such miscarriages of justice, the old cynicism towards rape victims returns, along with the tired and much disproven claim that women who “cry rape” are probably making it up?
Black, a commercial landscape gardener who is suing the police for wrongful arrest, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution, believes the pendulum has swung too far in favour of people who allege rape. “There used to be a time when women were never believed when they made a rape claim, and that was a terrible thing,” he says. “Now when a woman says she’s been abused the person she has accused is immediately regarded as guilty and that’s terrible too. The pendulum has swung too far. It has to come back somewhere in the middle.
“Doesn’t a case like mine hurt women? Shouldn’t the police be more rigorous when they’re investigating cases like mine so that genuine rape victims will be taken seriously?”
His lawyer Greg Walsh, who has acted both for victims and high-profile defendants in a number of sexual assault cases, says he is concerned that, since the royal commission began, the potential for false allegations is greater than ever. “It’s a terrible climate,” he says. “There is a preoccupation with sex abuse in the community and I’m concerned that the climate is now so pervasive that it is extremely difficult for a person who has been accused of sexual assault to get a fair trial.
“We cannot tolerate sex abuse, but the community has become so conditioned to believe that as soon as an allegation has been made it must be true, there is a very real risk of miscarriage of justice. That has, very clearly, been illustrated by Stephen Black’s case.”
The NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research recently found that the royal commission had encouraged more victims to report historical abuse and contributed to a rise in sexual assault statistics. Nationally, reports hit a four-year high in 2013 with just under 20,000 cases recorded by police, according to ABS figures. Two-thirds of those who reported sexual assault in 2013 were aged 19 or younger.
The issue of false rape allegations is extremely sensitive – not least because genuine victims of sexual abuse must often fight to get their voices heard, to have their case taken seriously by the police and courts. False allegations are also very different to claims that have not led to a conviction, or those that have been dropped before they reach court. Very many rape victims have seen their attackers go free thanks to a poor police investigation or a jury who believed the wrong version of events.
Opposition leader Bill Shorten recently outed himself as the target of a rape allegation. He described the historical allegation that he’d raped a 16-year-old girl in 1986 as “untrue and abhorrent” after Victoria Police concluded their investigation, with the Office of Public Prosecutions advising there was no reasonable prospect of conviction. But the alleged victim has insisted she was telling the truth. She has previously told The Australian she felt “really really angry” after hearing about the decision not to proceed with the case.
Other cases are more clear-cut. In January Ben Kooy, 34, spent four days in jail before allegations that he’d raped a teenager in a Sydney train station toilet were dropped by police. In 2012, Sydney woman Stevie Bamford was jailed for 15 days in Thailand after admitting that she’d made up claims she’d been raped by a tuk-tuk driver because she was afraid her boyfriend would be angry that she’d stayed out late.
Then there was the infamous case in March 2013 in which a teenager claimed she had been kidnapped and raped by a car-load of five men as she left a party in Sydney’s Baulkham Hills. She gave a detailed statement to the police, which included a description of her chief attacker and of the car, a green sedan. That case stunned residents of Baulkham Hills, where women were advised not to go out after dark and dozens of men were interviewed by police, some of whom still have the stench of the accusation hanging over them. Eventually, police declared that the “victim” had made the whole thing up. She was also Stephen Black’s accuser – and it was the collapse of the Baulkham Hills case that led to Black being freed, 10 days before his trial.
Shortly after he was freed, the girl was admitted to hospital and scheduled under the Mental Health Act. Police have said they do not intend to charge her. I ask Walsh if he will press for the girl to be named, or even charged. “No,” he says. “She suffers from a significant psychological disorder. To publicise her name could be catastrophic.”
But Black, whose anger suffuses him as we talk, is not forgiving. He would like to see the girl charged, her name publicised, if only to make her realise what she has done to his life. But he reserves his real fury for the police, whom he says were negligent; in his statement of claim, he alleges that they knew the allegation was probably untrue but persisted in treating him in a “high-handed, calculating, humiliating and oppressive manner.” He says: “I want everyone to know how they treated me.”
To rewind to the start of Black’s ordeal: on the evening of June 6, 2012, he was sitting at home when he got a call from the girl. “She started saying strange things like, ‘You had a choice’,” he recalls. “I didn’t know what she was talking about. I thought she was referring to an altercation I’d had. Then I heard her say, ‘I can’t do this any more,’ and she hung up. I wondered what was going on. I didn’t know then that she was at the police station and this was a set-up call.” Soon after, the police knocked at Black’s door and told him he was being arrested on suspicion of sexually abusing the teenager. “They took me to the police station where I had a three-hour interview. Then I went straight to jail. I couldn’t get out. I had no idea what had happened to me.”
During the interview, the police officer had the teenager’s statement in front of him; Black says he could answer all the allegations that were read out to him but there was one claim that he was not questioned about that night. If he had been, it is highly likely he would have been freed. In her statement, after stressing that she knew the difference between a circumcised and an uncircumcised penis, the girl had written: “I remember Stephen’s was circumcised.” Black is not circumcised. His statement of claim states: “At the time of [his] arrest he was subjected to a strip search in respect of which [the investigating officer] closely examined his genitals.”
“He could see that part of her statement was completely false,” says Black. “Wouldn’t you then question all her other evidence? But they never told me about it.”
In fact, Black first read his accuser’s statement a week after he was jailed. He says he was advised to keep the discrepancy to himself until his trial. “If I alerted her to the fact that she had got something so wrong, she could have changed her story,” he says.
Black reached his lowest point when, days later, dressed “in my prison greens”, he stood in court for his committal hearing and heard the charges read against him. “All these people in court looking at me as if I was some kind of pervert,” he says. “I was filled with anger and hatred. I had trouble controlling myself.”
We go through the statement and Black refutes point after point; times, places, home addresses, even descriptions of what he was wearing or the jobs he had at the time of the alleged abuse are incorrect, he says.
Then I read the girl’s mother’s statement. While defending her daughter’s claim, she contradicts a number of details, some of them important. Most crucially, she gives a completely different description of how the then 16-year-old disclosed to her that she’d been raped. The girl claims it was after she’d been out for the night and, drunk, had blurted it out to her mum. The mother claims it was during an evening in together when, alerted by her instinct that something “was not right”, she coaxed the awful accusation out of her daughter.
And yet, despite this and other discrepancies between the two statements, despite the obviously inaccurate description of Black’s “circumcision” and the lack of corroborating evidence, I am pursued by a nagging doubt; the doubt that will always persist when a child accuses a grown man of a terrible crime. As I read and re-read her statement, I ask myself: Why would she make these things up? What if I am, by writing this article, defending a rapist?
Once it was easier to pretend that the victim had made it all up, rather than accuse a man of such brutal deeds. Today, in a more enlightened atmosphere, the opposite is true: it is almost easier to believe that the accused must have committed the crime; to damn him rather than his accuser, to let his life crumble rather than hers.
Experts on violence against women and children agree that the statistics on false rape allegations are notoriously unreliable. The figure commonly quoted in Australia and overseas is two to 10 per cent of all rape allegations reported to police. But, as Liz Wall and Cindy Tarczon pointed out in a paper last year for the Australian Centre for the Study of Sexual Assault, “The commentary around the origin of this figure largely discredits it due to the lack of supporting evidence…”
This is partly due to the inconsistent classification and definition of what is a false report. The issue is also muddied by the fact that eight out of 10 sexual assault victims don’t report the incident to police in the first place, according to an ABS study. Some of those who work in the area believe this is because the male-dominated culture of the police is still likely to regard accusations of sexual assault with scepticism. There is also still a perception among victims of sexual assault that they will be put on trial rather than their abusers, although this is far less likely to be the case than it was even 10 years ago.
Although reports of sexual assault have reached a high in the wake of the royal commission, the conviction figures remain low. Data in NSW shows that about 74 per cent of sexual assault cases that proceeded to the higher courts resulted in acquittal, and about 61 per cent of sexual assault cases against children were acquitted; the rates are similar across Australia.
So why, when the odds are stacked against genuine victims of rape, and campaigners are still struggling to get their voices heard, would someone make a false claim?
A major British study by Alison Levitt QC found that nearly half of the women making false claims were aged 21 and under, and many had mental health problems. More than half of those who were under 18 had not contacted the police themselves, the initial report being made by someone else. “It was a feature of these cases that the suspect later reported that the whole thing had spiralled out of control and he or she had felt unable to stop the investigation,” Levitt writes.
Black grew up in Sydney’s west with his brother and two sisters. Their Croatian parents had come to Australia from the then Yugoslavia in the 1960s, fleeing the tyranny of communism and bringing with them the old European values that they instilled in their children: respect women, look after children. “My parents brought us up well,” says Black’s brother, Lou. “We didn’t have much money, but we were taught respect. None of us ever doubted that Steve was innocent.”
I ask him how the experience has changed his brother. “He’s completely different,” Lou says immediately. “He used to be really easygoing, and nobody had a bad word to say about him. But this has made him very angry and bitter. He’s jittery all the time; we have to walk on eggshells around him.”
