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

Daran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message:
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]: 

> On 22 Nov 2003 15:04:06 -0800 Kate Orman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in
> message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> 
>> Hi Daran - thanks for your posting! Some quick responses:
>> 
>> Daran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
>> news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> 
>>> It appears her supporters make the same misreading them.  I consider
>>> the figure to be a myth, until proven otherwise, and I find it very
>>> disappointing that so many of pages turned up by a search on 'rape
>>> myths' are perpetuating what they purport to debunk.
>> 
>> No argument there. What's at stake is too important for anti-rape 
>> activists to give our enemies ammunition.
> 
> I'm not sure what to make of that.  My enemies are the enemies of
> truth and reason.  Criticising error does not give my enemies
> ammunition.  Failure to do so does.
> 
> [...]
> 
>> I'm extremely lucky - I have access to a couple of university
>> libraries here in Sydney. So I have a photocopy of:
>> 
>> Kanin, Eugene J. False Rape Allegations. Archives of Sexual Behavior 
>> 23(1), 1994, pp 81-92.
> 
> I would be grateful if you could send me a scan.  Give me a heads up
> before you do.  I have filters in place which block large attachments.
> 
> [...]
> 
>>> Are you familiar with the UK's Home Office Research Study 196 (A
>>> question of evidence)?  It's about rape investigation in general,
>>> and you'll have to do a fair bit of data-mining to come up with any
>>> figures at all on FRAs.  Find it here:
>>> <http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs/hors196.pdf> 
>> 
>> *tips hat*
> 
> The study refers to Home Office Circular 69/1986 (Violence against
> women. Treatment of Victims of Rape and Domestic Violence'.  As ever,
> male victims of the same are ignored), which gives guidance to the
> police, among other things, on the recommended criteria for no-criming
> a rape complaint.  I'm in the UK, but my local library is uninterested
> in help me obtain this, nor have the police been willing to assist me
> in my enquiries.  I admit that I'm generally an armchair researcher,
> and that was as much shoeleather as I was willing to wear down at the
> time.  However, if you tell me you've tried to get it, and drawn a
> blank, then I might be persuaded to have another go. 
> 
> [...]
> 
>>> I'd also like to know more about the genuine FBI figures of 8%
>>> unfounded rape complaints vs. 2% for other crimes.  These figures
>>> sit in the UCR for years on end, unchanging, with no supporting
>>> data, then just disappear.
> 
> <http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm> as I'm sure you don't need to be
> told. 
> 
>> I'll see what I can find.
> 
> I would indeed be grateful.  The figures are deeply buried.  You'll
> find them in section 2 of the UCR, on page 24 (1995 and 96) and 26
> (97). (Page numbers are the ones at the bottom of the page, not the
> ones my PDF viewer thinks its on).  The corresponding documents for
> 98-00 appears to be only a handful of pages long.  (Is the website
> linking to the wrong documents?)  For 01 and 02 the section has been
> restructured, and I can't find this information.  Perhaps it is in
> some other section. 
> 
> OK, so three consecutive years is hardly 'years on end'.  I've heard
> that it's been in the report for much longer, and indeed 30 second's
> googling turned up this reference to 1992:
> <http://www.menweb.org/throop/falsereport/clipping/wapost-unfound.html>
> 
> Without access to earlier editions of the UCR itself, speculating on
> when the figure first appeared is probably not worth more than 30
> seconds googling.  The point is, it appears to have been there for a
> while, it doesn't appear to have changed, and it doesn't appear to be
> there any more. The *wording* in the 95-97 reports implies that these
> figures are up to date, and relevant to the year in question, however
> I suspect it's just been cut&pasted from report to successive report. 
> If that's the case, then the writers of the report have been naughty.
> 
> I'd be surprised if the FBI were peddling an outright myth, but I'd
> still like to know where it came from, and I have *serious* doubts
> about whether the figure is accurate or representative.

i don't know if this has already been cited here, or whether it helps much, 
but i came across it so, here you go.

http://archives.cjr.org/year/97/6/rape.asp

[on the 2% figure]

#  Sometimes the figure is attributed to a particular source ? but
#  that's still no guarantee the numbers can't be challenged. Marcia L.
#  Roth, the author of the 1996 op-ed article in the Louisville
#  Courier-Journal, attributed the 2 percent rate to the 1993 book Rape,
#  the Misunderstood Crime, by Julie Allison and Lawrence Wrightsman.
#  But Allison and Wrightsman weren't so unequivocal. Noting that the
#  frequency of false rape reports is difficult to assess, they didn't
#  do their own study; instead they looked at a synthesis of research
#  findings from a 1979 book, Understanding the Rape Victim, by Sedelle
#  Katz and Mary Ann Mazur. Katz and Mazur, it turns out, had reviewed
#  studies dating back to 1956 that showed the frequency of unfounded
#  and false rape reports ranging from a low of 1 percent to a high of
#  25 percent. Allison and Wrightsman simply chose the study that showed
#  2 percent. 

[on the FBI 8% figure]

# But the FBI has been saying since 1991 that the annual rate for the
# false reporting of forcible sexual assault across the country has been
# a consistent 8 percent (through 1995, the most recent year available).
# That's four times higher than the average of the false-reporting rates
# of the other crimes tracked by the FBI in its Uniform Crime Report.
# The agency's guidelines define a report as false when an investigation
# determines that no offense occurred. A complainant's failure or
# refusal to cooperate in the investigation does not, by itself, lead to
# a finding of false report. 
 
[and]

# The FBI's numbers have also been criticized on several grounds,
# including the bureau's assumption that all 16,765 police agencies
# across the country have carefully and uniformly followed its
# guidelines for judging a rape "unfounded." That's simply not likely. 

Further to this:

(Quote) An 'unfounded' report of an offense, complaint or incident is one 
in which, upon investigation by the responding officer, proves to be 
totally groundless in that no offense, complaint or incident was committed 
or attempted.(/Quote)

But, for example

http://inquirer.philly.com/packages/crime/html/sch101799.asp

(Article from 1999)

# The [Philadelphia] Police Department's sex-crimes unit buried their
# cases, rejecting a remarkably high proportion of reported rapes as
# "unfounded" and deliberately miscoding others to keep the department's
# crime numbers artificially low. 

[...]

# With pressure from the top to show results, too few investigators and
# a huge caseload, the unit became expert at getting rid of - or hiding
# - cases that could not be solved easily, an Inquirer investigation has
# found. 
# 
# Year after year, hundreds of cases were dumped in "investigation of
# person," an obscure administrative category meant for situations where
# no crime was committed. Cases put there do not show up in crime
# statistics.  

[...]

# In the early 1980s, police rejected as "unfounded" - or groundless -
# half the complaints they received, according to confidential FBI
# documents obtained recently by The Inquirer under the Freedom of
# Information Act. 
# 
# That rejection rate was five times the national average.
# 
# The proportion of cases deemed "unfounded" fell when the unit, under
# pressure from the FBI to stop rejecting so many complaints, began
# disposing of tough cases in "investigation of person." 
# 
# Two years ago, the FBI and departmental auditors questioned the use of
# the code. Sex-crimes investigators backed off "investigation of
# person" and again began "unfounding" large numbers of cases. 
# 
# In a single year, the unfounded rate doubled - to 18 percent for 1998.
# That was twice the national average and the highest rate among the 10
# largest cities in America.  

Unsurprisingly, it seems that we cannot trust the police to do their job.  
So the 'unfounded' stats are probably just as unreliable as any others on 
the issue.

-- 
Neil