Wednesday, September 03, 2008

False rape complaints

The business of false rape complaints bothers me. Here is another New Zealand case that has pretty much gone unpunished.

Judge Oke Blaikie said wasting police time and undermining legitimate rape prosecutions was a serious offence.

"People have been sent to prison for doing what you did."

He convicted Little of making a false statement to police, sentencing her to 9 months' supervision for substance abuse.


It would appear there are no statistics about the incidence of false rape claims - surprise, surprise. I have blogged before however about the rising incidence of dishonesty crimes and I suspect they are contained therein.

But some stats out of the US show that the incidence may be reasonably high. Wendy McElroy uncovered a report containing this statement;

"Every year since 1989, in about 25 percent of the sexual assault cases referred to the FBI where results could be obtained, the primary suspect has been excluded by forensic DNA testing. Specifically, FBI officials report that out of roughly 10,000 sexual assault cases since 1989, about 2,000 tests have been inconclusive, about 2,000 tests have excluded the primary suspect, and about 6,000 have "matched" or included the primary suspect.....these percentages have remained constant for 7 years, and the National Institute of Justice's informal survey of private laboratories reveals a strikingly similar 26 percent exclusion rate."

The original report is here.

Something else occurs to me. This incidence is broadly in line with the rate of DNA paternity testing that reveals a man is not the father of a child.

Of course if there are cash rewards for lying or, as the young Dannevirke beneficiary found out, attention without negative consequences, females will continue to behave in ways which can have devastating consequences for men. I suppose radical "all men are rapists" feminists would consider this is collective moral payback ignoring the individual price paid by innocent people.

1 comment:

Archivist said...

Good post. My Web site is devoted for false rape claims: False Rape Society

False rape claims are difficult to track because there is no uniform method for doing so and because there is an element of subjectivity in concluding a claim is false short of a judicial determination. Objectively verifiable data indicates that at least 9 percent and probably closer to half of all rape claims are false. (See, e.g., S. Taylor, K.C. Johnson, Until Proven Innocent.) Yet the crime of making a false rape report has become so embroiled in the radical feminist sexual assault milieu that it has been improperly removed from the public discourse about rape. Sexual assault counselors often disingenuously refer to the fact of false rape accusations as a "myth." Denigrating the experience of the falsely accused by dismissing their victimization as a myth is not merely dishonest but morally grotesque.

While there may be a few Grade "A" nutcases who regard false claims as moral payback for some imaginary sins of the "patriarchy" against women, the more insidious attitude is that victims of false rape accusations are unfortunate collateral damage in the war on rape. The fact is, rape and false reporting of rape are both crimes and there is no reason why we shouldn't all be devoted to opposing both.

Why are false rape claims such a problem? Because it is a frighteningly simple thing to re-characterize consensual sex as rape -- the very physical act that constitutes the alleged crime is precisely the same act that has been performed countless times every second of every minute of every day of every year since the beginning of time the world over -- as an act of love that is welcomed by women, not as a crime. But a woman can transmogrify this most fundamental human act of love into rape merely by branding it as nonconsensual, and that lie can, and does, destroy the life of the man or boy with whom she made love. The amazing thing is that there are not far more false rape claims, given the ease with which they are made -- a fact that speaks to the fundamental integrity of (wo)man-kind.

The solution? Make sentences for false rape accusers much more severe, but granting lighter sentences for those who recant early (we need to encourage recantations at all costs).