Okay. Over on
this thread, in reference to a previous encounter,
I wrote:I'm also not in the mood to hear about how men are victimized by the false rape claims of women, even in passing. As usual.
This led to a civil exchange of views between us on the subject, the opening sallies in which are quoted in full on both sides in this here post by me that I cut-and-pasted right after the line break:
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Stephen Morgan wrote:c2w wrote:I'm also not in the mood to hear about how men are victimized by the false rape claims of women, even in passing.
You never are,
I'd just like pause for a moment to note that your omission of the two words that followed the above-quoted comment ("As usual.") simply in order to level that accusation against me is a low and dishonest rhetorical device. Moving right along.
Stephen Morgan wrote:and I'm never in the mood to hear that you're still ignoring the conclusive evidence that this is a common thing.
There is no such conclusive evidence. There are slap-dash analyses of cherry-picked, incomplete, and off-point data that are designed to mislead those whose hot-buttons they push into a state from which they'll safely spend their time throwing blind punches at something they've misidentified as an arch-enemy and don't understand well enough to injure. It's a massive act against stated self-interest on your part that you continue to subscribe to it.
Stephen Morgan wrote:I was, in this case, merely hoping we could agree that when it happens it's bad. And, ideally, not because it makes it harder for real victims to come forward, but for the simple reason that a man may be wrongfully imprisoned for a long time.
When false rape claims happen, I guess you can't exclude the possibility that the damage done and trauma sustained are sometimes merely bad. I mean, assuming that there's no arrest and/or indictment; no trial or conviction; little serious attention to the claim; and a complaining witness of no personal importance to the accused, it might sometimes be.
But frankly, it strikes me as much more likely that when false rape claims happen they're either maliciously false, in which case they probably inflict the hell they were intended to inflict at least to some degree, or, alternatively, that they're not actually false rape claims but rather recanted rape claims. There's a sufficient accumulation of inconclusive data to put it pretty far beyond the realm of doubt that both of those scenarios occur in large enough numbers to account for a substantial percentage of all male-on-female rape claims. But you can't infer....Fuck it. I'm just gonna quote
Eugene Volokh in full, since he explains it more clearly than I'll ever be able to:
I've been doing some reading on the debate about the incidence of false rape reports. I've looked at a lot of studies on this, and hope to blog some more about it later (short summary: estimates range from under 2% to 40+%, though I have no opinion about which is right). But in the meantime, I thought I'd mention one observation that may be helpful for thinking about other debates as well.
Many people who believe that false rape reports are a tiny fraction of all rape reports argue that very few women would make such false reports. The common line is that women don't lie about rape, which must really mean that very few women lie about rape.
But even if this is true -- and I strongly suspect that it is -- this is entirely consistent with the possibility that a substantial fraction of rape reports are false. Let's say, for instance, that only 2% of all women age 16-19 could ever lie about rape; and that any particular year, only 2% of that tiny fraction actually do falsely report a rape to the police. So 98% of all women (including relatively young and not very mature women) would never lie about rape, and even of those who might under the right circumstances, most never will. (I use the 16-to-19 age group because the risk of rape is highest there; the same analysis could apply, though, to other age groups.)
There are, however, about 8 million women in the 16-to-19 age group in
the U.S., and 2% x 2% x 8 million = 3200 false rape reports per year. The [1]National Crime Victimization Survey (2002 data, see table 3) reports that 2.7 out of 1000 people age 16 to 19, which means 5.4 out of 1000 women age 16 to 19, are raped each year. This is an estimate based on a survey, not on police reports, and it may well be low (the actual rate may be higher); but in any event, we know that the rate of rapes reported to the police is roughly half that estimated to the NCVS (compare the [2]Uniform Crime Reports data, and remember that the UCR data aggregates rapes and attempted rapes, while the NCVS breaks them out). This means that roughly 2.7 out of 1000 women age 16 to 19 report an actual rape each year, for a total of 2.7/1000 x 8 million = 21,600 true rape reports per year.
