Still not asking for it

Still not asking for it

How Many Rape Reports Are False?

How many women falsely accuse men of rape?
A lot of statistics are floating around the Internet: Two percent, say many feminists, the same as other crimes. Twenty-five percent, say other groups who quarrel with the feminists on many issues, or maybe 40 percent. Here’s the real answer: We don’t know. Anyone who insists that we do know should be corrected or ignored.
The number of false accusations is what statisticians call a “dark number” -- that is, there is a true number, but it is unknown, and perhaps unknowable. For a deep dive into the reasons it’s so hard to know, I commend you to Cathy Young’s new piece at Slate, in which she details all the problems that confound investigations into false rape accusations.
Here’s what we do know: The 2 percent number is very bad and should never be cited. It apparently traces its lineage back to Susan Brownmiller’s legendary "Against Our Will," and her citation for this figure is a single speech by an appellate judge before a small group of lawyers. His source for this statistic was a single area of New York that started having policewomen conduct all rape interviews. This is not data. It is an anecdote about an anecdote.
The 41 percent number beloved of men’s-rights activists is better; it involves a peer-reviewed study by Eugene Kanin of a police department in some unknown small city. False reports could only be declared if the victim herself withdrew the charge. However. We’re talking about one city, in which 109 rapes were examined over a period of nine years. As feminists point out, victims might have withdrawn the charges simply because they found it too traumatic to engage with the police department, not because the accusation was false¹ . And the study itself is now pretty elderly. A lot has changed in 20 years, including, possibly, the number of false rape accusations in this city and the rest of the nation. This number should be used only with grave caution.
But so should any other numbers, such as the 8 percent figure that is commonly attributed to the FBI. When you dig into the research itself, you find it is often heavily inflected with the authors' prior beliefs about what constitutes the “real problem”: unreported cases of rape or false reports? So Kanin is frequently chided for accepting the results of a police department investigation that included offering the victims a polygraph, because this is intimidating for true victims as well as women making false reports, and it could raise the incidence of false negatives. On the other hand, if the rate of false rape reports is quite high -- much higher than that of other crimes -- then this might be a reasonable precaution. It’s possible that by encouraging police departments not to polygraph rape victims, we have fixed a cruel system in which innocent victims are bullied into recanting. It’s also possible that we’ve increased the number of false accusations that proceed to investigation and conviction.
Shorter: You cannot treat “percentage of reports that were found to be false by investigators” as “percentage of reports that were actually false.” Some women may simply have recanted to disengage from the system. Some police officers may decide a case was false when it wasn’t. On the other hand, we also know that false accusations can make their way through the system pretty far -- witness the Duke lacrosse players and Brian Banks.
What we know is that we don’t know. We should not presume that every rape victim is telling the truth because it would make it easier for victims to come forward. Nor should we presume that every rape accusation has a 50 percent chance of being false. We should look at the facts in each case and judge them with the knowledge that some women do lie about rape -- for revenge, to cover up some problem in their own lives, to get attention and sympathy from others. And also with the knowledge that men lie, too, violating their victims a second time in order to cover up their crimes. And that while men have gone to jail for rapes they did not commit, many other men have avoided the jail time they deserved for terrible crimes against women.
That’s not a very satisfying answer, because rape is inherently a hard crime to prosecute. If someone comes into a police station with their face bashed in, you can be pretty much certain that unless they’re a professional boxer, a crime has occurred. If a rape kit shows evidence of sexual intercourse, however, all that tells you is that … something happened. Because this is something that a lot of people do to each other voluntarily, you cannot proceed immediately to the arrest. Usually there are only two witnesses, telling different stories. Often drugs or alcohol were involved, and intoxicated people make lousy witnesses.
We don’t want that to be true. Rape is an especially heinous crime, and heinously unfair -- it is mostly something that stronger men do to weaker women. How can we pile on an extra dose of unfairness -- by failing to prosecute so many of the crimes?
Feminists would like to rectify that unfairness by treating rape accusations as presumptively true, making it easier for victims to come forward. That’s understandable. But there’s a risk that this makes it easier for false accusations to get through the system, resulting in destroyed lives for men such as Brian Banks. Men’s-rights activists would like to make it harder for innocent men to get caught in a web of lies, so they want rape accusations to be interrogated with deep suspicion. But treating rape victims as possible or likely liars may make it harder for them to go forward, leaving rapists free to stalk their next victim.
No one wants to openly advocate for a hard choice that will end in injustice for someone. So instead we get the war of bad statistics, with each side claiming certainty when all we really have are dark crimes and dark numbers.

¹ Though to be fair, Kalin, the author of the study, goes into some detail about the nature of the recantations, and they’re both pretty specific and pretty plausible -- i.e., “my husband is overseas and I’m afraid I’m pregnant.” They mostly occurred a couple of days after the report, not after extended contact with “the system.”

 http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-19/how-many-rape-reports-are-false

This is what I was wearing

This is what I was wearing

What Can You Do if Someone Falsely Accuses You of Rape?

