About Half of Rape Allegations are False, Research Shows

False allegations of rape are believed to be more common than many persons realize. These are the findings of four research studies:

• 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.¹ 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.²
• In a nine-year study of 109 rapes reported to the police in a Midwestern city, Purdue sociologist Eugene J. Kanin reported that in 41% of the cases the complainants eventually admitted that no rape had occurred.³
• In a follow-up study of rape claims filed over a three-year period at two large Midwestern universities, Kanin found that of 64 rape cases, 50% turned out to be false.⁴ Among the false charges, 53% of the women admitted they filed the false claim as an alibi.⁵
• According to a 1996 Department of Justice report, “in about 25% of the sexual assault cases referred to the FBI, ... the primary suspect has been excluded by forensic DNA testing.⁶ It should be noted that rape involves a forcible and non-consensual act, and a DNA match alone does not prove that rape occurred. So the 25% figure substantially underestimates the true extent of false allegations.

And according to former Colorado prosecutor Craig Silverman, “For 16 years, I was a kick-ass prosecutor who made most of my reputation vigorously prosecuting rapists. ... I was amazed to see all the false rape allegations that were made to the Denver Police Department. ... A command officer in the Denver Police sex assaults unit recently told me he placed the false rape numbers at approximately 45%.”⁷
According to the FBI, about 95,000 forcible rapes were reported in 2004.⁸ Based on the statements and studies cited above, some 47,000 American men are falsely accused of rape each year. These men are disproportionately African-American.⁹
Some of these men are wrongly convicted, sentenced, and imprisoned. Even if there is no conviction, a false allegation of rape can “emotionally, socially, and economically destroy a person.”¹⁰

---

1 McDowell CP. False allegations. Forensic Science Digest, Vol. 11, No. 4, December 1985

2 Ibid.

3 Kanin EJ. An alarming national trend: False rape allegations. Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1994 http://www.sexcriminals.com/library/doc-1002-1.pdf

4 Ibid., p. 2, Kanin reports that in the city studied, "for a declaration of false charge to be made, the complainant must admit that no rape had occurred. ... The police department will not declare a rape charge as false when the complainant, for whatever reason, fails to pursue the charge or cooperate on the case, regardless how much doubt the police may have regarding the validity of the charge. In short, these cases are declared false only because the complainant admitted they are false. ... Thus, the rape complainants referred to in this paper are for completed forcible rapes only. The foregoing leaves us with a certain confidence that cases declared false by this police agency are indeed a reasonable -- if not a minimal -- reflection of false rape allegations made to this agency, especially when one considers that a finding of false allegation is totally dependent upon the recantation of the rape charge."

5 Ibid., Addenda.

6 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

7 http://web.archive.org/web/20050404230831/http://www.thedenverchannel.com/kobebryanttrial/2812198/detail.html

8 Federal Bureau of Investigation. Forcible rape. February 17, 2006. http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/violent_crime/forcible_rape.html

9 Innocence Project: Facts on post-conviction DNA exonerations. http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/351.php

10 Angelucci M, Sacks G. Research shows false allegations of rape common. Los Angeles Daily Journal, Sept. 15, 2004. http://www.glennsacks.com/research_shows_false.htm

  http://www.mediaradar.org/research_on_false_rape_allegations.php

Man nearly loses everything when woman makes up story of kidnap, rape

GREELEY, Colo. — A Weld County woman was convicted of three felonies Thursday for falsely accusing a young man of kidnapping and raping her.
Katherine Elizabeth Bennett, 21, claimed a male acquaintance, Dustin Toth, took her from a Safeway store parking lot in Windsor on Nov. 24, 2013, and subsequently raped her. But her story, which changed several times, was later proven false, prosecutors said.
“It was very consensual …  we went downstairs to watch movies and later became inimate,” Toth says.
Over the course of the investigation, Bennett deleted text messages proving that her initial report was false and carried on with her fabricated story, police said.
“Because of her initial report, a Windsor man was arrested for investigation of serious felonies that caused him to lose his job and damaged his reputation in the community,” prosecutors said in a media release.
“He was not charged, but the hardships due to his arrest and the publicized allegations continued for this young man, who testified that he nearly lost his military career as well because of the false allegations from a woman he considered to be a friend.”
“It was hard, It still is hard. I lost jobs. I wasn’t able to find a job for months because of my record,” Toth says. “It was all dropped which is why I was able to stay with the military.”
Bennett will be sentenced on Oct. 24. She could face up to nine years in prison.

 http://kdvr.com/2014/08/29/woman-convicted-for-falsely-accusing-man-of-kidnapping-raping-her/

