Dreamer Easy

"When a room full of people feels the urgent need to shun and discard a rape victim, nothing makes it easier than adopting the belief that she made the whole thing up. The terrifying vulnerability that she represents is immediately dissolved because it never happened. And the victim can righteously be discarded because she is a liar.

Ironically, the failure to empathize with the rape victim, and the impulse to shun her, only make us all more vulnerable [because] the vast majority of rapes are perpetrated by serial offenders. Thus, when the participants in the criminal justice system collaborate in discarding a rape victim, they simultaneously increase the odds of future rapes."

• "The San Diego Police Department Sex Crimes Division routinely evaluated the rate of false reports over several years and found them to be around 4%. In a recent study of 2,643 sexual assault cases reported to British police, 8% were classified as false allegations. Yet when researchers applied the actual criteria for a false report, as opposed to an unsubstantiated or unfounded report, the figure dropped to 2%." (Raphael, J. The Duke Lacrosse Case: Exploiting the Issue of False Rape Accusations. Violence Against Women 14(3), March 2008. I'd like to track down the original sources of these figures.)
  
  
• Raphael also remarks: "Professor Lisak reminds us that not a single 'benchmark' study on false rape claims can be found in the social science literature". (Citing Lisak, D. (2007). False allegations of rape: A critique of Kanin. Sexual Assault Report 11, no. 1, 1-2, 6, and 9.) This is why I say there is "some" evidence that women don't often falsely report rape: no-one has ever specifically researched the prevalence of false reports.
  
  
• ETA: "False allegations are widely believed to be a common occurence in cases of sexual assault. However, to date, there is no evidence to support this view. I would therefore counsel caution when statements are made about behaviour, which might be prefaced 'everyone knows'. In such circumstances, it is more likely that nobody knows."
  Adshead, Gwen. Psychological trauma and its influence on genuine and false complaints of sexual assault. Medicine, Science, and the Law 36(2) 1996 pp 95-99.
  
  
• "To the best of the authors' knowledge, there are no statistics maintained on false allegations."
  Hazelwood, Robert R. and Ann Wolbert Burgess. "False allegations of rape". in Hazelwood, Robert R. and Ann Wolbert Burgess (eds). Practical Aspects of Rape Investigation: A Multidisciplinary Approach (4th ed). CRC Press (Taylor and Francis Group), Boca Raton FL, 2008.
  
  

• UK figures from a 2005 Home Office Research Study, A gap or a chasm? Attrition in reported rape cases: "Nine per cent of reported cases were designated false... However, closer analysis of this category applying Home Office counting rules reduces this to three per cent. Even the higher figure is considerably lower than the extent of false reporting estimated by police officers interviewed in this study." [My emphasis] ETA: "... the Home Office guidance on 'no criming' and false complaints in particular was not always followed with cases having neither an admission by the complainant nor strong evidentiary grounds." (Kelly 2010)
  
  
• A second paper I found, a report from the Villanova University School of Law, discusses the results of the belief that false reports are common, in the law and in police procedure, but points out: "In fact, there is no good empirical data on false rape complaints either historically or currently... As a scientific matter, the frequency of false rape complaints to police or other legal authorities remains unknown." [My emphasis] (Anderson, Michelle J. The Legacy of the Prompt Complaint Requirement, Corroboration Requirement, and Cautionary Instructions on Campus Sexual Assault. Villanova University School of Law, Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 2004-10, June 2004.)
  
  
• A Canadian figure: in a study of rape reports to the Winnebago PD in 1976 and 1977, 27.3% of the cases were labelled "unfounded", but only 5.2% were false reports. (Johnson, Stuart, Rick Linden, and Candice Minch. Attrition in the Processing of Rape Cases. Canadian Journal of Criminology 29 1987.)

• "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.