It is an ugly reality, but it is known to happen: petty people misusing the very serious charge of rape as a way to gain an upper hand, get revenge, or otherwise harm another person. The results of such a false accusation can be devastating, even if the person wrongfully accused is ultimately acquitted. So, what can the innocent person do in such a case? What are the consequences to the false accuser?

Unfortunately, the topic of rape is so touchy that many are unwilling to do anything about a false claim. Some prosecutors side with the false-accuser even after the evidence clearly reveals that the claim is false, believing it could be an honest mistake, a difference of opinion regarding consent, or a cry for help from someone suffering in other ways at the hands of the one they wrongfully accused. Moreover, prosecutors and law enforcement do not want actual rape victims to fear possible criminal sanctions for reporting legitimate rapes if it later becomes impossible to prove the case. As a result, very few false claims are ever prosecuted criminally.

Still, the consequences of a false report of rape can be devastating to the life of the one accused. Often, the mere suggestion that a person has done something is enough to convict them in the court of public opinion. With websites that feature arrest mug shots and identify charges, there is no way for a wrongfully accused person to protect their reputation. This can have life changing effects, lead to loss of employment opportunities, public ridicule, and emotional harm.

As a result, it is usually possible for one wrongfully accused of rape to fight back. Typically, one will have to wait until they are exonerated, but once proved innocent of the false accusation, some jurisdictions allow them to bring a civil suit against the accuser. Notably, this action cannot relate directly to anything that was said or done in the criminal prosecution, as that is generally protected by the litigation privilege. But, false statements to police, to the media, or to family and friends may give rise to civil liability. Additionally, in jurisdictions that recognize a civil cause of action for perjury, if the accuser provided false testimony, either in person or via affidavit (such as a police report) this may also form the basis for additional relief.

In 2011 in Maryland, a man was awarded $852,000 and full custody of his children after he was able to prove that his ex-wife had falsely accused him of sexually assaulting their daughters. The ex-wife had accused the man of sexually assaulting the children in order to gain an advantage in a custody dispute. This led him to lose his job and find it almost impossible to obtain another for 5 years while he fought the legal battle to clear his name. While much of the damage done by the false accusation can never be undone for the wrongfully accused man, the verdict does send a clear message that such conduct cannot be tolerated in the American legal system.

If you have been wrongfully accused of rape or another sexually based crime, you should immediately contact an attorney. Not only will you need assistance in clearing your name in the criminal matter, you may need help pursuing remedies against the wrongful accuser. However, given the nature of laws protecting victims of rape, it will be a very difficult and highly technical legal battle to show that the accuser did not simply lack sufficient evidence to obtain a conviction, but actually engaged in malicious conduct designed to harm the reputation of the accused and subject him to possible criminal sanctions.

Copyright HG.org
 http://www.hg.org/article.asp?id=31767

I don't need feminism

I don't need feminism because I am capable of taking responsibility for myself and my actions

Crying rape

In the emotionally charged conversation about rape, few topics are more fraught than that of false allegations. Consider some responses to the news that singer-songwriter Conor Oberst had been falsely accused of sexual assault. Last December a woman writing in the comments section of the website xoJane, going by the name Joanie Faircloth, claimed Oberst raped her when she was a teenager. The charge spread across the Internet; Oberst denied it and brought a libel suit against Faircloth when she refused to retract the story. In July she completely recanted, admitting that she had made it all up to get attention. Yet instead of showing sympathy for the ordeal of the musician—one known for being supportive of feminist issues—some chided him for taking legal action to defend himself against a false, career-damaging charge. In the Daily Dot, pop culture critic Chris Ostendorf decried the lawsuit, arguing that it could intimidate real victims of rape and that it promoted the idea of men as victims of false accusations—even though that’s exactly what Oberst was. After Oberst dropped the suit, Bustle’s Caroline Pate praised his decision and referred to the saga as “a roller-coaster for both parties”—treating the false accuser and the wrongly accused as morally equivalent—and called the revelation of Oberst’s innocence “crushingly disappointing.”

False rape accusations are a lightning rod for a variety of reasons. Rape is a repugnant crime—and one for which the evidence often relies on one person’s word against another’s. Moreover, in the not-so-distant past, the belief that women routinely make up rape charges often led to appalling treatment of victims. However, in challenging what author and law professor Susan Estrich has called “the myth of the lying woman,” feminists have been creating their own counter-myth: that of the woman who never lies.

