Even if the only victims of wrongful claims of rape and sexual assault were those we know about from the stories we report on here, those injustices alone would be enough to warrant our advocacy on this site. The fact is, we have strong reason to suspect that number is much greater.
It is unfortunate that certain idealogues try to stanch any discussion about false rape claims. They insist that the needs of those who are falsely accused of sex crimes should not be addressed because, they maintain, false rape claims are rare or even a "myth."
While eveyone agrees that people lie about everything under the sun for all manner of reasons, good, bad and indifferent, members of the sexual grievance industry assert that in the singular instance of rape, mirabile dictu, one gender is incapable of telling a lie while the other is comprised of pathological liars. The very discussion of rape becomes a sort of truth serum for women, a magic elixir that forces anyone not possessing a Y-chromosome to utter incontrovertible truth. Is this in any sense plausible to a fair-minded person? The question scarcely survives its statement.
The assertion is, of course, is an assault on our common sense. That women lie about rape shouldn't be surprising because rape is easy to lie about. The very physical act that constitutes the alleged crime is precisely the same act that has been performed countless times every minute of every day of every year since the beginning of time the world over as an act of love, an act of procreation. To transmogrify this most fundamental human act into a claim of rape, all a woman needs to do is recharacterize it as nonconsensual. No dobut, many men would also lie about rape if their lies would be deemed plausible. Since they aren't, men rarely tell such lies.
Clearly false accusations of rape happen, but how prevalent are they? The crime has become so embroiled in the gender-politicized sexual assault milieu, where serious dialogue grounded in fact is displaced by vituperative rants and politically motivated assertions, that most reports about the prevalence of such false claims are inherently untrustworthy. In advocating for rape reforms, some feminist legal scholars engaged in a sort of disingenuous scholarly overkill by sprinkling their rationales with shibboleths about how women don’t or hardly ever lie about rape. As a result, the legal literature is replete with references to the “fact” that only two percent of all rape clams are false, consistent with the purported average for other crimes. It is not uncommon in this literature for men’s fears about false accusations to be dismissed with almost derisive references to Potiphar’s wife, who, according to the Bible’s Book of Genesis, wrongly accused Joseph (of “coat-of-many-colors” fame) of rape.
The overriding evidence shows that false rape claims are a significant problem, and that the victims of false claims are not rarities.
It is disingenuous to insist that false rape claims are a "myth" because no one knows for certain the percentage of false rape claims. A leading feminist legal scholar has acknowledged this irrefutable fact: ". . . the statistics on false rape accusation widely vary and 'as a scientific matter, the frequency of false rape complaints to police or other legal authorities remains unknown.'" A. Gruber, Rape, Feminism, and the War on Crime, 84 Wash. L. Rev. 581, 595-600 (November 2009) (citation omitted). An authoritative law review article debunked the canard that only two percent of all rape claims are false. The author traced this number to its baseless source. See http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v33-issue3/greer.pdf. The FBI has compiled statistics to show that women lie far more often about rape than other crimes. The Politics of Sexuality, Barry M. Dank, Editor in Chief, Vol. 3 at 36, n. 8. It is, therefore, erroneous to assert that only a small or insignificant percentage of rape claims are false because no one can make that assertion with any degree of certainty, and all the available evidence suggests it is wrong.
That the exact prevalence of false rape claims is neither known nor knowable is easily demonstrated. Only a relatively small percentage of rape claims can be definitively called "rape." This is beyond dispute. Rougly fifteen percent end in conviction in the U.S. and of those we know that some innocent men and boys are convicted. We also know that some claims reported (the numbers vary depending on the study) are outright false. But in between the claims we are reasonably certain were actual rapes, and the ones we are reasonably certain were false claims, is a vast gray area consisting of a group of claims that cannot properly be classified as "rapes" -- because we just don't know. That's the nature of a rape claim. The claims in this vast gray middle area often suffer from evidentiary infirmities. For example, for some such claims, while the claimant herself might think a rape occurred, her outward manifestations of assent did not match her subjective disinclination to engage in sex, so it wasn't rape. And that's just one of a countless number of examples.
Regardless of what the actual number might be, every impartial, objective study ever conducted on the subject shows false rape claims are a serious problem. As reported by "False Rape Allegations" by Eugene Kanin, Archives of Sexual Behavior Feb 1994 v23 n1 p81 (12), Professor Kanin’s major study of a mid-size Midwestern U.S. city over the course of nine years found that 41 percent of all rape claims were false. Kanin also studied the police records of two unnamed large state universities, and found that in three years, 50 percent of the 64 rapes reported to campus police were determined to be false, without the use of polygraphs. (Kanin, incidentally, was a feminist icon whose work was cited and relied on without question by feminists, including the infamous Koss Report. He suddenly became a nitwit who forgot how to do research when his studies upset the narrative of the persons who dominate the public discourse about rape.)
In addition, a landmark Air Force study in 1985 studied 556 rape allegations. It found that 27% of the accusers recanted, and an independent evaluation revealed a false accusation rate of 60%. McDowell, Charles P., Ph.D. “False Allegations.” Forensic Science Digest, (publication of the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations), Vol. 11, No. 4 (December 1985), p. 64. See also, "Until Proven Innocent," the widely praised (praised even by the New York Times, which the book skewers -- as well as by most other major U.S. news sources) and painstaking study of the Duke Lacrosse non-rape case. Authors Stuart Taylor and Professor K.C. Johnson explain that the exact number of false claims is elusive but "[t]he standard assertion by feminists that only 2 percent" or sexual assault claims "are false, which traces to Susan Brownmiller's 1975 book 'Against Our Will,' is without empirical foundation and belied by a wealth of empirical data. These data suggest that at least 9 percent and probably closer to half" of all sexual assault claims "are false . . . ." (Page 374.)
Have you ever noticed that every time a feminist discusses false rape claims, she becomes an actuarial? False rape claims, she posits, are an acceptable risk because there are so few of them and because there are so many actual rapes -- especially of the unreported variety. "I'll start to become concerned about false rape claims," she gushes, "when false rape claims become half the problem rape is." Then she'll support her rant by trotting out statistics that are, again, wholly untrustworthy.
The sexual grievance industry posits stats for the prevalence of rape that are wildly, fantastically, inconsistent. Many feminist organizations posit stats that are inconsistent with their own stats for alleged underreporting of rape. Moreover, they typically rely on polls where the questions are skewed to yield more "rapes," and where pollsters don't bother to check the male's side of the story. While no one can say whether most rape claims reported to police were actual rapes, feminist organizations insist that a young woman's offhand and unchallenged boast to a pollster that she was raped is incontrovertible fact, and public policy is set accordingly.
Organizations such as NOW and RAINN rely on the U.S Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey to insist that rape is rampant and largely underreported. What those organizations do not publicize is that this survey, conducted by in-person and telephone interviews, defines rape as follows: "Forced sexual intercourse including both psychological coercion as well as physical force. . . ." You need to scroll to page 131 out of 133 to find that definition. Putting aside other problems with the definition, "psychological coercion," of course, can mean all manner of things that are not rape, including "I'll take your mother to the doctors tomorrow if you make love to me tonight."
For more information about false rape claims, see here: http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/p/informative-sources.html
