4 ms·

> Same article notes that between 2-8% of rape complaints are false. Worries about false rape claims are wildly overblown. That is a HUGE percent of false accu

> Same article notes that between 2-8% of rape complaints are false. Worries about false rape claims are wildly overblown. That is a HUGE percent of false accusations! On the high end that's 1 in 10! In the middle, it's 1 in 20. That's a LOT.

nawgz 6y ago
Yet you express no concern at the amount of unprosecuted cases...
- suifbwish 6y ago
  The cases would be prosecuted if there was evidence to support them. You can’t just punish people without proof. Contrary to popular belief the purpose of the legal system is not to make wronged people feel better.
  - nawgz 6y ago
    So you think a crime as endemic as rape which is punished at vanishingly low rates indicates innocence of the perps instead of a fundamentally flawed justice system, starting at the point of evidence collection? Even after seeing those very evidence collectors, the police, flaunt their duties and the law repeatedly? Interesting.
    - suifbwish 6y ago
      The idea of someone being able to accuse someone else of a crime without evidence should terrify anyone who believes in freedom and democracy. Rape, murder, or any other crime.
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        What does that have to do with this article? Are you saying that the OP has requested this person be criminally convicted?
        suifbwish 6y ago
        Not from what I have read. It seems like they chose the internet mob as their bringer of justice.
      - nawgz 6y ago
        Where on earth has that come into play? That is a strange and telling deflection.
    - stickfigure 6y ago
      I am curious. What percentage of all rape convictions would you tolerate being wrong (that is, the person behind bars is innocent) in order to ensure sufficient coverage of convicting the guilty?
      - suifbwish 6y ago
        What makes you think there is or should be a maximum acceptable tolerance for that sort of thing? The purpose of our legal process is FIRST to protect the innocent THEN to punish the guilty. The US legal system is not a hot dog factory where there is an acceptable concentration of rat feces levels in the food. If there is not evidence of a crime, no crime shall be punished. There are other countries where that sort of thing is tolerated.
        rodgerd 6y ago
        The standard is "reasonable doubt", not "absolute certainty".
      - nawgz 6y ago
        This is a false dichotomy to propose. My claim is that the police - notorious domestic abusers, rights violators - are failing to collect evidence from women coming forward with rape allegations. Given the time-sensitive and trauma-riddled nature of such things, it is not a simple topic, so even without attributing malice, it is clear police are undertrained (here and elsewhere). I wrote a bunch more and gathered some links, but Hacker News is telling me to slow down. 6 comments on this thread since 2pm, wow such spam
thu2111 6y ago
It is huge but it's actually an under-estimate. The 2% figure has no actual basis, if you try and trace it back to some source you'll always end up at a dead end. A more commonly cited figure is 10%, which comes from the clearance rate of DNA testing kits. i.e. someone accuses a man of rape, there is DNA and it exonerates him. So this is an absolute lower bound because a lot of rape accusations are a bit like this article: "we had sex a bunch of times consensually, and then also when it wasn't". You can't disprove that with DNA evidence but it can still be a false accusation. Back in the 90s when this stuff was less politicised there was a somewhat rigorous study that put the true figure at around 50% [1]. It gave pie charts of the reasons for the false accusations and other interesting bits of data. This figure causes people to freak out these days due to the "believe the victim" mentality you can see above, where there is a deliberate conflation between accusations of rape and actual rapes, so it gets attacked a lot, but modern scholarship hardly investigates the question of false reporting rates for rape unless the authors already decided their conclusion before doing the research (you can sometimes see admissions of this in the study's discussion sections). The 50% figure has some other support: when interviewed anonymously police workers, both male and female, tend to pick this figure when asked to estimate the false reporting rate. The low prosecution success rate is usually painted these days as an obvious flaw of the justice system, but that's identity politics. When you drill into it in detail and ask OK, where do these prosecutions go, and why are they dropped, or why do they fail to win in court, the answer is: because a LOT of rape allegations are not only false but clearly false. For example, because the complainant goes to the police and admits they made it up, or because they are clearly high on drugs when making the accusation and rescind it when sober. Even if you engage in some mental gymnastics to assume rescinding an accusation is never valid, it doesn't matter. It's really hard to win in court when the "victim" themselves are claiming they're not really a victim at all. [1] https://ia800209.us.archive.org/4/items/FalseRapeAllegations/false-rape-allegations-archive.pdf https://ia800209.us.archive.org/4/items/FalseRapeAllegations...