The toll on the family has been immense. Black’s father, who had been ill before Black was arrested, died shortly after he came out of prison and his mother still hasn’t got over his arrest. Black’s family rallied around to help him: his sister and brother-in-law sold their car to try to raise the $20,000 bail and Lou went around his friends asking for money. In the end, bail was refused.
“This has changed us all,” says Lou. “My wife and I have a two-year-old son and now I refuse ever to be alone with the babysitter. My wife even has to drive her home. I wouldn’t have thought about it before, but if this kind of accusation can be made against someone like Steve, it could happen to any of us.
“Once you’ve been accused of something you are always tarred. Some people will always think, ‘Maybe he did it.’ You can never erase it: you’ll always have that badge on your shoulder.”
Since he was freed, Black hasn’t got his life back on track. He lost his job and hasn’t worked since. He says that all he can think about is the injustice done to him; it eats away at him. He spends his days riding his bike and trying to keep fit. And waiting until his case against the police goes to court in November.
Carol Ronken, a criminologist with the campaign organisation Bravehearts, would not discuss this specific case but defended police investigations into child sex abuse as being “incredibly thorough”. She says: “There certainly are cases where usually young people rather than children have made false allegations, but usually this is discovered early on in an investigation. We know that the majority of disclosures are real, we know that victims find the process of speaking out incredibly difficult and we know that ‘speaking out’ is seldom straightforward.
“It is never OK for an innocent person to spend time in jail and this is one of those incredibly difficult areas when the system tried to balance the rights of an accused with the protection of the community. While the rarity of this occurring is no excuse, we also understand the underlying need of the criminal justice system to protect children and young people.”
Walsh believes Black’s case is an important one because it illustrates that “the onus of proof has been lowered – a case no longer has to be proven beyond reasonable doubt,” he says. While this is not strictly true, of course, Walsh’s point is that such cases are not being investigated stringently enough. “The laws… have gone too far in favour of the victim and I think this is a serious matter for debate,” he says.
Black says he’s looking forward to his day in court. “If they offer to settle beforehand, I’ll probably refuse,” he says. “I want to be in court, I want their negligence out there for people to see. It’s not about the money. My life has been destroyed. And you have to wonder, how many other people are there out there like me?”
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/whats-the-fallout-from-a-false-accusation-of-rape/story-e6frg8h6-1227099500714?nk=703d85f5f0a80e9bd7fa66346ab2e835
You can’t help but feel for the teenager describing the abuse which began, she wrote, when she was just 10 years old. The family friend had seemed “nice and pretty genuine” when she first met him. Then he started abusing her, ordering her to remove her clothes, running his hands over her body, silencing her with the words: “I will hurt your mum if you make a noise.”
Within a year, she wrote in her police statement, the abuse had escalated to rape. On some occasions he was at the house while her mother was out. He would shut her in her bedroom and assault her, even though her brothers and sisters were in the house and could run in and out of each other’s rooms at will. Sometimes, she wrote, the abuse took place when her mother was home, oblivious to what was happening in her oldest daughter’s bedroom. The abuser’s actions, even his words, are repeated throughout the statement; he did the same thing to her each time he attacked her and he verbally abused her with the same obscenities every time. These assaults, she said, continued for years. “It almost became a bit of a routine,” the teenager wrote with seemingly weary resignation.
The statement of any abuse victim is painful to read and this is no exception. As I scan the 21 pages of accusations, the man sitting opposite me in a western Sydney cafe watches me closely. “You know what makes me angriest?” he says eventually, his finger jabbing at the statement. “This bit.” The first paragraph. The paragraph that reads: “The statement is true … and I make it knowing that … I will be liable to prosecution if I have wilfully stated in it anything that I know to be false.”
“The statement isn’t true,” says Stephen Black. “None of it. I can disprove every point she made but I was never given the chance. I was just sent to jail.”
Black, 46, spent 10 months in prison on remand, charged with sexually assaulting the girl from the time she was 10 until she was 14 years old. He was freed 10 days before he was due to stand trial, when the Director of Public Prosecutions re-examined his case after a separate allegation by the then 17-year-old girl against a number of other men was found to be false. “If it wasn’t for the other rape case falling apart, I would probably be serving 15 years in prison,” says Black. “As it is, everything in my life has been destroyed.”
Rape is a despicable crime, rendered even more vile when the victim is a child. Historically, this has been one of the hardest of crimes to prove because the evidence of children was often regarded as too unreliable to prove a case in court. Sometimes children were not believed by their families or the institutions tasked with protecting them. Sometimes the allegations were years old with no corroborating evidence aside from faded memories. Now, thanks to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and the brave people who have stepped forward, more victims are speaking out. They are being listened to. Believed.
But what if an allegation is false? If police are not rigorous enough in their investigation – or the system is so determined to give the victim a voice that crucial evidence that could prove a person’s innocence is overlooked? And what if, because of such miscarriages of justice, the old cynicism towards rape victims returns, along with the tired and much disproven claim that women who “cry rape” are probably making it up?
Black, a commercial landscape gardener who is suing the police for wrongful arrest, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution, believes the pendulum has swung too far in favour of people who allege rape. “There used to be a time when women were never believed when they made a rape claim, and that was a terrible thing,” he says. “Now when a woman says she’s been abused the person she has accused is immediately regarded as guilty and that’s terrible too. The pendulum has swung too far. It has to come back somewhere in the middle.
“Doesn’t a case like mine hurt women? Shouldn’t the police be more rigorous when they’re investigating cases like mine so that genuine rape victims will be taken seriously?”
His lawyer Greg Walsh, who has acted both for victims and high-profile defendants in a number of sexual assault cases, says he is concerned that, since the royal commission began, the potential for false allegations is greater than ever. “It’s a terrible climate,” he says. “There is a preoccupation with sex abuse in the community and I’m concerned that the climate is now so pervasive that it is extremely difficult for a person who has been accused of sexual assault to get a fair trial.
“We cannot tolerate sex abuse, but the community has become so conditioned to believe that as soon as an allegation has been made it must be true, there is a very real risk of miscarriage of justice. That has, very clearly, been illustrated by Stephen Black’s case.”
The NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research recently found that the royal commission had encouraged more victims to report historical abuse and contributed to a rise in sexual assault statistics. Nationally, reports hit a four-year high in 2013 with just under 20,000 cases recorded by police, according to ABS figures. Two-thirds of those who reported sexual assault in 2013 were aged 19 or younger.
The issue of false rape allegations is extremely sensitive – not least because genuine victims of sexual abuse must often fight to get their voices heard, to have their case taken seriously by the police and courts. False allegations are also very different to claims that have not led to a conviction, or those that have been dropped before they reach court. Very many rape victims have seen their attackers go free thanks to a poor police investigation or a jury who believed the wrong version of events.
Opposition leader Bill Shorten recently outed himself as the target of a rape allegation. He described the historical allegation that he’d raped a 16-year-old girl in 1986 as “untrue and abhorrent” after Victoria Police concluded their investigation, with the Office of Public Prosecutions advising there was no reasonable prospect of conviction. But the alleged victim has insisted she was telling the truth. She has previously told The Australian she felt “really really angry” after hearing about the decision not to proceed with the case.
Other cases are more clear-cut. In January Ben Kooy, 34, spent four days in jail before allegations that he’d raped a teenager in a Sydney train station toilet were dropped by police. In 2012, Sydney woman Stevie Bamford was jailed for 15 days in Thailand after admitting that she’d made up claims she’d been raped by a tuk-tuk driver because she was afraid her boyfriend would be angry that she’d stayed out late.
Then there was the infamous case in March 2013 in which a teenager claimed she had been kidnapped and raped by a car-load of five men as she left a party in Sydney’s Baulkham Hills. She gave a detailed statement to the police, which included a description of her chief attacker and of the car, a green sedan. That case stunned residents of Baulkham Hills, where women were advised not to go out after dark and dozens of men were interviewed by police, some of whom still have the stench of the accusation hanging over them. Eventually, police declared that the “victim” had made the whole thing up. She was also Stephen Black’s accuser – and it was the collapse of the Baulkham Hills case that led to Black being freed, 10 days before his trial.
Shortly after he was freed, the girl was admitted to hospital and scheduled under the Mental Health Act. Police have said they do not intend to charge her. I ask Walsh if he will press for the girl to be named, or even charged. “No,” he says. “She suffers from a significant psychological disorder. To publicise her name could be catastrophic.”
But Black, whose anger suffuses him as we talk, is not forgiving. He would like to see the girl charged, her name publicised, if only to make her realise what she has done to his life. But he reserves his real fury for the police, whom he says were negligent; in his statement of claim, he alleges that they knew the allegation was probably untrue but persisted in treating him in a “high-handed, calculating, humiliating and oppressive manner.” He says: “I want everyone to know how they treated me.”
To rewind to the start of Black’s ordeal: on the evening of June 6, 2012, he was sitting at home when he got a call from the girl. “She started saying strange things like, ‘You had a choice’,” he recalls. “I didn’t know what she was talking about. I thought she was referring to an altercation I’d had. Then I heard her say, ‘I can’t do this any more,’ and she hung up. I wondered what was going on. I didn’t know then that she was at the police station and this was a set-up call.” Soon after, the police knocked at Black’s door and told him he was being arrested on suspicion of sexually abusing the teenager. “They took me to the police station where I had a three-hour interview. Then I went straight to jail. I couldn’t get out. I had no idea what had happened to me.”
