4 ms·

Everyone has a friend of a friend who was falsely accused of sexual assault. Everyone has actual real friends who are women who've been victims of actual real

by yoz 16y ago

Everyone has a friend of a friend who was falsely accused of sexual assault. Everyone has actual real friends who are women who've been victims of actual real sexual assault. Usually at least 10% of them. (That'll be 10% who've actually dared speak up about it, and another, probably larger percentage who don't, because they've seen what's happened to their friends who've spoken up. "What, no witnesses? How do we know you're telling the truth? Oh, you were drinking that night, were you? I guess you must have been leading him on...") Let's get nerdy about this, shall we? It's classic outlier bias, like people who're afraid of the risks of flying, and prefer to drive everywhere. In the time it takes you to read the article about the Duke lacrosse case, another woman will have been sexually assaulted. (One every two minutes in the USA. 1 in 6 women, 1 in 33 men.) But the Duke case is the one you'll remember, because it's far rarer than real sexual assault. Maybe she's making it up, and the guy really is innocent. I wouldn't bet on it, though.

lrm242 16y ago
The lesson from the Duke case is not that false accusations are more or less rare than what we feel in our guts. It's simply that these sorts of cases elicit enormous emotional responses; however, we owe it to ourselves and our civility to recognize that fact and force ourselves to make judgments based on facts and reasoning and not those emotions.
sp4rki 16y ago
I'm sure that you're correct in this matter and it is common knowledge that it is more likely that a woman is telling the truth in such cases vs a man being set up. That being said (and take this with a grain of salt because I'm not stating it's a fact), in my experience I've seen more cases of male friends being set up. Not only with assault allegations, but pregnancy, rape, and other convoluted evil plans. I've even been accused of such things twice in my life, once when I was a virgin, and a second time when I had a stable long term relationship (my partner and my neighbor where with me at the time so I had both as alibi).

by yoz 16y ago

lrm242 16y ago

The lesson from the Duke case is not that false accusations are more or less rare than what we feel in our guts. It's simply that these sorts of cases elicit enormous emotional responses; however, we owe it to ourselves and our civility to recognize that fact and force ourselves to make judgments based on facts and reasoning and not those emotions.

sp4rki 16y ago

I'm sure that you're correct in this matter and it is common knowledge that it is more likely that a woman is telling the truth in such cases vs a man being set up. That being said (and take this with a grain of salt because I'm not stating it's a fact), in my experience I've seen more cases of male friends being set up. Not only with assault allegations, but pregnancy, rape, and other convoluted evil plans. I've even been accused of such things twice in my life, once when I was a virgin, and a second time when I had a stable long term relationship (my partner and my neighbor where with me at the time so I had both as alibi).