Women tell the truth

There's a widespread belief that women often make false reports of rape, posing a serious risk to innocent men. For a long time now, I've been meaning to write an essay challenging this view. To the best of my knowledge, there is no real evidence that women often make false rape reports. The incorrect belief that they do has had serious consequences.

I've just discovered that the folder I've been keeping my research in has been damaged by water, so I'm going to assemble the evidence I have here, in a series of postings. Your comments and feedback are very much invited, whatever your views.

The first thing I want to do is go over some of the issues, "out loud".

( Read more... )

Women tell the truth: the evidence 1

• 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.

Women tell the truth: the evidence 2

• "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.