Re: Frequent false reports: where's the evidence? (was: Re: Rape Education Story #60

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Waldo Weaver) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Kate Orman) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...

> 
> There are a number of other studies on the internet, but you have to
> do some persistent digging. Here's one from the Canadian police:
> 
> http://fact.on.ca/news/news0109/np010908.htm
> 
> Excerpts:
> 
> "Ontario-wide, about 5.7% of all sexual assault allegations are
> demonstrably false.
>  In the approximately four and a half years since the province made
> record-keeping of violent crime mandatory, 2,233 women (this includes
> a small number of men) out of 39,223 sex-related complainants have
> lied, said Ontario Provincial Police Detective-Sergeant Darryl Doak.
>  In the 33 months British Columbia has been keeping the same
> statistics using the same computer program -- police forces in all
> provinces use the Violent Criminal Linkage Analysis System, or VICLAS,
> but only Ontario must -- proven false allegations of sexual assault
> are running 6.7% of the total, or 986 of 14,586 cases.
>  That translates to about 41 Ontario women, and 29 in B.C., each and
> every month falsely cloaking themselves in the most sacred of robes,
> those belonging to the female victim of intimate sexual violence."
> 
> "False allegators are "a very significant problem."" -- Detective
> Wendy Leaver, Toronto Police, Sexual Assault Squad
> 
> So I guess it all boils down to how you define "commonplace". Do you
> consider a phenomenon which occurs on the average of twice a day
> (speaking only of the two provinces in Canada) to be "rare" or a
> "myth"? And for that matter, false accusations of rape are just one
> facet of a much larger  problem, namely false accusations in general
> (false accusations  of DV, child molestation, child abuse, sexual
> assault, sexual harassment). Factoring in all those false accusations,
> we see that false accusations by lying women are commonplace, and a
> significant  social problem. They should be openly acknowledged and
> addressed, not minimized and swept under the carpet.

What intrigues me about this is the implicit understanding that the
allegations that are "proven" false constitute 100% of false
allegations. I'm not trying to cause trouble by bringing this up, but
that is an extremely optimistic assumption.

I would imagine that a great deal of false rape allegations go
something like this. A woman develops some reason, for example, a
suspicion that she may be pregnant to the great disappointment of her
family, to file a false charge. The woman reports than her neighbor
raped her later than is ideal- a week later. Or for whatever other
reason, there is no physical evidence. Or she promptly alleges that an
unidentified person raped her and there is physical evidence- but
there is no way, of course, to be sure that that person forced himself
on her.

In the former case, the police tell her that in the absence of any
witnesses or physical evidence, her neighbor cannot be charged.

In the latter case, years go by and no one is identified as a suspect,
and no one is arrested. The accuser is rarely contacted by police, and
she maintains her story. No harm done, she may feel. She's way too
embarassed to back out.

I would wonder whether those women making FRA (the 6.7% in the
provinces above) are heavily enriched in those whose stories seem
likely to fall apart or to lead to a hotly contested court contest
that may make her look bad. In other words, those cases that cannot be
made with little or no followup and for which no one was arrested.

This is one of the reasons that I believe that we'll never know the
true incidence of FRAs- although it could be that the study above can
help us find the lower limit, for two Canadian provinces anyway.