Men Falsely Accused of Rape Also Deserve Justice

If someone is falsely accused of a very serious crime and ends up in prison for something they did not do and find themselves being abused and having urine thrown over them and they and their family are forced to endure all the stress and shame that goes with all that - then you would have thought that there would be general agreement that this is a very serious matter and that the perpetrator would be punished appropriately.
However - people seem to take a very different view if the accuser is a women and the false accusation is one of rape.
Rhiannon Brooker - a trainee barrister - made a series of allegations of being raped and beaten by her boyfriend Paul Fensome which caused him to be imprisoned for 36 days during which time he was abused and assaulted.
Mr Fensome was able to provide firm alibis and Ms Brooker was subsequently charged with perverting the course of justice - an offence so serious it carries a maximum sentence of life in prison and she was finally sentenced to three and half years in prison. The Solicitor General, Robert Buckland, asked the Court of Appeal to increase the sentence - which they declined to do.
Quoted in the Guardian - the shadow Attorney General, Emily Thornberry, said she was surprised the Solicitor General had considered the sentence unduly lenient and argued that the government's priority ought to be ensuring more rapists were successfully prosecuted.
She said: "Ms Brooker, a mother with a young child, received a custodial sentence of over three years for a non-violent offence. The court of appeal considered that there was nothing wrong with the sentence." She went onto say "I think the priority of the law officers should be to address the widening gulf between the soaring numbers of rape allegations made to the police and the dwindling proportion that ever get prosecuted."
The support group Women Against Rape also criticised the Solicitor General for seeking an even longer sentence. They argue that women should not be prosecuted for perverting the cause of justice - that if they are they should remain anonymous - that any prosecution will put off women coming forward with real allegations and that Ms Brooker is innocent anyway.

It is a subjective judgement after all as to how long a person should spend in prison and perhaps three and half years was enough but some people take the argument further and argue that women should not be prosecuted at all in these circumstances.
Their central argument seems to be that false allegations should be ignored because they would tend to feed a myth that many women make false allegations and that punishing a women who makes a false allegation would put other women off reporting real allegations.
It is worth noting that Lord Jeffery Archer was sentenced to four years - and his false testimony did not lead to anyone going to prison accused of a very serious offence.

I am sure that many rapes go unreported and that women fear they will not be believed I am fairly sure that some women are not actually believed when making genuine allegations and that is an injustice.

I also think women suffer from gender discrimination at many levels of society - in the work place - in the media and in the criminal justice system. Women suffer from misogyny and abuse from anonymous people on the internet for doing no more than expressing their views. Young women seem to suffer from what is misleadingly called a 'lad culture' in universities when it should really be called an abuse culture. More needs to be done to protect women who are victims of such crimes and the criminal justice system needs to get better at it.
I think all this is true - but I don't think that that injustice means it is right to deny men justice when they suffer imprisonment and disgrace for something they did not do.

Emily Thornberry described the offence as a non-violent one - well yes in the sense that Ms Brooker did not use actual violence - but I would say 36 days in prison accused of a very serious sexual offence was much worse than many things the law regards as violent. As for government priorities - what about justice for everyone including men? Emily Thornberry may be the next Attorney General and so will have a good deal of influence on policy matters and so we should note what she says about these matters.

It is almost as if the various critics of this prosecution and appeal think it means nothing for a man to go to prison and to face that level of disgrace for something he did not do.
Men who commit rape and abuse and harass women should be brought to court and should receive a punishment that fits the crime. Police officers and prosecutors who are so stupid and bigoted that they assume women are always making up rape allegations should lose their jobs but none of this means that few that do make false allegations should escape justice if they lie and have someone sent to prison for something they did not do.

Women deserve justice and the law often does not serve them well but justice should be blind and men deserve its protection as well.

 http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/bob-morgan/men-falsely-accused-of-ra_b_5931630.html

I probably won't be taken seriously

I need feminism because I probably won't be taken seriously.

