Women tell the truth: the evidence 1

[dreamer_easy]

• There's often confusion between reports which were recanted, and reports which did not lead to prosecution for one of many reasons. "This is one way in which rates of false allegation have been inflated and misrepresented. It may be reported that false allegations of rape occur at the rate of 30%, for example, when what is really meant is that 30% of cases are 'unfounded'." (Aiken, Margaret M, Ann Wolbert Burgess, and Robert R. Hazelwood. "False Rape Allegations". In Hazelwood, Robert R. and An Wolbert Burgess (eds), Practical Aspects of Rape Investigation. Boca Raton, CRR Press, 1995.)
  
  
• "In fact, there is no empirical data to prove that there are more false charges of rape than any other violent crime." [Emphasis mine] (Torrey, Morrison. When Will We Be Believed? Rape Myths and the Idea of a Fair Trial in Rape Prosecutions U.C. Davis Law Review 24 1991, pp 1013-1027.
  
  (Torrey cites a 1979 US Department of Justice report, Forcible Rape: A Manual for Filing and Trial Prosecutors. Prosecutors' Volume II. I wonder if I can find it? ETA: I found a partly illegible scan of the manual - which in turn cites: Curtis, L.A. Victim precipitation and violent crime. Social Problems 21, 1974, pp 594-605.)
  
  
• Torrey also points to the confusion between "unfounded" reports and false reports. "Sometimes the pressures to close a case cause police to categorize rape complaints as 'unfounded' without appropriate investigation. For instance, after a media story the police department in Oakland, California, was forced to reopen 203 rape complaints that had been listed as 'unfounded' even though no investigation had occurred." (The Oakland mess is also referred to in Schafran, Lynn Hecht. Writing and Reading About Rape: A Primer. St. John's Law Review 66 1993 pp 979-1045.)
  
  
• The same thing happened in Philadelphia in the 1990s. A 1999 investigation discovered that a third of the SVU's cases - hundreds of rapes and sexual assaults - had been coded "investigation of person" and dropped from investigation. (Prior to this, the SVU had labelled an unusually large number of complaints "unfounded" - blaming false rape reports. They switched to the "investigation of person" label after the FBI expressed concern.)
  
  
• One problem for me is the widespread claim that only 2% of all rape reports are false. I haven't been able to find an original source for this figure, which I think may be a misinterpretation of a single study mentioned in Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape.