Women tell the truth: the evidence 2

[dreamer_easy]

• "Some women do lie, of course, but the number of women who make false reports is negligible in comparison with the number of valid complainants. In a six-month period in New York City there were around 2000 reported rapes, of which about 250 were unfounded reports. But 'unfounded' does not mean lying... After analysing all the 'unfounded' reports, we found that there were actually only five cases of women maliciously telling lies and deliberately falsely accusing men of rapes that had never been committed. In these cases the women are arrested for making false accusations..." [Bolding mine, but emphasis his!] (O'Reilly, Harry J. "Crisis Intervention with Victims of Forcible Rape: A Police Perspective". In Hopkins, June (ed). Perspectives on Rape and Sexual Assault. Harper and Row, London, 1984.)
  
  
• One of the worst articles I found on the subject was a 1971 piece in Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality, which was a long collection of anecdotes, accompanied by an erotic Rodin drawing and a cartoon making fun of women's lib. Sources were given for almost none of the stories - in fact, we're given no idea of where they came from. Possibly the author, John MacDonald, included the sources in his book Rape: Offenders and Their Victims, published the same year.
  
  In the article and the book, MacDonald stated that 25% of reported rapes in Denver during one year were unfounded - some for reasons as trivial as having occurred outside the Denver jurisdiction. When another researcher (Hursch, Carolyn J. The Trouble With Rape. Nelson-Hall, Chicago, 1977) looked at the Denver data, she found that only 9% of the reports were unfounded by police, and that only 3% were false reports.

Comments

Clarification req.

[sambushell.livejournal.com]

Is the second para a quote or your writing?

Re: Clarification req.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

It's me! I've fixed it so it doesn't look as though I'm attributing my scribble to Hursch. Thank you!

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

I am confused about what the term "unfounded" means here - my initial reading of that word would make me think "there is no foundation," i.e. "based on a false statement," but that seems to be contradicted by the far smaller number of cases which are provably false.

Does it mean "not enough evidence to prosecute?" Or perhaps, "not enough evidence to evaluate truth or falsity?"

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

You've hit on one of the most important issues. Police have a category for rape cases they're not going to continue investigating - a confusingly and misleadingly named category. In the US and Canada, it's "unfounded"; in the UK, it's "no crime". In all three countries, the category does *not* mean there actually wasn't a crime, or that there was no foundation for the report - it's just a bureaucratic label. Sometimes the police don't think the report is without foundation, or that no crime occurred - but as you suggest, don't think the case would have much chance in court, so still label it "unfounded" or "no crime" as though the report was a lie. Reports can also be "unfounded" for trivial reasons - I should put together a list.

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

I know in other categories, these are often described as "decline to prosecute" or "insufficient evidence"