Stop victim blaming

Stop victim blaming

Stop victim blaming

Stop victim blaming

False Rape Accusations May Be More Common Than Thought

Is it the new 1-in-4 statistic?
I don't mean the widely-circulated '1-in-4 women will be raped in their lifetime' but a statistic that suggests '1-in-4 accusations of rape are false.'
For a long time, I have been bothered by the elusiveness of figures on the prevalence of false accusations of sexual assault. The crime of 'bearing false witness' is rarely tracked or punished, and the context in which it is usually raised is highly politicized.
Politically correct feminists claim false rape accusations are rare and account for only 2 percent of all reports. Men's rights sites point to research that places the rate as high as 41 percent. These are wildly disparate figures that cannot be reconciled.
This week I stumbled over a passage in a 1996 study published by the U.S. Department of Justice: Convicted by Juries, Exonerated by Science: Case Studies in the Use of DNA Evidence to Establish Innocence After Trial.
The study documents 28 cases which, "with the exception of one young man of limited mental capacity who pleaded guilty," consist of individuals who were convicted by juries and, then, later exonerated by DNA tests.
At the time of release, they had each served an average of 7 years in prison.
The passage that riveted my attention was a quote from Peter Neufeld and Barry C. Scheck, prominent criminal attorneys and co-founders of the Innocence Project that seeks to release those falsely imprisoned.
They stated, "Every year since 1989, in about 25 percent of the sexual assault cases referred to the FBI where results could be obtained, the primary suspect has been excluded by forensic DNA testing. Specifically, FBI officials report that out of roughly 10,000 sexual assault cases since 1989, about 2,000 tests have been inconclusive, about 2,000 tests have excluded the primary suspect, and about 6,000 have "matched" or included the primary suspect."
The authors continued, "these percentages have remained constant for 7 years, and the National Institute of Justice's informal survey of private laboratories reveals a strikingly similar 26 percent exclusion rate."
If the foregoing results can be extrapolated, then the rate of false reports is roughly between 20 (if DNA excludes an accused) to 40 percent (if inconclusive DNA is added). The relatively low estimate of 25 to 26 percent is probably accurate, especially since it is supported by other sources.
Before analyzing the competing figures, however, caveats about the one just mentioned are necessary.
First, the category of 'false accusations' does not distinguish between accusers who lie and those who are honestly mistaken. Nor does it indicate that a rape did not occur, merely that the specific accused is innocent.
Thus, there is a drive by voices for reform, like the Innocence Institute, to improve eyewitness identification techniques within police departments.
For example, the Innocence Institute suggests "Police should use a 'double-blind' photo identification procedure where someone other than the investigator -- who does not know who the suspect is -- constructs photo arrays with non-suspects as fillers to reduce suggestiveness."
Second, even if false accusations are as common as 1-in-4, that means 75 percent of reports are probably accurate and, so, all accusations deserve a thorough and professional investigation.
Third, the 1-in-4 figure has 'fuzzy' aspects that could influence the results. For example, Neufeld and Scheck mention only sexual assault cases that were "referred to the FBI where results could be obtained."
It is not clear what percentage of all reported assaults are represented by those cases. As well, the terms 'rape' and 'sexual assault' are often used interchangeably, especially when comparing studies, and it is not clear that they are always synonyms for each other.
Nevertheless, the FBI data on excluded DNA is as close to hard statistics that I've found on the rate of false accusations of sexual assault.
Where do the other figures come from and why is there reason to doubt them? Let me consider the two statistics that I have encountered most often.
"Two percent of all reports are false."
Several years ago, I tried to track down the origin of this much-cited stat. The first instance I found of the figure was in Susan Brownmiller's book on sexual assault entitled "Against Our Will" (1975). Brownmiller claimed that false accusations in New York City had dropped to 2 percent after police departments began using policewomen to interview alleged victims.
Elsewhere, the two percent figure appears without citation or with only a vague attribution to "FBI" sources. Although the figure shows up in legislation such as the Violence Against Women Act, legal scholar Michelle Anderson of Villanova University Law School reported in 2004, "no study has ever been published which sets forth an evidentiary basis for the two percent false rape complaint thesis."
In short, there is no reason to credit that figure.
"Forty-one percent of all reports are false."
This claim comes from a study conducted by Eugene J. Kanin of Purdue University. Kanin examined 109 rape complaints registered in a Midwestern city from 1978 to 1987.
Of these, 45 were ultimately classified by the police as "false." Also based on police records, Kanin determined that 50 percent of the rapes reported at two major universities were "false."
Although Kanin offers solid research, I would need to see more studies with different populations before accepting the figure of 50 percent as prevalent; to me, the figure seems high.
But even a skeptic like me must credit a DNA exclusion rate of 20 percent that remained constant over several years when conducted by FBI labs. This is especially true when 20 percent more were found to be questionable.
False accusations are not rare. They are common.

Wendy McElroy is the editor of ifeminists.com and a research fellow for The Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. She is the author and editor of many books and articles, including the new book, "Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the 21st Century" (Ivan R. Dee/Independent Institute, 2002). She lives with her husband in Canada.

 http://www.foxnews.com/story/2006/05/02/false-rape-accusations-may-be-more-common-than-thought/

Secure your home from burglars

Make it one to avoid

Make it one to avoid