News & Politics
Why It’s So Hard to Quantify False Rape Charges
The question the Hofstra rape disaster left dangling.
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How often do women falsely cry rape? Because of the 18-year-old Hofstra student who recanted after telling police that five men had tricked her into a bathroom and then gang raped her two weeks ago, that question has been flying around the Internet. As Cathy Young notes in Newsday, the answers often fall into one of two camps. "Many feminists argue that the problem of false accusations is so minuscule that to discuss it extensively is a harmful distraction from the far more serious problem of rape. On the other side are men's-rights activists, claiming that false accusations are as much of a scourge as rape itself."
But isn't the rate of false rape charges an empirical question, with a specific answer that isn't vulnerable to ideological twisting? Yes and no. There has been a burst of research on this subject. Some of it is careful, but much of it is questionable. While most of the good studies converge at a rate of about 8 percent to 10 percent for false rape charges, the literature isn't quite definitive enough to stamp out the far higher estimates. And even if we go by the lower numbers, there's the question of interpretation. If one in 10 charges of rape is made up, is that a dangerously high rate or an acceptably low one? To put this in perspective, if we use the Bureau of Justice Statistics that show about 200,000 rapes in 2008, we could be looking at as many as 20,000 false accusations.
Legal scholars used to be routinely suspicious of rape victims. "Surely the simplest, and perhaps the most important, reason not to permit conviction for rape on the uncorroborated word of the prosecutrix is that the word is very often false," a Yale Law Journal article opined in 1952, echoing a view voiced since at least the 17th century. These views remained mainstream into the 1970s, if not later. As Marcia Clark said yesterday recalling the 1977 rape charges against Roman Polanski, "Those were the days when folks still believed rape was 'easy to charge and hard to disprove.' " And that old adage couldn't have been further from the truth. Prosecutors well knew that unless the victim was Snow White, the case was toast."
You can see what Susan Brownmiller was up against when she wrote her path-breaking feminist tract, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, in 1975.
In her book, Brownmiller said that only 2 percent of rape allegations are false, citing findings by the female police in a New York City rape squad. The problem is that while this statistic has been widely repeated, with dutiful mentions of New York-based "research," no one has ever tracked down its source. This we learned from a comprehensive review of the literature on false rape charges published in the Cambridge Law Journal in 2006. The author, Philip Rumney, finds a couple of small studies that back up the 2 percent claim but isn't confident of their methodology.
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Comments
Intellectually Dishonest
By: h0tr0d | Tue, 10/20/2009 - 15:51
This analysis has ideology written all over it. If you want to learn about false rape allegations.....please go anywhere except a blog in the feminist echo chamber.
another perspective
By: blevine | Fri, 10/02/2009 - 01:42
A more important issue then the percentage of rape charges that are false, is the percentage of men jailed as a result of false rape charges.
We rely on the expertise of the police, district attorneys and the courts to distinguish between true and false charges, something which the article also questions.
The courts and police seem to be proceeding from the assumption that making it difficult to charge rape will result in fewer women charging rape falsely. This assumption is problematic.
Implied in the articles is the idea that we should make it easier for woman to report rapes and investigate and prosecute rapes more vigorously. While this would cause more men to be justly convicted of rape, it would probably increase the percentage of men falsely convicted. I wonder what percentage of false convictions the authors are willing to live with in order to pursue the laudable goal of making woman safer?
False rape allegations
By: Dmerrin | Fri, 10/02/2009 - 00:07
This situation is obviously a complicated and difficult one. At first 10% false seemed kind of high, but maybe that's changed as a few generations of women have grown up perceiving themselves more empowered than women may have a few decades ago. I agree that many of those involved in the men's rights movements are often irrational and emotional to an extent that makes them difficult to reason with about any subject that's at all sore for them-- but, it also seems necessary for society, and feminists, too, to ensure that the consequences for those who accuse falsely are severe and unequivocal. Mind you, I agree that the problem of rape is much larger than the problem of false accusation-- 9:1 more, we might say-- BUT, because this situation seems truly to be rather rare, it becomes all the more difficult for a man who truly has been falsely accused to do more than get a legal, as well as social "not guilty" verdict, as opposed to a "Proved Innocent." I'm glad you included the anecdote about the man and woman, who, having experienced these respective scenarios of victimization, experienced such similar trauma symptoms. It brings to mind two points-- first, that perhaps in a manner similar to the insight about rape being primarily motivated by the rapist's hunger for power over a victim, we might say the same of a false allegation of rape. Second, if we refer again to the anecdote in the article, we see that the man recalls that apart from his family and friends, he was basically "on [his] own,"-- where he reports that his girlfriend, when raped, had been well supported, and that this had aided her healing. Assuming both events are relatively recent, the man's report sounds-- to me, at least-- like approximately what I'd expect in both situations-- i.e. some good and useful social supports for a rape victim and little of the same for a person accused falsely. The interesting thing to me is that much of what I hear women report experiencing after being assaulted-- fear of not being believed, actually not being believed, their own characters being scrutinized, the rapist being given all benefits of the doubt... much of these would be, I think, pretty close to what a falsely accused man would feel. Perhaps it would be less for such a man if he were quickly exonerated-- if, as happened recently at Hofstra, the accuser actually recanted. But in cases where that didn't occur, I rather think many men would believe they were in a nearly impossible situation-- perhaps he might escape a conviction, but he would not escape certain social consequences. Furthermore, I'm not sure a man needs to ever experience this himself to imagine what a hell this would make of his life-- perhaps he's seen another man go through it, or perhaps simply imagining it is enough. This may be why many men, even today, may be psychologically defensive about this subject. I can't condone what the article says about the attitudes of the average law enforcement agent on this subject-- I'd have expected most police to be able to maintain a cool head with regard to this and all accusations of crime-- that they'd make no judgments until the evidence began to swing one way or the other. But in the long run, it seems to me to be in society's and women's interest to make sure that when it can be determined that a woman HAS, in fact, made a false accusation, she be sanctioned severely. Not only is this in the interest of justice, but it seems that over time, this might make the burden on the victims of rape less heavy. It would follow, I think, that actual rapists would find it harder to escape punishment.