India to pay women big money to cry rape

I have avoided writing about the recent idiocy dripping from the pen of some jurist who sits on the Supreme Court of India -- that Indian women don't lie about rape.  That enlightened judge should have taken two minutes to scan through False Rape Society before writing such an obvious falsehood because he or she would have found ample evidence of the very thing that supposedly doesn't happen.

As impossible as it may seem, India has topped itself.  It has decreed that every woman who testifies that a male raped her will be handed the equivalent of 4,374.96 US dollars, a not-insignificant sum anywhere, but a huge payday in India. "A rape victim will be entitled to a compensation of Rs 200,000, provided she testifies in a court of law against the accused."  See it here.  "[A] victim will get Rs 20,000 within a fortnight of lodging a rape complaint as interim relief. Another Rs 50,000 will be provided for immediate rehabilitation and medical expenses."

India has given women and girls a huge financial incentive to destroy innocent males. How huge?  The average annual income in the US is more than 45 times that of India -- so this payday is actually equivalent to $200,000 in U.S. dollars. That's not compensation for an injury, for many people, that's a retirement.

What if the woman falsely cries rape? She keeps the money, of course.  "The scheme, however, doesn’t have any provision of recovering compensation, in case the complaint is false, a provision sought by police bodies.  'Our aim is to provide financial succour…,' Women and Child Development Minister Krishna Tirath said."

Paying women to cry "rape" is not unique to India. The UK is among the nations that writes out a check in exchange for a rape complaint. If India's goal is to jack up rape convictions, it is unfortunate that it did not study the UK's failed model: the UK enables women to lie about rape by paying them and then wonders why its conviction rate for rape is so low.  Not only do monetary schemes like this attract charlatans who think nothing of grabbing the money even if it destroys the life of some hapless man or boy, but they taint even actual rape victims with a significant motive to lie.  Juries aren't stupid -- they know that every woman who testifies that she's been raped has been paid, and that naturally raises questions about her motives. 

We've previously written about how the UK Gives Women a Monetary Incentive to Lie About Rape at Glenn Sacks' site: http://glennsacks.com/blog/?p=3452.  Certain truths about UK's compensation system are equally applicable to India's:

The premise of those who assert women don’t lie about rape is that women have no incentive to lie, and that the criminal ordeal a rape accuser is put through outweighs any possible benefit from lying.

This, of course, is not true, and the Compensation Scheme indisputably furnishes a monetary incentive to lie about rape. It is well to note two things: (1) the compensation paid for sexual offenses is scarcely insignificant; and (2) women lie about rape for far less rational reasons. In Professor Eugene Kanin’s landmark study of a mid-size Midwestern city over the course of nine years, he found that 41 percent of all rape claims were not just false but actually recanted. Two of the three principal motivations for false claims identified by Kanin are the following: women lie to obtain attention/sympathy, and for revenge.

If significant numbers of women are willing to lie about rape simply to get attention or for revenge, is it not all the more plausible that some women will lie for the more rational reason of obtaining a significant sum of money? The question scarcely survives its statement.