More than £60,000 was spent on false rape claims in a single month in Telford after a quarter of cases were proved to be false, police said today.
It comes after a 16-year-old was charged with perverting the course of justice after alleging she was raped in Stirchley.
And a 12-year-old girl who claimed she was raped by two different men in a five-week period in Oakengates was arrested on suspicion of perverting the course of justice this week and admitted the allegations were false.
Acting detective inspector Billy Scott, of Telford CID, said a quarter of the 16 rape cases which were reported in September were proved to be false. But he said everything would be done to catch offenders in genuine cases.
“Stranger rapes – where the victim does not know the offender – are extremely rare in Telford,” he said.
“However, we treat every single allegation that is made at face value and victims of any sexual offences, including rapes, are rightly given the gold service.”
Mr Scott said a huge team of officers, including specialist search teams, forensic teams and soil specialists were drafted in as part of any sexual offences investigation.
The latest false claims have seen areas sealed off for 24 hours and uniformed officers on guard to preserve any possible evidence.
Mr Scott said: “In the month of September alone we had 16 rapes reported – of those reported four of them were of a stranger nature where the victim said they did not know the alleged offender.”
As a result of extensive inquiries, involving senior detectives and divisional CID, these four offences were shown not to have occurred.
“Each investigation can cost between £10,000 and £20,000 because every time we rightfully do a full and proper investigation.
“We have a lot of money wasted by people who make up the allegations but, more importantly, the human resources we waste following up false allegations can have a massively detrimental impact on the service we are able to offer a genuine victim of crime.”
Link: http://www.shropshirestar.com/news/2010/11/13/60000-spent-on-telford-false-rape-claims/
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6 comments:
SO 4 out of the 16 were stranger rape allegations, and they were all false.
So, 12 out of the 16 were not stranger rape allegations, but named individual allegations, and we aren't saying a damn thing about how many of those are false, because, y'know, 11 these 12 all lived with the guys they accused, and 10 of them were going through divorces / custody battles, and the other one had a one night stand but both she and her current boyfriend knew the guy, and the remaining 1 of 12 met the guy on facebook for a one night stand and then her new boyfriend found out.
anecdote time.... last weekend I had a drink with a local rape squad detective, they told me that in this city there are "several" rape allegations made each week, they then listed the THREE in the last ten years they knew to be rapes, and TWO that nobody knew, but the would put money on being rape...
They then said the force made an average of £250 for each set of transcripts sold to divorce lawyers, and they did so many of these the steno pool could not keep up.
YMMV
AfOR,
So we know there is at least a 25% rate of false reporting, and it could very well be higher.
So much for that vaunted 2%.
AfOR - "SO 4 out of the 16 were stranger rape allegations, and they were all false."
That's how I read it (although the text isn't entirely clear about that).
If so, it sure shoots the crap out of my pet theory that there are nearly as many falsified violent stranger kidnap-rapes as there are real ones.
Going by this account, there now seem to be far more falsified ones than real ones.
I think it was a typo, 2% of accusations are genuine.
AfOR,
I meant the 2% as in the oft quoted, "Only 2% of rape allegations are false". In this case, we KNOW that 25% of the reported cases are false.
slwerner,
I would say that with the current definition of rape, stranger rapes are exceptionall rare (from a numbers standpoint). Since drunken hookups/regretted encounters are now classified as rape, the purported numbers are ridiculous.
"Leading detectives today warned people who lied that they had been raped that they were discrediting the genuine victims who had been through the trauma of such an offence."
Hat's off to you officers,handled it perfectly, let's all cross our fingers and hope that the 19,000th exhortation to the common dignity of these thoughtless attention whores will finally cause them to overlook the smorgasbordh of fawning,sympathy, and drama that these heartless idiots crave. You know, not for the men that they've hurt, but for the fictional imaginary FEMALE victims of their crimes.
I mean, it's been a colossal failure the other 18,999 times but that's no reason to assume it won't work this time,right?
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