Under this model, then, 13% of all rape reports to the police would be false (in the 16-to-19 age group), even though only 2% of all women in
that age group would ever make a false rape report, and only 2% of those actually make a false rape report each year. Ninety-eight percent of all women may be completely truthful on this subject, and yet we may still have a substantial false rape report rate.
This, of course, is just a model, based on numbers picked out of thin
air. Maybe, for instance, the fraction of women who'd ever make a
false rape report is much lower than 2%, or maybe it's higher. We can't know for sure.
But the model does illustrate that it's perfectly possible to believe
that (1) only a tiny fraction of women would ever lie about being
raped, (2) a huge fraction of rapes are unreported (quite possibly
even more than 50%, so that rape may be a highly underreported crime
by many women, as well as overreported by a few), and yet (3) a
substantial fraction of rape reports to the police are false.
Some people who worry about false rape reports may in fact believe
that women are psychologically wired to lie about such things; I'm
certainly not one, but historically that has been the view of some, to
which others have understandably reacted with hostility. That may be
why some people take the opposite view: Instead of "women often lie,
so the false rape report is very high," they say "women very rarely
lie, so the false rape report is very low." But that doesn't follow.
False rape reports, however rare they may be as a fraction of all
women might still be substantial as a fraction of all rape reports.
Cites and footnotes at link. And less inconsistent ragging, too. Sorry. I couldn't fix it, for some reason.
Also, in summary: If you want to give your itchy bias a good scratch, you can play games with the numbers that either justify the belief that lying bitches routinely make false claims of rape or that saintly and much-put-upon women never do. But that wouldn't amount to conclusive evidence of anything other than the nature of your bias. Which isn't all that interesting, per se, and which there are far easier ways of determining. Plus, if you're Eugene Volokh, you can have riotous fun thumbing your nose at both biased groups. However, that's purely by the way.
Or you could just focus on the substantial body of evidence that proves over and over again that wrongful conviction rates for all crimes, especially violent crimes, are astronomically high. Which has been proven over and over again to be attributable to the shoddy and/or corrupt work that's just a routine part of the noble civic service rendered to the public by police, prosecutors, and their snitches. There's very good data available on cases of wrongful convictions that eventually ended in exoneration between 1989 and 2003, 36 percent of which were for rape. And virtually the rest of which were for murder, which obviously says more about what crimes lead to exoneration and why than it does about wrongful conviction. And even more obviously is a very, very conservative estimate wrt to the number of wrongful convictions in general as well as for rape and murder specifically, as its authors acknowledge.
FWIW, the leading cause of wrongful conviction overall has long been recognized as misidentification by eyewitnesses, which is known by police and prosecutors to be much too unreliable to hang your hat on, but which they continue to use as their primary method of culprit identification. They also continue to use line-up methods that are known to maximize the chances of misidentification. Incidentally, wrongful conviction for rape occurs in connection with undisputed instances of rape in the vast majority of cases. Unsurprisingly, given that rapes for which there's little or no physical evidence of violent assault are far less likely even to get to the trial stage. And a very large percentage of those involve one or more instance of witness misidentification. Wittingly false accusations of rape aren't a major factor, absent shoddy law enforcement, However, there are a small but nonetheless significant and way too high number of them. I mean, all else aside, one would be way too high a number when the outcome is wrongful conviction. That should go without saying.
Wittingly false accusations of murder, on the other hand, are a huge problem. I believe that they're either the leading cause of wrongful murder convictions or very close to it. I have no clue as to what wicked scheme feminist employed to bring that one about, personally. But I'm relying on you, Stephen.
Here. Have
a link to the entire horrifying thing.
Several of The Innocence Project sites have good resources for those concerned about the plight of the falsely accused/wrongfully convicted, too. Which is frankly, just a fancy way of saying: Probably half of the prison population of the United States, but who knows?
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Back again in one moment with the pertinent part of your reply.