During the interview, the police officer had the teenager’s statement in front of him; Black says he could answer all the allegations that were read out to him but there was one claim that he was not questioned about that night. If he had been, it is highly likely he would have been freed. In her statement, after stressing that she knew the difference between a circumcised and an uncircumcised penis, the girl had written: “I remember Stephen’s was circumcised.” Black is not circumcised. His statement of claim states: “At the time of [his] arrest he was subjected to a strip search in respect of which [the investigating officer] closely examined his genitals.”
“He could see that part of her statement was completely false,” says Black. “Wouldn’t you then question all her other evidence? But they never told me about it.”
In fact, Black first read his accuser’s statement a week after he was jailed. He says he was advised to keep the discrepancy to himself until his trial. “If I alerted her to the fact that she had got something so wrong, she could have changed her story,” he says.
Black reached his lowest point when, days later, dressed “in my prison greens”, he stood in court for his committal hearing and heard the charges read against him. “All these people in court looking at me as if I was some kind of pervert,” he says. “I was filled with anger and hatred. I had trouble controlling myself.”
We go through the statement and Black refutes point after point; times, places, home addresses, even descriptions of what he was wearing or the jobs he had at the time of the alleged abuse are incorrect, he says.
Then I read the girl’s mother’s statement. While defending her daughter’s claim, she contradicts a number of details, some of them important. Most crucially, she gives a completely different description of how the then 16-year-old disclosed to her that she’d been raped. The girl claims it was after she’d been out for the night and, drunk, had blurted it out to her mum. The mother claims it was during an evening in together when, alerted by her instinct that something “was not right”, she coaxed the awful accusation out of her daughter.
And yet, despite this and other discrepancies between the two statements, despite the obviously inaccurate description of Black’s “circumcision” and the lack of corroborating evidence, I am pursued by a nagging doubt; the doubt that will always persist when a child accuses a grown man of a terrible crime. As I read and re-read her statement, I ask myself: Why would she make these things up? What if I am, by writing this article, defending a rapist?
Once it was easier to pretend that the victim had made it all up, rather than accuse a man of such brutal deeds. Today, in a more enlightened atmosphere, the opposite is true: it is almost easier to believe that the accused must have committed the crime; to damn him rather than his accuser, to let his life crumble rather than hers.
Experts on violence against women and children agree that the statistics on false rape allegations are notoriously unreliable. The figure commonly quoted in Australia and overseas is two to 10 per cent of all rape allegations reported to police. But, as Liz Wall and Cindy Tarczon pointed out in a paper last year for the Australian Centre for the Study of Sexual Assault, “The commentary around the origin of this figure largely discredits it due to the lack of supporting evidence…”
This is partly due to the inconsistent classification and definition of what is a false report. The issue is also muddied by the fact that eight out of 10 sexual assault victims don’t report the incident to police in the first place, according to an ABS study. Some of those who work in the area believe this is because the male-dominated culture of the police is still likely to regard accusations of sexual assault with scepticism. There is also still a perception among victims of sexual assault that they will be put on trial rather than their abusers, although this is far less likely to be the case than it was even 10 years ago.
Although reports of sexual assault have reached a high in the wake of the royal commission, the conviction figures remain low. Data in NSW shows that about 74 per cent of sexual assault cases that proceeded to the higher courts resulted in acquittal, and about 61 per cent of sexual assault cases against children were acquitted; the rates are similar across Australia.
So why, when the odds are stacked against genuine victims of rape, and campaigners are still struggling to get their voices heard, would someone make a false claim?
A major British study by Alison Levitt QC found that nearly half of the women making false claims were aged 21 and under, and many had mental health problems. More than half of those who were under 18 had not contacted the police themselves, the initial report being made by someone else. “It was a feature of these cases that the suspect later reported that the whole thing had spiralled out of control and he or she had felt unable to stop the investigation,” Levitt writes.
Black grew up in Sydney’s west with his brother and two sisters. Their Croatian parents had come to Australia from the then Yugoslavia in the 1960s, fleeing the tyranny of communism and bringing with them the old European values that they instilled in their children: respect women, look after children. “My parents brought us up well,” says Black’s brother, Lou. “We didn’t have much money, but we were taught respect. None of us ever doubted that Steve was innocent.”
I ask him how the experience has changed his brother. “He’s completely different,” Lou says immediately. “He used to be really easygoing, and nobody had a bad word to say about him. But this has made him very angry and bitter. He’s jittery all the time; we have to walk on eggshells around him.”
The toll on the family has been immense. Black’s father, who had been ill before Black was arrested, died shortly after he came out of prison and his mother still hasn’t got over his arrest. Black’s family rallied around to help him: his sister and brother-in-law sold their car to try to raise the $20,000 bail and Lou went around his friends asking for money. In the end, bail was refused.
“This has changed us all,” says Lou. “My wife and I have a two-year-old son and now I refuse ever to be alone with the babysitter. My wife even has to drive her home. I wouldn’t have thought about it before, but if this kind of accusation can be made against someone like Steve, it could happen to any of us.
“Once you’ve been accused of something you are always tarred. Some people will always think, ‘Maybe he did it.’ You can never erase it: you’ll always have that badge on your shoulder.”
Since he was freed, Black hasn’t got his life back on track. He lost his job and hasn’t worked since. He says that all he can think about is the injustice done to him; it eats away at him. He spends his days riding his bike and trying to keep fit. And waiting until his case against the police goes to court in November.
Carol Ronken, a criminologist with the campaign organisation Bravehearts, would not discuss this specific case but defended police investigations into child sex abuse as being “incredibly thorough”. She says: “There certainly are cases where usually young people rather than children have made false allegations, but usually this is discovered early on in an investigation. We know that the majority of disclosures are real, we know that victims find the process of speaking out incredibly difficult and we know that ‘speaking out’ is seldom straightforward.
“It is never OK for an innocent person to spend time in jail and this is one of those incredibly difficult areas when the system tried to balance the rights of an accused with the protection of the community. While the rarity of this occurring is no excuse, we also understand the underlying need of the criminal justice system to protect children and young people.”
Walsh believes Black’s case is an important one because it illustrates that “the onus of proof has been lowered – a case no longer has to be proven beyond reasonable doubt,” he says. While this is not strictly true, of course, Walsh’s point is that such cases are not being investigated stringently enough. “The laws… have gone too far in favour of the victim and I think this is a serious matter for debate,” he says.
Black says he’s looking forward to his day in court. “If they offer to settle beforehand, I’ll probably refuse,” he says. “I want to be in court, I want their negligence out there for people to see. It’s not about the money. My life has been destroyed. And you have to wonder, how many other people are there out there like me?”
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/whats-the-fallout-from-a-false-accusation-of-rape/story-e6frg8h6-1227099500714?nk=703d85f5f0a80e9bd7fa66346ab2e835
Monday 29 December 2014
Sunday 28 December 2014
Woman jailed after falsely accusing friend's son of raping her at house party
A WOMAN was jailed after falsely accusing her friend’s son of raping her.
Kelly Harwood, 43, had drunken consensual sex with the 30-year-old on a camp bed set up in her friend’s kitchen.
But she felt guilty when they stopped because she realised she had betrayed her friend.
She called the police and lied to officers by claiming that she had been raped at the property in Aberdeen.
Her victim was subjected to an intrusive medical examination and interviewed under caution by police carrying out their investigations.
Harwood eventually came clean and admitted that she had not told the truth when she was questioned again two days later.
She was charged with wasting police time on May 7 last year and admitted the offence when she appeared in court.
Sentence was deferred until yesterday and she was jailed for a year.
Sheriff William Summers told her: “The reality is that you face a very serious charge. You had consensual sex with a man and thereafter accused him of rape.
“It is hard to imagine a more serious allegation made against someone in that situation.”
Harwood was at a party at her friend’s house on May 6 and the flat had been filled with people drinking.
Her friend’s son turned up at the flat later on and the pair became intimate when everyone else had left.
They had consensual sex in the kitchen after her friend had gone to her bed but Harwood told him she had not agreed to it moments after they stopped.
Harwood, of Aberdeen, then called the police and said she had been raped while she had been sleeping at the city flat.
The concerned man then ran to wake up his mum to let her know what had happened.
But Harwood told them not to worry, insisting that she would tell the police the truth. However, she continued with her false story when officers arrived.
She was taken to Wolmanhill Hospital where she was medically examined and her victim was interviewed at a police station.
The court heard yesterday that the offence deprived the public of police officers and cost a total of 1,352 pounds.
Defence lawyer Graeme Morrison said: “As far as this offence was concerned, she was suffering from a mental health problem exacerbated to a large extent with the amount of alcohol she had consumed that night and around that time.
“On the night of the offence she was very drunk.
“This was a friend of hers son, it was not something she set out to do.”
Mr Morrison said his client had little recollection of the night and was still intoxicated when she spoke to the police.
