A college student's lie that she had been raped, which lie led to an "intense" investigation, has been found to be "UNFOUNDED." http://upolice.buffalo.edu/alertlist.php#13 In this particular case, "UNFOUNDED" means "false" because the student admitted she made up the whole thing. (Many rape advocates try to insist that any time the term "unfounded" is used, it should be assumed that a rape might have occurred, and that a man or boy presumed innocent should carry the taint of "possible rapist" for the remainder of his life. Here we know that this particular "unfounded" means "false.")
According to University Police: "After a review of the report, the new information provided and her current personal situation, no criminal charges will be filed in the case."
Precisely what does that mean -- her "current personal situation"? Is it any wonder that false reporting is so common when police coddle this particular class of criminal (false rape accusers) in this manner?
In fact, the police furnish no reason for not pursuing charges against this woman. But one suspects the decision was prompted by political or ideological reasons, judged by the biased -- but ever so politically correct -- assertion tacked onto the end of the University Police Alerts and Timely Warnings List: "However, it is important to note that false reporting in such cases is rare and sexual assaults tend to be underreported. UB police encourage crime reporting; we take all crime reports seriously and continue to investigate them until they are formally closed."
Excuse me, officers: false rape claims are not rare. Spend several hours educating yourselves by reading this Web site, e.g., you can start here, and http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v33-issue3/greer.pdf and http://www.salon.com/news/1999/03/cov_10news.html and http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,194032,00.html.
As for underreporting: this is the great mystery. It is well to note that the "fact" of widespread underreporting is posited by persons who embrace sexual assault studies that inflate the incidence of rape by including consensual sexual encounters. The vast majority of women who were raped according to one famous study did not believe they were raped, even when informed that, in the view of the persons conducting the study, they had been raped. http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_campus_rape.html and http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9502/sommers.html (You see, according to the paid sexual assault advocates, we must believe women when they say they were raped, but we can't believe women when they say they weren't raped or when they recant a rape claim. Get it? Neither do we.) Accordingly, if the studies finding rampant underreporting classify as "rape" such consensual encounters, then the underreporting scare is grossly inflated.
HERE IS THE NEWS STORY:
Rape and Kidnapping Claim Was False, Investigators Conclude
Release Date: November 6, 2008
A student who claimed to have been kidnapped and raped on UB's North Campus last year has told University Police that the incident never happened.
The woman's December 3, 2007 claim was investigated by University Police, but detectives were unable to find any physical evidence or witnesses, said University Police Chief Gerald Schoenle. "This incident created an atmosphere of concern on campus, and we think it is important for everybody at UB to know that we have determined that the alleged crime never took place."
Schoenle said that it is against the law to make false statements to the police, but the university has decided it will not press charges against the woman, who is no longer a student and does not reside in the Buffalo area.
For more information about the University Police investigation, go to http://upolice.buffalo.edu/alerts.php.
Link: http://www.buffalo.edu/news/9765
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
6 comments:
I know the statistics show that false reporting isn't rare, but let's for a moment imagine it was.
Hardly anybody has ever done what Josef Fritzl did. Would anybody suggest that, due to the rarity of cases of fathers imprisoning their daughters in a basement and sexually abusing them for twenty years, we shouldn't prosecute when it does happen?
At the moment in the UK there is a mother on trial for allegedly faking the kidnapping of her nine-year-old daughter. Should we not bother prosecuting that, because it's so rare?
I'm sure you or anyone reading will come up with other crimes that have been prosecuted, even though they're extremely rare.
As always, your logic cannot be plausibly disputed.
The other argument is that these crimes should not be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law because it would have a chilling effect on real rape victims coming forward. First, there is positively no evidence to support that. Second, since when is criminal behavior excused because of even a legitimate chilling effect? For what other crime could this even be suggested with a straight face?
With that said, I am all for giving a sentencing discount to false claims where the accuser makes an early recantation and no innocent man or boy was targeted by police -- because we need to encourage early recantations (they are often the only way for a man or boy to avoid a trial). But every false claim should be at least charged.
What do you mean there is no evidence to support this? The reason why Rape is the single most unreported crime is fear that the victim will not be believed. 60% of sexual assaults are not reported to the police (RAINN). So your saying now that every accusation of false rape should be charged? It's bad enough people don't believe them now and you want to throw charges at them? Give me a break.
Also, it is a huge misperception that false reports are not rare. Why is that? If everytime a rape or sexual assault occured and was reported as these false rapes are, the ratio would be overwhelming to the side of actual accounts of rape and sexual assault. The percentage of falsely reported rapes and sexual assaults is statistically the same as any other falsely reported crime; about 3-5%.
ubmgsteve, your take on these issues is . . . singular, to put it politely.