More than a quarter-century ago, feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon wrote that “feminism is built on believing women’s accounts of sexual use and abuse by men”; today, Jessica Valenti urges us to “believe victims en masse,” because only then will we recognize the true prevalence of sexual assault. But a de facto presumption of guilt in alleged sexual offenses is as dangerous as a presumption of guilt in any crime, and for the same reasons: It upends the foundations on which our system of justice rests and creates a risk of ruining innocent lives.

How frequent are false accusations? A commonly cited estimate, which may have originated with feminist author Susan Brownmiller in the 1970s, is that they account for only about 2 percent of rape reports. After the Oberst fiasco, feminist blogger Rebecca Watson posted a video asserting that, statistically, you will be wrong two out of 100 times if you presume a rape accusation to be true and 98 out of 100 times if you presume it to be false.

In fact, as Emily Bazelon and Rachael Larimore wrote in Slate five years ago, official data on what law enforcement terms “unfounded” rape reports (that is, ones in which the police determine that no crime occurred) yield conflicting numbers, depending on local policies and procedures—averaging 8 percent to 10 percent of all reported rapes. Yet the truth is even knottier than these statistics suggest. The answer to “How common are false allegations?” depends largely on how false allegations are defined. Do we count only cases in which a police report—or a complaint to some other official authority, such as a college administrator—is shown to be deliberately false? Do we include informal, word-of-mouth charges like the one against Oberst? What of he said/she said cases in which the truth is never known?

Not all reports classified as unfounded are necessarily false. In some cases, women who were victims of rape were disbelieved, pressured into recanting, and charged with false reporting only to be vindicated later on—the kind of awful story that adds to people’s skittishness about discussing false accusations. Some police departments have been criticized for having an anomalously high percentage of supposedly unfounded rape charges: Baltimore’s “unfounded” rate used to be the highest in the nation, at about 30 percent, due partly to questionable and sometimes downright abusive police procedures, such as badgering a woman about why she waited two hours to report a street assault. By 2013, an effort to provide better training and encourage full investigation of all complaints reduced that rate to less than 2 percent.

On the other hand, “unfounded” statistics do not capture all false allegations—only cases rejected at the earliest stage (correctly or not) because of what investigators believe to be strong proof that no crime was committed. This does not include cases in which charges are filed but rejected for prosecution (between a quarter and nearly half of all cases), or the relatively small number of prosecutions that end in dismissal or acquittal. Of course not all such cases involve innocent defendants—probably not even most; but surely some do.

In challenging “the myth of the lying woman,” feminists have been creating their own counter-myth: that of the woman who never lies.

A similar pattern can be found in a recent study often cited as evidence of the rarity of false accusations: a 2010 paper by psychologist David Lisak, which examined all 136 sexual assault reports made on a northeastern university campus over a 10-year period. For 19 of these cases, the files did not contain enough information to evaluate the outcome. Of the 117 cases that could be classified, eight—or 6.8 percent—were determined to be false complaints; that conclusion was reached when there was substantial evidence refuting the complainant’s account. But does it mean that 93 percent of the reports that could be evaluated were shown to be truthful?

More than 40 percent of the reports evaluated in Lisak’s study (excluding the ones for which there was not enough information to classify them) did result in disciplinary or criminal charges. However, 52 percent were investigated and closed. Lisak told me that the vast majority of these complaints did not proceed due to insufficient evidence, often because the complainant had stopped cooperating with investigators. His paper also mentions another type of complaint that did not proceed: cases in which “the incident did not meet the legal elements of the crime of sexual assault.” Lisak was unable to provide any specifics on these incidents. But, in other known cases, such allegations stem from conflicting definitions of what constitutes rape and consent—particularly in sexual encounters that involve alcohol.

The scandal at Ohio University last fall is an example of this.* A female student who was caught on camera in a drunken public sex act—which bystanders of both sexes had perceived as consensual—then filed a rape complaint after photos and video that showed her receiving oral sex from a male student became an Internet hit. The woman, who claimed she had no memory of the event, received strong support from feminist activists on campus and was vilified as a liar on men’s rights websites. Ultimately, the grand jury cleared the man, concluding that while both parties were drunk, the woman was not incapacitated—she walked away unassisted and bought a burrito moments after the encounter—and was a willing participant. The district attorney also declined to charge either party with public indecency, commenting that the embarrassment was punishment enough.

Did the young woman lie to salvage her reputation? Of course we don’t know; it may be that she thought that any level of intoxication renders consent invalid, as many campus programs are teaching today. But, as sociologist Kathleen Bogle and law professor Anne Coughlin recently noted in Slate, this is far from the legal standard for incapacitation required in a criminal finding of sexual assault. Even assuming the female student genuinely believed that what happened was rape, it was still, as the investigation concluded, a wrongful accusation—but one that won’t be recorded as an “unfounded rape report” by the FBI.