He said she had eventually given officers a “full and frank” admission that the sex was consensual.
The lawyer said his client then spent about three weeks in hospital after being diagnosed with depression and was now on medication.
Sheriff Summers said it was clear that she suffered from a depressive illness but said the offence was so serious that only a custodial sentence was appropriate.
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/woman-jailed-after-falsely-accusing-4519261
Kelly Harwood, 43, had drunken consensual sex with the 30-year-old on a camp bed set up in her friend’s kitchen.
But she felt guilty when they stopped because she realised she had betrayed her friend.
She called the police and lied to officers by claiming that she had been raped at the property in Aberdeen.
Her victim was subjected to an intrusive medical examination and interviewed under caution by police carrying out their investigations.
Harwood eventually came clean and admitted that she had not told the truth when she was questioned again two days later.
She was charged with wasting police time on May 7 last year and admitted the offence when she appeared in court.
Sentence was deferred until yesterday and she was jailed for a year.
Sheriff William Summers told her: “The reality is that you face a very serious charge. You had consensual sex with a man and thereafter accused him of rape.
“It is hard to imagine a more serious allegation made against someone in that situation.”
Harwood was at a party at her friend’s house on May 6 and the flat had been filled with people drinking.
Her friend’s son turned up at the flat later on and the pair became intimate when everyone else had left.
They had consensual sex in the kitchen after her friend had gone to her bed but Harwood told him she had not agreed to it moments after they stopped.
Harwood, of Aberdeen, then called the police and said she had been raped while she had been sleeping at the city flat.
The concerned man then ran to wake up his mum to let her know what had happened.
But Harwood told them not to worry, insisting that she would tell the police the truth. However, she continued with her false story when officers arrived.
She was taken to Wolmanhill Hospital where she was medically examined and her victim was interviewed at a police station.
The court heard yesterday that the offence deprived the public of police officers and cost a total of 1,352 pounds.
Defence lawyer Graeme Morrison said: “As far as this offence was concerned, she was suffering from a mental health problem exacerbated to a large extent with the amount of alcohol she had consumed that night and around that time.
“On the night of the offence she was very drunk.
“This was a friend of hers son, it was not something she set out to do.”
Mr Morrison said his client had little recollection of the night and was still intoxicated when she spoke to the police.
He said she had eventually given officers a “full and frank” admission that the sex was consensual.
The lawyer said his client then spent about three weeks in hospital after being diagnosed with depression and was now on medication.
Sheriff Summers said it was clear that she suffered from a depressive illness but said the offence was so serious that only a custodial sentence was appropriate.
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/woman-jailed-after-falsely-accusing-4519261
Saturday 27 December 2014
False Allegations of Sexual Assualt: An Analysis of Ten Years of Reported Cases
Abstract
One of the most controversial disputes affecting the discourse related to violence against
women is the dispute about the frequency of false allegations of sexual assault. In an effort
to add clarity to the discourse, published research on false allegations is critiqued, and the
results of a new study described. All cases (N = 136) of sexual assault reported to a major
Northeastern university over a 10-year period are analyzed to determine the percentage of
false allegations. Of the 136 cases of sexual assault reported over the 10-year period, 8 (5.9%)
are coded as false allegations. These results, taken in the context of an examination of
previous research, indicate that the prevalence of false allegations is between 2% and 10%.
Violence Against Women
16(12) 1318–
1334
© The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission: http://www.
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1077801210387747
http://vaw.sagepub.com
One of the most controversial disputes affecting the discourse related to violence against
women is the dispute about the frequency of false allegations of sexual assault. In an effort
to add clarity to the discourse, published research on false allegations is critiqued, and the
results of a new study described. All cases (N = 136) of sexual assault reported to a major
Northeastern university over a 10-year period are analyzed to determine the percentage of
false allegations. Of the 136 cases of sexual assault reported over the 10-year period, 8 (5.9%)
are coded as false allegations. These results, taken in the context of an examination of
previous research, indicate that the prevalence of false allegations is between 2% and 10%.
Violence Against Women
16(12) 1318–
1334
© The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission: http://www.
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1077801210387747
http://vaw.sagepub.com
Friday 26 December 2014
I am accountable
 |
I don't need feminism because: as a self-respecting adult, I am accountable for my own actions. |
Thursday 25 December 2014
Rape Culture is a ‘Panic Where Paranoia, Censorship, and False Accusations Flourish’
On January 27, 2010, University of North Dakota officials
charged undergraduate Caleb Warner with sexually assaulting a fellow
student. He insisted the encounter was consensual, but was found guilty by a campus tribunal and thereupon expelled and banned from campus.
A few months later, Warner received surprising news. The local police had determined not only that Warner was innocent,
but that the alleged victim had deliberately falsified her charges. She
was charged with lying to police for filing a false report, and fled
the state.
Cases like Warner’s are proliferating. Here is a partial
list of young men who have recently filed lawsuits against their schools
for what appear to be gross mistreatment in campus sexual assault
tribunals: Drew Sterrett—University of Michigan, “John Doe”—Swarthmore, Anthony Villar—Philadelphia University, Peter Yu—Vassar, Andre Henry—Delaware State, Dez Wells—Xavier, and Zackary Hunt—Denison. Presumed guilty is the new legal principle where sex is concerned.
Sexual assault on campus is a genuine problem—but the new
rape culture crusade is turning ugly. The list of falsely accused young
men subject to kangaroo court justice is growing apace. Students at
Boston University demanded that a Robin Thicke concert be cancelled: His
hit song Blurred Lines is supposedly a rape anthem. (It
includes the words, “I know you want it.”) Professors at Oberlin,
University of California, Santa Barbara, and Rutgers have been urged to
place “trigger warnings” on class syllabi that include books like the Great Gatsby—too
much misogynist violence. This movement is turning our campuses into
hostile environments for free expression and due process. And so far,
university officials, political leaders, and the White House are siding with the mob.
It appears that we are in the throes of one of those
panics where paranoia, censorship, and false accusations flourish—and
otherwise sensible people abandon their critical facilities. We are not
facing anything as extreme as the Salem Witch Trials or the McCarthy
inquisitions. But today’s rape culture movement bears some striking
similarities to a panic that gripped daycare centers in the 1980s.
In August 1983, an anguished mother reported to the police
that her 2-year old son had been horrifically abused in the McMartin
preschool in Manhattan Beach, California. She described a network of
underground tunnels where school staff had sodomized her child and
forced him to watch animal sacrifices. The mother was mentally disturbed
and her story had no basis in reality. But the news media seized on the
story, and paranoia about Satanic Cults became a national epidemic.
Parents were already on edge: advocacy groups, politicians, and the
media had warned
that nearly 50,000 children were being abducted by strangers, and 4,000
of them murdered, every year. As news of the McMartin barbarity spread,
daycare personnel in schools across the nation found themselves
implicated in the crime of satanic-ritual child abuse. A national
network of abuse-therapists promptly materialized. Through the use of
intimidating interviewing techniques, they egged on children to
“remember” terrible abuses in their daycare.
The abuse therapists were joined by an influential group
of conspiracy-minded feminists, including Gloria Steinem and Catharine
MacKinnon. When a few civil libertarian feminists—Carol Tavris, Wendy
Kaminer, Ellen Willis, and Debbie Nathan—tried to blow the whistle on
the witch-hunt, they were vilified by the conspiracy caucus as backlashers, child abuse apologists, and “obedient ‘daddies’ girls of male editors.”
From the start of the scare in 1983 until its ending in
the mid-1990s, untold numbers of children were subject to manipulative
therapies and hundreds of innocent adults faced charges of ritual child
abuse. Several of the accused would spend years in prison for crimes
that never happened. A recent Slate
article called it “one of the most damaging moral panics in America’s
history,” which only began to abate when skeptical journalists got round
to checking facts and asking questions. A 1985 story in the Los Angeles Times informed readers that, according to FBI reports, the number of child kidnappings by strangers in 1984 was 67, not 50,000
Today’s college rape panic is an eerie
recapitulation of the daycare abuse panic. Just as the mythical “50,000
abducted children” fueled paranoia about child safety in the 1980s, so
today’s hysteria is incited by the constantly repeated, equally
fictitious “one-in-five women on campus is a victim of rape”—which even
President Obama has embraced.
The one-in-five number is derived from surveys where biased samples
of respondents are asked an artful combination of straightforward and
leading questions, reminiscent of the conclusory interviews behind the
daycare agitation. A much-cited CDC study, for example, first tells respondents:
“Please remember that even if someone uses alcohol or drugs, what
happens to them is not their fault.” Then it asks: “When you were drunk,
high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent, how many
people ever had vaginal sex with you.” (Emphasis mine.) The CDC counted
all such sexual encounters as rapes.
Reputable studies
suggest that approximately one-in-forty college women are victims of
rape or sexual assault (assault includes verbal threats as well as
unwanted sexual grabbing and fondling). One-in-forty is still too many
women. But it hardly constitutes a “rape culture” requiring White House
intervention.