Although you first challenge my statement that thre is no evidence to support the purported "chilling effect," in order to disprove me, you proceed to change the subject. Your attempt to prove a chilling effect is most ineffectual.
You proceed to proffer a statistic on underreporting promulgated by a biased, interested organization that has no interest in protecting innocent persons wrongly accused of rape. One would first need to know what questions did they ask women to determine that there is rampant underreporting? Did they include men in their surveys? If not, why not? Most such statistics are achieved on the basis of questionaires that ask women (and women only) questions which assume rape occurs where it doesn't (e.g., "Did you ever have sex when you didn't want to?" -- that, of course, is not now, nor has it ever been, the standard for determining if rape occurred). AND, the most famous of all such surveys ignored women's own experences on this subject by telling a large chuck they'd been "raped" when the women themselves said they weren't. IF the women didn't know they'd been raped, obviously their "rapists" didn't know they had "raped," so what the hell kind of crime is that? In fact, the questions asked were not appropriate to determining if rape occurred.
In any event, you personally lose all credibility when you posit a definite percentage or a small range of percentages for both underreported AND false claims -- no one knows. Get it? I have reviewed all the legitimate (not MRA or feminist) literature on this issue. I have no interest in wild MRA claims that 90% of rape claims are false or wild feminist claims that only 2 percent are false. Whatever the number for false claims, it is significant, and as paddybrown's comment astutely points out above, even if "rare," it is a problem that should not be ignored.
Most of what is written in this area (your comment, sadly, falls in this category) is written to achieve an ideological end, and is not based on unbiased, objectively verifiable fact. Frankly, your certainty on this subject matter and blithe dismissal of false rape claims betrays an inclination to toss wrongly accused men and boys in the dumpster, and that, with all due respect, is morally grotesque.
This Web site is frequented by men who have been wrongly accused of rape and your trolling here with biased and interested "information" that cannot be objectively verified and that suggests we should not be concerned with their victimization is inappopriate and hurtful. You should spend several hours reviewing this site to educate yourself about the prevalence of false rape claims, based on objectively verifiable information.
Interesting. Now that the 2% figure has been shown to have been plucked out of the air by Brownmiller, the rape industry advocates are revising their figure upwards - ubmgsteve saying 3-5% (another figure plucked out of the air), and I saw a feminist blog using the "8% unfounded" FBI figure - but still claiming it's insignificant. 8% means two claims out of every 25 - I think that's pretty significant.
Do you know what causes women to think they won't be believed? All those claims that turn out to be lies. The thought that if they go to the police, they'll be thought of as another Crystal Mangum. Give those who impersonate rape victims a disincentive to make their false claims - jail time commensurate with the damage their claim did - and you'll get fewer of these high profile incidents, and less suspicion about genuine rape claims.
However, if women are scared to report for the fear that they'll be asked to back it up, that's suspicious in itself. I work in public liability claims, and the majority of them, even the ones we turn down, are for genuine injuries or damage, but my employer isn't legally liable for it. But every once in a while I get a claimant who, when I tell them I have to investigate the matter and confirm all the details before a decision can be made, gets belligerent and/or upset, and accuses me of calling them a liar because I don't just take their word for it.
Do you know what these people have in common? That's right. They're liars, trying to avoid having their lies found out.
Those who claim that to investigate rape claims with an open mind is to call the claimant a liar: liars, trying to avoid getting found out. Those who claim that to prosecute malicious claimants would put off genuine ones: liars, trying to avoid getting found out.
Feminists have deliberately expanded the definition of rape to include thousands of interactions that have no chance of being considered rape by a criminal court, for the express purpose of keeping the conviction percentage low, so they can claim, in a society where women have equal legal rights with men in all areas except the ones they have special privileges, that they're still "oppressed", and thereby justify their existence.
paddybrown, I couldn't agree more! And that is my experience, too, regarding liars in my law practice.
If you are a member of a group that has some members hurting the group as a whole (as false accusers hurt real rape victims), what do you do? Do you stop the problem, or do you pretend it's not a problem? I would opt for the former; the feminists opt for the latter. You are exactly correct.
And I have a post coming up in a week or so about how the feminists want to narrow the definition of "consent" to the point where perfectly lawful and natural sex becomes "rape." You are correct: the "studies" they use to support "underreporting" include significant numbers of incidents that are not rape in the real or rational world.
And don't even get me started as to why these surveys hardly ever include men.
Post a Comment