So why is it necessary for us to have a clearer picture of the scope of false allegations, if most allegations are not intentionally false? We are not, as some anti-feminist blogs assert, in the midst of a massive “epidemic” of rape hoaxes. But wrongful accusations—either deliberately made up or based on gray-area cases that may hinge on mixed signals, alcohol-addled memories, or misunderstandings of what constitutes sexual assault—are not the almost nonexistent anomaly advocates for victims often claim. They can be cries for attention and sympathy, or attempts to cover up embarrassing sexual encounters (such as the 2009 Hofstra University case in which a female student’s claim of gang rape in a men’s room fell apart after a cellphone video taken by one of the accused men showed consensual group sex), or vendettas against former partners.

At whatever rate such cases occur, they should not be dismissed as statistical blips: These lies can have tragic results. Two years ago former California high school football star Brian Banks, who had spent five years in prison for raping his classmate Wanetta Gibson, was exonerated after Gibson contacted him to apologize and admitted making up the attack. In 2009, New Yorker William McCaffrey was released after serving four years of a 20-year prison sentence for a rape his friend Biurny Peguero had made up to explain her injuries from a fight with several women. In 2012 a Michigan man, James Grissom, was freed after nearly 10 years in prison when the woman who accused him, Sara Ylen, was caught making another false allegation (and faking cancer to bilk money from insurance companies and sympathetic donors). Even without a wrongful conviction, the consequences of a false accusation can be devastating—from a terrifying middle-of-the-night arrest to lengthy pretrial detention.

Cultural unease about the issue of false accusations is understandable, given how the “crying rape” trope has been historically linked with misogynist stereotypes of women as devious, crazy, or both. The old assumptions about women’s propensity to lie about rape led to sexist laws that required women to be bruised, bloodied, and chaste to prove that they were attacked. Even now, this topic attracts woman-haters, such as the “men’s rights activist” who misidentified an Ohio University student as the accuser in the caught-on-video case last fall and suggested that even if he had the wrong woman, it was appropriate payback for calumnies against innocent males.

But “believe the victim” dogma, and the resistance to seeing false accusations as a real problem, can also create a dangerous environment. It is a climate in which a law mandating an impossibly vague “affirmative consent” standard in campus sexual assault cases can be defended on the grounds that false complaints are a nonissue. It is a climate in which an exoneration is often presumed to be a miscarriage of justice, like when, earlier this year, activists at Dartmouth were dismayed at a student’s acquittal even though his story of clumsy drunken sex was backed by substantial evidence.

In this climate a man can be publicly vilified on the basis of an anonymous accusation on the Internet nearly a decade after the alleged rape. Even as the allegation against Oberst crumbled, another such charge gained traction—this one against Max Temkin, co-creator of the indie game Cards Against Humanity. Temkin’s accuser, a former fellow student at Goucher College who calls herself “Magz,” says that she spent years blaming herself for the attack (of which she has given no specifics), until she was finally emboldened to come forward by the stories shared in the #YesAllWomen hashtag. Temkin, who says that “Magz” first began to accuse him after seeing him profiled in a newspaper, maintains that the two had a brief consensual relationship that stopped short of intercourse and that he broke off in a rather insensitive way.

Most of the public responses were scathing toward Temkin. Filmmaker Kelly Kend speculated that both Temkin and “Magz” were telling the truth but he had misread her signals, making him an unwitting rapist. Comedian and culture blogger Arthur Chu called Temkin’s categorical denial of guilt “vague” and “deflecting.” In a much harsher comment, game-maker Ryan Macklin slammed Temkin’s attempt to defend himself as “vile” and called the mere mention of a libel suit “a metaphorical threat of rape.” In late August, Temkin was disinvited from the XOXO Festival, an event celebrating independently produced art and technology, after some social media complaints about “promoting a rapist.”

We don’t know whether Temkin is the victim of a false allegation; we also don’t know whether “Magz” is a victim of rape. We don’t know—and will probably never know, barring a confession from him or a recantation from her. But the rush to condemn Temkin and support “Magz” starkly illustrates both the power and the peril of unproven accusations.

Our focus on getting justice for women who are sexually assaulted is necessary and right. We are still far from the day when every woman who makes a rape accusation gets a proper police investigation and a fair hearing. But seeking justice for female victims should make us more sensitive, not less, to justice for unfairly accused men. In practical terms, that means finding ways to show support for victims of sexual violence without equating accusation and guilt, and recognizing that the wrongly accused are real victims too. It means not assuming that only a conviction is a fair outcome for an alleged sex crime. It means, finally, rejecting laws and policies rooted in the assumption that wrongful accusations are so vanishingly rare they needn’t be a cause for concern. To put it simply, we need to stop presuming guilt.

*Correction, Sept. 18, 2014: This article misidentified Ohio University as the University of Ohio at Athens. (Return.)

 http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/09/false_rape_accusations_why_must_be_pretend_they_never_happen.single.html

I need feminism

I need feminism