Once again, conspiracy feminists are at the forefront of this movement. Just
as feminist psychologists persuaded children that they had been abused,
so women’s activists have persuaded many young women that what they
might have dismissed as a foolish drunken hookup was actually a felony
rape. “Believe the children,” said the ritual abuse experts during the
day care scare. “Believe the survivors,” say today’s rape culturalists.
To not believe an alleged victim is to risk being called a rape
apologist.
Some will say that these moral panics, while overblown, do
call attention to serious problems. This is deeply mistaken. The
hysteria around daycare abuse and campus rape shed no light: rather they
confuse and discredit genuine cases of abuse and violence. Molestation
and rape are horrific crimes that warrant serious attention and vigorous
response. Panics breed chaos and mob justice. They claim innocent
victims, undermine social trust, and teach us to doubt the evidence of
our own experience.
E.M. Forster said it best in A Passage to India,
referring to a panic among “good citizens” following a highly dubious
accusation of rape: “Pity, wrath, and heroism filled them, but the power
of putting two and two together was annihilated.”
http://time.com/100091/campus-sexual-assault-christina-hoff-sommers/
Wednesday 24 December 2014
10 Reasons False Rape Accusations are Common
Feminists and their ideological allies routinely dismiss and
trivialize the experiences of men falsely accused of rape by claiming
that “only 2% of rape accusations are false – the same as false reports
of other crimes.” They also invoke this claim as a rationalization to
erode due process for the wrongly accused – especially in academia where male students are often effectively guilty until proven innocent.
The 2% claim is more than just an erroneous figure. It is a lie. Substantial evidence exists which – when taken together – confirms that false rape accusations occur substantially more often than false reports of other crimes. Given the inherent flaws in measuring criminological behavior, the rate of false rape accusations cannot be dictated by any individual criterion. Instead it must be triangulated by multiple factors. Ten of those factors are listed below.
This is a compilation-style AVFMS post with extensive source citations. Let it be a resource to anyone interested in raising awareness of the problem of false accusations and challenging those who dare repeat the lie that only 2% of rape claims are false.
At the same time they abstain from conducting an independent investigation into the crime scene, evidence, eyewitness statements, cross-examining statements by the accuser, interviewing the accused, and so forth.
Criminal justice professionals do all these things. Thus their experience is not to be taken lightly, and this is especially true the more experienced they are. Consider the words of veteran sex-crimes prosecutor Craig Silverman:
Note that not only does Silverman say that false rape accusations
happen with remarkable regularity, but also that there is a culture
which stifles speech daring to voice this inconvenient truth.
Oftentimes, whenever police or prosecutors speak the truth about the rate of false rape accusations, Feminist and related interest groups demand that they undergo “sensitivity training.” What this really means is that they must be intimidated, browbeaten, threatened, and coerced into apologizing for stating an inconvenient truth.
These groups also tend to advocate definitions of rape that fly in the face of the legal (real) definitions and are simply out of touch with how crimes must be investigated.
Despite this, however, police will occasionally show off-the-cuff candor. After investigating a woman’s claim that turned out to be false, Captain Randy Lewis of Rexburg PD told reporters that “we run into that all the time” [2]. After a similar investigation Captain Lynn Mitchell of the U Police said “Rape is a very ugly, violent crime which law enforcement and the community take very seriously. However, there are many fraudulent reports of rape each year” [3].
After a woman falsely accused a man of rape in Orlando, FL, police told local news reporters that false reporting “has reached an epidemic level” [4]. They then made a point to ask the community stop making so many false rape claims because it was draining precious resources from the criminal justice system [5].
Sgt. Sandra Tomeo of Plano PD told reporters for the Plano Star Courier that false rape accusations were “a common occurrence,” citing numbers indicating that ~47% of rape accusations made to Plano, TX police were demonstrably false [6].
Speaking to the Warrington Guardian, detective Dougie Shaw said:
Barbara C. Johnson, a former attorney with ~20 years experience and
an advisor to the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Bicentennial
Committee, also describes the rate of false rape accusations as being
excessively high in her book Behind the Black Robes: Failed Justice
[10].
Rape lies are sometimes concocted as a form of revenge to land ex-boyfriends and ex-husbands in jail, or as a means to get rid of a current partner. A woman may lie about rape to cover up the fact that she is cheating on her husband, which sometimes results in her husband killing her lover. Sometimes, if the husband is having an affair, the woman the man is having an affair with will falsely accuse him of rape if she is caught by his wife.
Some female students falsely accused their teacher of rape because they get poor final grades in class as an excuse for failing their exams. Other women make up false claims simply to get attention, or because they regret a consensual sexual encounter. In some cases women lie about rape to get an abortion (see here and here). There is also a rash of Feminists who make false rape claims (especially in academia) as a means to “raise awareness” of the problem of rape.
Sometimes entire groups of men are falsely accused, which happened at Duke [11] and Hostra University. While both cases were highly publicized and accompanied by public outcry neither false accuser was charged. One woman cried rape because a man forgot her name.
There is also virtually no limit to which some women will go to fabricate a false claim. Some women seek out S&M/bondage encounters and use the rough sex as “evidence” against the men they falsely accuse. Some women give themselves black eyes, or rip their clothes and scratch their faces, or cut themselves, or tie themselves up as “evidence” against the men they falsely accuse.
There are also some women who use false rape claims as a means of extorting money from men. In some places women who claim rape can immediately apply for “victim’s compensation,” which has led some women to lie about rape just to be handed free money.
When was the last time you heard of someone being falsely accused of murder for such a wide range of reasons?
Listen to this excerpt from my April 2012 interview with A&M-Commerce’s Title IX Coordinator Michele Vieira on the systemic lack of punishments for false accusers in academia. Keep in mind that a Title IX Coordinator is the one who, along with the Dean of Students/Student Affairs personnel, investigates accusations of sexual misconduct on campus:
Even in cases that receive a high degree of public outcry false
accusers are not charged. The infamous false accuser Crystal Mangum
in the 2006 Duke lacrosse false rape case was not charged either despite
overwhelming evidence that she lied. This news outlet
reports about a woman who was spared jail despite making not one, not
two, but eight false rape claims [8]. Another woman finally was jailed
for a false rape claim, but only because it was the third time [9].
At Hofstra University Danmell Ndonye falsely accused five young men of gang rape as an alibi to her boyfriend for having sex with several of men in a restroom. Even though one of the young men recorded the incident with his phone and proved she lied she was never charged with a crime.
Even when police acknowledge the high rate of false rape accusations (as I documented earlier in this post) the false accusers are not charged. And when they are charged it is often on the grounds that they waste police resources or damage the credibility of rape victims, not that they put men through a living hell.
What does the absence of any public mention of the harm to the wrongly accused – on the rare occasion that false accusations are punished at all – say about how much society values their humanity?
Dr. Eugene Kanin is a retired sociologist at Purdue University. As an early Feminist he pioneered awareness and study of the concept of date rape. In the 1990s he authored a study on the prevalence of false rape accusations which concluded that 41% of the accusers – which were in fact all of the accusations made to the police department of a small metropolitan area over a ten year period – were false.
The primary reasons he cited for making false claims were “providing an alibi, seeking revenge, and obtaining sympathy and attention.” This is consistent with news coverage of many false rape claims, as mentioned in section 3 above.
Those who critique his study often attempt to distract others from the implications of the data by pointing to irrelevant elements of the study. For example, they will point to the fact that polygraph tests were administered to the accusers as though this somehow seriously impacts the data, without mentioning that such tests were also administered to the accused.
Kanin’s critics will also often ignore the most powerful evidence from his study: the police only considered an accusation false when the accusers themselves admitted it, regardless as to whatever they themselves thought about the case. Given that there were likely numerous false accusers who did not recant this means the 41% false rape figure is actually the floor, and the real percentage may be significantly higher.
Kanin’s study is also cited by criminal justice professionals as consistent with their experiences, such as sex-crimes prosecutor Craig Silverman earlier in this article.
This isn’t the only study, however; Dr. Charles McDowell investigated false claims in the military as well. The findings:
While the most problematic element in these studies is determining
how representative these sample sizes are of the general population of
accusers, the implications of the data are troubling even when
interpreted charitably in favor of accusers. If the average rate of
false accusations for crimes in general is ~2%, what does it mean when
it is generous to say that the rate of false rape accusations is at
least ten times that amount, and likely much higher?
A 1996 Department of Justice report documented that “in about 25% of the sexual assault cases referred to the FBI…the primary suspect has been excluded by forensic DNA testing” [13]. In other words, the DNA found on the accuser didn’t match those accused.
It is possible (though unlikely in most such cases) that the DNA mismatches are the result of misidentifications and that a rape really did occur. However, as Feminists themselves tell us, most rape does not involve strangers jumping out of the bushes. They are committed by a person the accuser knows.
It is important to remember that this figure only represents cases that were referred to the FBI, a limitation. However, it should also be noted that even a DNA match would not in itself prove that a rape occurred; all it would prove is that intercourse occurred. A significant number of accusations involving a DNA match are false as well, meaning that more than 25% of the cases referred to the FBI in the 1996 DoJ report were false accusations.
Against Our Will is a book on rape by Feminist Susan Brownmiller that was published in the 1970s. Brownmiller claims that she was given the figure by a professional in the criminal justice system. We are given no evidence other than her word that this was ever the case.
Nonetheless, Brownmiller’s claim was cited by one Feminist professor after another. Since citing a professor instead of an unverifiable anecdote from a lone Feminist gives the claim a greater appearance of merit, once one professor cites it the next professor cites that professor, and so on. Eventually a labyrinthine web of citations is constructed. In the end, however, they all point to this one source, a source which is obviously biased and cannot be verified.
It also bears mention that as a group Feminist professors behave very much like a cult rather than a scholarly community. Not only do they tend to favor obscurantism and rail against objectivity (see the famous atheist Richard Dawkins describing this phenomenon), they also tend to cite only those within their narrow, insular circle and shun voices from the outside. Much like the charge of blasphemy among religious zealots, when their arguments fall through they often resort to making personal accusations against those who disagree with them (“misogyny!”).
This lack of quality control has led to a great amount of academic fraud among the Feminist community – some of which is laughably bad. The 2% false rape figure is yet another example of this.
When underreporting occurs it narrows the pool of genuine rape complaints. This means that a greater percentage of rape complaints will turn out to be false, since those claims are not underreported. The video below explains this phenomenon more clearly:
They are also mistaken when they encourage female students to accuse male students of rape based upon these extralegal definitions. In short, what they are actually doing is encouraging female students to make false rape accusations.
Goshen College once famously declared a new form of rape called “psychological rape,” saying that “psychological rape consists of verbal harassment, whistles, kissing noises, heavy breathing, sly comments or stares. These are all assaults on any woman’s sense of well-being” [14].
And that’s just the start. Below are a few examples of other school policies, warehoused at the key AVFMS post on Rights & Protections. Some schools:
Feminist and former ACLU board member Wendy Kaminer is famous for saying “it is a primary article of faith among many feminists that women don’t lie about rape, ever; they lack the dishonesty gene” [14]. This is, of course, demonstrably false.
Not only do many Feminists view false rape accusations as insignificant, but some also view them as a justifiable vengeance that should be inflicted upon men. Many Feminists are notoriously hostile to due process, resembling more the nature of medieval witch-hunters than enlightened progressives.
Many prominent Feminists also adopt radically broad definitions of rape. These “all sex is rape” Feminists inevitably include many innocent men within the scope of those they falsely label as rapists. Here are a few quotes from Feminists in academia, which are warehoused (among many others) on the key AVFMS page “The Language of Misandry in Academia”:
“Feminism is built on believing women’s accounts of sexual use and abuse by men.”
But they don’t.
Writing for the Washington City Paper, Feminist Amanda Hess argued that a woman who has consensual sex she later regrets once it becomes public “must defend her femininity by saying that she had been coerced into sex.” Men, however, do not make false rape accusations because they regret consensual sexual encounters with unattractive women.
This is not to say that men are all angels. There are some forms of evil that are distinctive (though not unique) to men. But false rape accusations are not one of them; on the contrary, they are overwhelmingly (and almost exclusively) a female domain.
Some might say, “so you’re saying women have a dark side to them. How does that make you different from the Feminists you criticize?” That is quite simple. Feminists say men are bad and women are good. In their worldview women are never capable of evil – or if they are it is only because they are mirroring the evil of men (as Hess argues later in her article).
I say that both men and women are bad and good, although they sometimes demonstrate this in different ways. At the end of the day everyone is accountable for the good and bad they do. You won’t find many Feminists advocating ideas like that.
Medical studies report that of women who are raped roughly 5% of them will become pregnant. In June of 2013 Republican Trent Franks argued that women who become pregnant from a rape should not be allowed to seek abortions because the rate of pregnancy resulting from rape is extremely low.
Feminists did not challenge the 5% statistic, but instead became livid that anyone would consider disregarding the experiences of such women, even if they were only 5% of the total.
So I must ask: what’s the big difference between 2% and 5%? If 2% is so petty and trivial – indeed next to nothing – what makes 5% worthy of a full-scale national uproar? If we behaved like Feminists, wouldn’t we treat those 5% of rape victims who become pregnant very similarly to how they treat the 2% of men who (they erroneously claim) are falsely accused?
Do you think Feminists would accept such an arrangement? You know the answer.
[1] Craig Silverman. Link to ABC article here. See the backup screenshot here. [2] Link here. See the backup screenshot here. [3] Captain Lynn Mitchell, the Daily Utah Chronicle. Link to article here. See the backup screenshot here. [4] Link here. See the backup screenshot here. [5] Link here. See the backup screenshot here. [6] The Plano Courier. Link here. See the backup screenshot here. [7] Link here. See the backup screenshot here. [8] Link here. [9] Link here. [10] Barbara C. Johnson, Behind the Black Robes: Failed Justice, p. 128-29. Some quotes (including those in question) can be found at The False Rape Society. [11] See Until Proven Innocent by Dr. KC Johnson. Also, see this video on the 2006 Duke lacrosse false rape case. [12] McDowell CP. False allegations. Forensic Science Digest, Vol. 11, No. 4, December 1985. [13] Connors E, Lundregan T, Miller N, McEwen T. Convicted by juries, exonerated by science: Case studies in the use of DNA evidence to establish innocence after trial. June 1996. http://www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles/dnaevid.txt. A backup text has been preserved at AVFMS here. [14] Goshen College. Link here, screenshot here, AVFMS article here. [15] Kaminer, W. (1993, October). Feminism’s identity crisis. The Atlantic Monthly, p. 67.
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131088792045869428#editor/target=post;postID=343677699985301097
The 2% claim is more than just an erroneous figure. It is a lie. Substantial evidence exists which – when taken together – confirms that false rape accusations occur substantially more often than false reports of other crimes. Given the inherent flaws in measuring criminological behavior, the rate of false rape accusations cannot be dictated by any individual criterion. Instead it must be triangulated by multiple factors. Ten of those factors are listed below.
This is a compilation-style AVFMS post with extensive source citations. Let it be a resource to anyone interested in raising awareness of the problem of false accusations and challenging those who dare repeat the lie that only 2% of rape claims are false.
The Reasons
1. Experts working in the trenches of the criminal justice system report that, in light of their experience, false rape accusations are much higher.
Criminal justice professionals have the power to investigate rape with far greater accuracy than academics. The latter regularly rely on survey research for criminological data, which often involves simply taking the respondent’s answers to their questions (many of which are tailored to corral respondents into answering in a particular way) as gold.At the same time they abstain from conducting an independent investigation into the crime scene, evidence, eyewitness statements, cross-examining statements by the accuser, interviewing the accused, and so forth.
Criminal justice professionals do all these things. Thus their experience is not to be taken lightly, and this is especially true the more experienced they are. Consider the words of veteran sex-crimes prosecutor Craig Silverman:
For
16 years, I was a kickass prosecutor who made most of my reputation
vigorously prosecuting rapists. I am unaware of any Colorado prosecutor
who put as many rapists away for as much prison time as I did during my
prosecutorial career. Several dozen rapists are serving thousands of
years as a result of my efforts.
However, during my time as a prosecutor who
made case filing decisions, I was amazed to see all the false rape
allegations that were made to the Denver Police Department. It was
remarkable and surprising to me. You would have to see it to believe it.
Any honest veteran sex assault investigator
will tell you that rape is one of the most falsely reported crimes that
there is. A command officer in the Denver Police sex assaults unit
recently told me he placed the false rape numbers at approximately 45
percent. Objective studies have confirmed this. See Purdue Professor
Kanin’s nine-year study published in 1994 concluding that over 40
percent of rape allegations were demonstrably false.
The above statements are heresy to say
publicly for many politically correct prosecutors. That is especially
true if they want to maintain good relations with the victim advocacy
community [1].
Oftentimes, whenever police or prosecutors speak the truth about the rate of false rape accusations, Feminist and related interest groups demand that they undergo “sensitivity training.” What this really means is that they must be intimidated, browbeaten, threatened, and coerced into apologizing for stating an inconvenient truth.
These groups also tend to advocate definitions of rape that fly in the face of the legal (real) definitions and are simply out of touch with how crimes must be investigated.
Despite this, however, police will occasionally show off-the-cuff candor. After investigating a woman’s claim that turned out to be false, Captain Randy Lewis of Rexburg PD told reporters that “we run into that all the time” [2]. After a similar investigation Captain Lynn Mitchell of the U Police said “Rape is a very ugly, violent crime which law enforcement and the community take very seriously. However, there are many fraudulent reports of rape each year” [3].
After a woman falsely accused a man of rape in Orlando, FL, police told local news reporters that false reporting “has reached an epidemic level” [4]. They then made a point to ask the community stop making so many false rape claims because it was draining precious resources from the criminal justice system [5].
Sgt. Sandra Tomeo of Plano PD told reporters for the Plano Star Courier that false rape accusations were “a common occurrence,” citing numbers indicating that ~47% of rape accusations made to Plano, TX police were demonstrably false [6].
Speaking to the Warrington Guardian, detective Dougie Shaw said:
We
have anything up to four or five reports of rape every weekend but a
large number of complaints turn out to be something else with some not
thinking about the consequences of false allegations. But we always take
allegations of rape seriously and do everything we can to gather
evidence.
Most weekends we also have a report from somebody saying their drink
has been spiked with rohypnol – while we have had cases where women have
been drugged these are extremely rare. We actually have significantly less genuine rape cases than those reported
so it is important to consider the percentage of bona fide reports when
looking at conviction statistics, which appear low because they
encompass all reports [7].
2. Rape claims are made for a much wider variety of reasons than false accusations of other crimes
The nature of false rape accusations is different from false reports of other crimes in ways that distinctively facilitate false rape claims. Accusing someone of rape claims require virtually no physical evidence. For this reason rape lies can be flung about for all sorts of reasons.Rape lies are sometimes concocted as a form of revenge to land ex-boyfriends and ex-husbands in jail, or as a means to get rid of a current partner. A woman may lie about rape to cover up the fact that she is cheating on her husband, which sometimes results in her husband killing her lover. Sometimes, if the husband is having an affair, the woman the man is having an affair with will falsely accuse him of rape if she is caught by his wife.
Some female students falsely accused their teacher of rape because they get poor final grades in class as an excuse for failing their exams. Other women make up false claims simply to get attention, or because they regret a consensual sexual encounter. In some cases women lie about rape to get an abortion (see here and here). There is also a rash of Feminists who make false rape claims (especially in academia) as a means to “raise awareness” of the problem of rape.
Sometimes entire groups of men are falsely accused, which happened at Duke [11] and Hostra University. While both cases were highly publicized and accompanied by public outcry neither false accuser was charged. One woman cried rape because a man forgot her name.
There is also virtually no limit to which some women will go to fabricate a false claim. Some women seek out S&M/bondage encounters and use the rough sex as “evidence” against the men they falsely accuse. Some women give themselves black eyes, or rip their clothes and scratch their faces, or cut themselves, or tie themselves up as “evidence” against the men they falsely accuse.
There are also some women who use false rape claims as a means of extorting money from men. In some places women who claim rape can immediately apply for “victim’s compensation,” which has led some women to lie about rape just to be handed free money.
When was the last time you heard of someone being falsely accused of murder for such a wide range of reasons?
3. False rape accusations are rarely punished, removing the deterrent to falsely accuse.
Why do people do bad things? Often because they can. The absence of law and law enforcement tends to embolden the corrupt and corrupt the good.Listen to this excerpt from my April 2012 interview with A&M-Commerce’s Title IX Coordinator Michele Vieira on the systemic lack of punishments for false accusers in academia. Keep in mind that a Title IX Coordinator is the one who, along with the Dean of Students/Student Affairs personnel, investigates accusations of sexual misconduct on campus:
00:00
00:00
At Hofstra University Danmell Ndonye falsely accused five young men of gang rape as an alibi to her boyfriend for having sex with several of men in a restroom. Even though one of the young men recorded the incident with his phone and proved she lied she was never charged with a crime.
Even when police acknowledge the high rate of false rape accusations (as I documented earlier in this post) the false accusers are not charged. And when they are charged it is often on the grounds that they waste police resources or damage the credibility of rape victims, not that they put men through a living hell.
What does the absence of any public mention of the harm to the wrongly accused – on the rare occasion that false accusations are punished at all – say about how much society values their humanity?
4. Numerous studies have concluded that false rape accusations are significantly higher than false accusations of other crimes.
All research is flawed to a greater or lesser degree, and research on false rape claims is no exception. What research we do have is troubling, however.Dr. Eugene Kanin is a retired sociologist at Purdue University. As an early Feminist he pioneered awareness and study of the concept of date rape. In the 1990s he authored a study on the prevalence of false rape accusations which concluded that 41% of the accusers – which were in fact all of the accusations made to the police department of a small metropolitan area over a ten year period – were false.
The primary reasons he cited for making false claims were “providing an alibi, seeking revenge, and obtaining sympathy and attention.” This is consistent with news coverage of many false rape claims, as mentioned in section 3 above.
Those who critique his study often attempt to distract others from the implications of the data by pointing to irrelevant elements of the study. For example, they will point to the fact that polygraph tests were administered to the accusers as though this somehow seriously impacts the data, without mentioning that such tests were also administered to the accused.
Kanin’s critics will also often ignore the most powerful evidence from his study: the police only considered an accusation false when the accusers themselves admitted it, regardless as to whatever they themselves thought about the case. Given that there were likely numerous false accusers who did not recant this means the 41% false rape figure is actually the floor, and the real percentage may be significantly higher.
Kanin’s study is also cited by criminal justice professionals as consistent with their experiences, such as sex-crimes prosecutor Craig Silverman earlier in this article.
This isn’t the only study, however; Dr. Charles McDowell investigated false claims in the military as well. The findings:
A
review of 556 rape accusations filed against Air Force personnel found
that 27% of women later recanted. Then 25 criteria were developed based
on the profile of those women, and then submitted to three independent
reviewers to review the remaining cases. If all three reviewers deemed
the allegation was false, it was categorized as false.
As a result, 60% of all allegations were found to be false.
Of those women who later recanted, many didn’t admit the allegation was
false until just before taking a polygraph test. Others admitted it was
false only after having failed a polygraph test [12].
A 1996 Department of Justice report documented that “in about 25% of the sexual assault cases referred to the FBI…the primary suspect has been excluded by forensic DNA testing” [13]. In other words, the DNA found on the accuser didn’t match those accused.
It is possible (though unlikely in most such cases) that the DNA mismatches are the result of misidentifications and that a rape really did occur. However, as Feminists themselves tell us, most rape does not involve strangers jumping out of the bushes. They are committed by a person the accuser knows.
It is important to remember that this figure only represents cases that were referred to the FBI, a limitation. However, it should also be noted that even a DNA match would not in itself prove that a rape occurred; all it would prove is that intercourse occurred. A significant number of accusations involving a DNA match are false as well, meaning that more than 25% of the cases referred to the FBI in the 1996 DoJ report were false accusations.
5. The “scholarship” that “proves” false rape accusations are around 2% is little more than intellectual fraud and not based on any real investigation at all
As Edward Greer, J.D., states in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, “no study has ever been published which sets forth an evidentiary basis for the ‘two percent false rape complaint’ thesis,” and that “without exception every scholarly or semi-scholarly source that utilizes the two percent false claim proposition can ultimately be traced back to Against Our Will.”Against Our Will is a book on rape by Feminist Susan Brownmiller that was published in the 1970s. Brownmiller claims that she was given the figure by a professional in the criminal justice system. We are given no evidence other than her word that this was ever the case.
Nonetheless, Brownmiller’s claim was cited by one Feminist professor after another. Since citing a professor instead of an unverifiable anecdote from a lone Feminist gives the claim a greater appearance of merit, once one professor cites it the next professor cites that professor, and so on. Eventually a labyrinthine web of citations is constructed. In the end, however, they all point to this one source, a source which is obviously biased and cannot be verified.
It also bears mention that as a group Feminist professors behave very much like a cult rather than a scholarly community. Not only do they tend to favor obscurantism and rail against objectivity (see the famous atheist Richard Dawkins describing this phenomenon), they also tend to cite only those within their narrow, insular circle and shun voices from the outside. Much like the charge of blasphemy among religious zealots, when their arguments fall through they often resort to making personal accusations against those who disagree with them (“misogyny!”).
This lack of quality control has led to a great amount of academic fraud among the Feminist community – some of which is laughably bad. The 2% false rape figure is yet another example of this.
6. The higher the rate of rape underreporting, the higher the rate of false rape reports will be
It is the nature of rape that the crime itself is underreported. When it comes to false rape complaints the exact opposite is the case. Indeed, a false rape complaint derives most of its power from the very fact that it is reported.When underreporting occurs it narrows the pool of genuine rape complaints. This means that a greater percentage of rape complaints will turn out to be false, since those claims are not underreported. The video below explains this phenomenon more clearly:
7. It is harder to prove a rape accusation is false than other false accusations, therefore there is less disincentive to falsely accuse
Simply put, it is harder to prove a negative (“prove you didn’t do it!”) in he said / she said cases. Accusers can also make false accusations of rapes that supposedly occurred years earlier and tarnish the reputations of those they accuse, all without evidence. The lack of evidence may make it difficult to move her case forward, but it will also make it difficult to bring a case against her as well.8. Female students are systemically taught that sex is rape when it is not, essentially being taught to make false rape accusations
Accusations of rape that fall outside the legal definition of the crime are false rape accusations. The administrations of many schools, however, think that they are a law unto themselves when they brand this-or-that student a rapist based upon their own “extralegal” definitions of rape, which they often adopt at the demand of Feminists. They are mistaken.They are also mistaken when they encourage female students to accuse male students of rape based upon these extralegal definitions. In short, what they are actually doing is encouraging female students to make false rape accusations.
Goshen College once famously declared a new form of rape called “psychological rape,” saying that “psychological rape consists of verbal harassment, whistles, kissing noises, heavy breathing, sly comments or stares. These are all assaults on any woman’s sense of well-being” [14].
And that’s just the start. Below are a few examples of other school policies, warehoused at the key AVFMS post on Rights & Protections. Some schools:
- Declare that, in regards to consent, “no always means no” but “yes does not always mean yes,” and hold that body language, context, tone, etc. – even when they contradict words expressing consent – may be used to convict a male student, but cannot be used to acquit him. Example: Occidental College.
- Declare that accusers who are drunk are not capable of agency, whereas those accused who are drunk are capable of agency (i.e., by punishing a male student when both the accuser and the accused are drunk and have sex). Example: Mississippi State University (see here and here).
- Adopt an “affirmative consent” policy, which declares that the accused must prove that the accuser verbalized her consent by explicitly stating “yes” at each degree of the sexual encounter. For example, if the woman said “yes” when a man kissed her but not “yes” when he touched her breast, it is an act of sexual assault. Nods, winks, and other gestures do not count toward consent. Examples: St. Louis University, Elon University, and Gettysburg College.
- Adopt a policy that a woman’s consent is not valid if the person she accused of rape “is perceived as more powerful” than the accuser. Examples: Duke University, Vassar College and Loyola Marymount University.
- Lastly, schools are continuously pushed to adopt broader and more draconian measures in addition to the ones they already have. Example: the “enthusiastic consent” standard advocated at Harvard, whereby sexual assault occurs if a woman’s consent is not sufficiently “enthusiastic” (according to extreme Feminist standards of “enthusiasm”). This policy was at least adopted at Vassar College andLoyola Marymount University.
9. The community opposed to acknowledging the problem of false rape accusations while supporting the 2% figure has an ideological agenda that is notoriously bigoted and anti-male
The more vociferously an idea is opposed by a group of narrow-minded and bigoted dogmatists, the greater the likelihood that the idea they oppose is actually true. This is especially true when it comes to how Feminists and their ideological allies treat men who are wrongly accused of rape.Feminist and former ACLU board member Wendy Kaminer is famous for saying “it is a primary article of faith among many feminists that women don’t lie about rape, ever; they lack the dishonesty gene” [14]. This is, of course, demonstrably false.
Not only do many Feminists view false rape accusations as insignificant, but some also view them as a justifiable vengeance that should be inflicted upon men. Many Feminists are notoriously hostile to due process, resembling more the nature of medieval witch-hunters than enlightened progressives.
Many prominent Feminists also adopt radically broad definitions of rape. These “all sex is rape” Feminists inevitably include many innocent men within the scope of those they falsely label as rapists. Here are a few quotes from Feminists in academia, which are warehoused (among many others) on the key AVFMS page “The Language of Misandry in Academia”:
“Feminism is built on believing women’s accounts of sexual use and abuse by men.”
- Feminist Professor Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified, p. 5.
“They [victims of false rape accusations] have a lot of pain, but it
is not a pain that I would necessarily have spared them. I think it
ideally initiates a process of self-exploration. ‘How do I see women?’
‘If I didn’t violate her, could I have?’ ‘Do I have the potential to do
to her what they say I did?’ Those are good questions.”
- Dr. Catherine Comins, assistant dean of students at Vassar College. Source: TIME magazine.
“I’m really tired of people suggesting that you’re somehow
un-American if you don’t respect the presumption of innocence, because
you know what that sounds like to a victim? Presumption you’re a liar.”
- Wendy Murphy, adjunct professor of law and sex-assault victim advocate, commenting on the Duke lacrosse false rape case. Source: National Public Radio.
“If a woman did falsely accuse a man of rape, she may have had
reasons to. Maybe she wasn’t raped, but he clearly violated her in some
way.”
- Ginny, college senior interviewed by TIME magazine (source here).
“It’s obviously one of the big side effects, if it could result in an
innocent person being found guilty. But I think sexual assault is such a
big issue that it’s worth the risk.”
- First-year student Steph Winters at the
University of Maryland on the school lowering its standard of evidence
to “convict” male students of sexual assault. Source: The Diamondback (school newspaper).
“So many women get their lives totally ruined by being assaulted and
not saying anything. So if one guy gets his life ruined, maybe it
balances out.”
- Oberlin sophomore Emily Lloyd, after
Feminist students were criticized for placing posters around campus that
bore the title “Rapist of the Month,” and below that heading a name of a
freshman male drawn randomly from the campus registry. Source: the Toledo Blade.
“There is no clear distinction between consensual sex and rape,
but a continuum of pressure, threat, coercion and force. The concept of
a continuum validates the sense of abuse women feel when they do not
freely consent to sex.”
- Dr. Liz Kelly, The Hidden Gender of Law, p. 350.
“Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.”
- Dr. Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified, p. 82.
“Sexual violence includes any physical, visual, verbal or sexual act that is experienced by the woman or girl, at the time or later,
as a threat, invasion or assault that has the effect of hurting her or
degrading her and/or taken away her ability to control intimate
contact.’”
- Dr. Liz Kelly, Surviving Sexual Violence, p. 41.
“In this book we will be using the term victim to refer to people who claim to have been sexually assaulted.”
- Drs. Carol Bohmer and Andrea Parrot, Sexual Assault on Campus, p. 5.
This is a small sample of the attitudes that many Feminists have
toward the wrongly accused. For all AVFMS posts on rape hysteria in
academia go here.10. False rape accusations are the dark side of female nature/socialization
In his study on false rape accusations Dr. Eugene Kanin said there is:
something
biological, legal, and cultural would seem to make false rape
allegations inevitable. If rape were a commonplace victimization
experience of men, if men could experience the anxiety of possible
pregnancy from illicit affairs, if men had a cultural base that would
support their confidence in using rape accusations punitively, and if
men could feel secure that victimization could elicit attention and
sympathy, then men also would be making false rape accusations.
Writing for the Washington City Paper, Feminist Amanda Hess argued that a woman who has consensual sex she later regrets once it becomes public “must defend her femininity by saying that she had been coerced into sex.” Men, however, do not make false rape accusations because they regret consensual sexual encounters with unattractive women.
This is not to say that men are all angels. There are some forms of evil that are distinctive (though not unique) to men. But false rape accusations are not one of them; on the contrary, they are overwhelmingly (and almost exclusively) a female domain.
Some might say, “so you’re saying women have a dark side to them. How does that make you different from the Feminists you criticize?” That is quite simple. Feminists say men are bad and women are good. In their worldview women are never capable of evil – or if they are it is only because they are mirroring the evil of men (as Hess argues later in her article).
I say that both men and women are bad and good, although they sometimes demonstrate this in different ways. At the end of the day everyone is accountable for the good and bad they do. You won’t find many Feminists advocating ideas like that.
But even if the 2% figure were true…
It is abundantly obvious by now that the claim of “only 2% of rape accusations are false” is a lie. But even if it were true, would it matter? Would it be a justifiable reason to brush aside the experiences of the wrongly accused, as Feminists & Friends so often do? Let’s look at it a different way by examining another low statistic.Medical studies report that of women who are raped roughly 5% of them will become pregnant. In June of 2013 Republican Trent Franks argued that women who become pregnant from a rape should not be allowed to seek abortions because the rate of pregnancy resulting from rape is extremely low.
Feminists did not challenge the 5% statistic, but instead became livid that anyone would consider disregarding the experiences of such women, even if they were only 5% of the total.
So I must ask: what’s the big difference between 2% and 5%? If 2% is so petty and trivial – indeed next to nothing – what makes 5% worthy of a full-scale national uproar? If we behaved like Feminists, wouldn’t we treat those 5% of rape victims who become pregnant very similarly to how they treat the 2% of men who (they erroneously claim) are falsely accused?
Do you think Feminists would accept such an arrangement? You know the answer.
A Voice for Male Students aims to create a community of writers on
men’s and boys’ education issues. If you would like to submit a guest
post to be published here, please read the submission guidelines.
Notes:
*Since this is a compilation-style/key resource page, some of the more critical links have also been preserved via screenshot.[1] Craig Silverman. Link to ABC article here. See the backup screenshot here. [2] Link here. See the backup screenshot here. [3] Captain Lynn Mitchell, the Daily Utah Chronicle. Link to article here. See the backup screenshot here. [4] Link here. See the backup screenshot here. [5] Link here. See the backup screenshot here. [6] The Plano Courier. Link here. See the backup screenshot here. [7] Link here. See the backup screenshot here. [8] Link here. [9] Link here. [10] Barbara C. Johnson, Behind the Black Robes: Failed Justice, p. 128-29. Some quotes (including those in question) can be found at The False Rape Society. [11] See Until Proven Innocent by Dr. KC Johnson. Also, see this video on the 2006 Duke lacrosse false rape case. [12] McDowell CP. False allegations. Forensic Science Digest, Vol. 11, No. 4, December 1985. [13] Connors E, Lundregan T, Miller N, McEwen T. Convicted by juries, exonerated by science: Case studies in the use of DNA evidence to establish innocence after trial. June 1996. http://www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles/dnaevid.txt. A backup text has been preserved at AVFMS here. [14] Goshen College. Link here, screenshot here, AVFMS article here. [15] Kaminer, W. (1993, October). Feminism’s identity crisis. The Atlantic Monthly, p. 67.
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=131088792045869428#editor/target=post;postID=343677699985301097
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)