nawgz 6y ago

Yet you express no concern at the amount of unprosecuted cases...

suifbwish 6y ago
The cases would be prosecuted if there was evidence to support them. You can’t just punish people without proof. Contrary to popular belief the purpose of the legal system is not to make wronged people feel better.
- nawgz 6y ago
  So you think a crime as endemic as rape which is punished at vanishingly low rates indicates innocence of the perps instead of a fundamentally flawed justice system, starting at the point of evidence collection? Even after seeing those very evidence collectors, the police, flaunt their duties and the law repeatedly? Interesting.
  - suifbwish 6y ago
    The idea of someone being able to accuse someone else of a crime without evidence should terrify anyone who believes in freedom and democracy. Rape, murder, or any other crime.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      What does that have to do with this article? Are you saying that the OP has requested this person be criminally convicted?
      - suifbwish 6y ago
        Not from what I have read. It seems like they chose the internet mob as their bringer of justice.
    - nawgz 6y ago
      Where on earth has that come into play? That is a strange and telling deflection.
  - stickfigure 6y ago
    I am curious. What percentage of all rape convictions would you tolerate being wrong (that is, the person behind bars is innocent) in order to ensure sufficient coverage of convicting the guilty?
    - suifbwish 6y ago
      What makes you think there is or should be a maximum acceptable tolerance for that sort of thing? The purpose of our legal process is FIRST to protect the innocent THEN to punish the guilty. The US legal system is not a hot dog factory where there is an acceptable concentration of rat feces levels in the food. If there is not evidence of a crime, no crime shall be punished. There are other countries where that sort of thing is tolerated.
      - rodgerd 6y ago
        The standard is "reasonable doubt", not "absolute certainty".
    - nawgz 6y ago
      This is a false dichotomy to propose. My claim is that the police - notorious domestic abusers, rights violators - are failing to collect evidence from women coming forward with rape allegations. Given the time-sensitive and trauma-riddled nature of such things, it is not a simple topic, so even without attributing malice, it is clear police are undertrained (here and elsewhere). I wrote a bunch more and gathered some links, but Hacker News is telling me to slow down. 6 comments on this thread since 2pm, wow such spam

thu2111 6y ago

It is huge but it's actually an under-estimate. The 2% figure has no actual basis, if you try and trace it back to some source you'll always end up at a dead end. A more commonly cited figure is 10%, which comes from the clearance rate of DNA testing kits. i.e. someone accuses a man of rape, there is DNA and it exonerates him. So this is an absolute lower bound because a lot of rape accusations are a bit like this article: "we had sex a bunch of times consensually, and then also when it wasn't". You can't disprove that with DNA evidence but it can still be a false accusation. Back in the 90s when this stuff was less politicised there was a somewhat rigorous study that put the true figure at around 50% [1]. It gave pie charts of the reasons for the false accusations and other interesting bits of data. This figure causes people to freak out these days due to the "believe the victim" mentality you can see above, where there is a deliberate conflation between accusations of rape and actual rapes, so it gets attacked a lot, but modern scholarship hardly investigates the question of false reporting rates for rape unless the authors already decided their conclusion before doing the research (you can sometimes see admissions of this in the study's discussion sections). The 50% figure has some other support: when interviewed anonymously police workers, both male and female, tend to pick this figure when asked to estimate the false reporting rate. The low prosecution success rate is usually painted these days as an obvious flaw of the justice system, but that's identity politics. When you drill into it in detail and ask OK, where do these prosecutions go, and why are they dropped, or why do they fail to win in court, the answer is: because a LOT of rape allegations are not only false but clearly false. For example, because the complainant goes to the police and admits they made it up, or because they are clearly high on drugs when making the accusation and rescind it when sober. Even if you engage in some mental gymnastics to assume rescinding an accusation is never valid, it doesn't matter. It's really hard to win in court when the "victim" themselves are claiming they're not really a victim at all. [1] https://ia800209.us.archive.org/4/items/FalseRapeAllegations/false-rape-allegations-archive.pdf https://ia800209.us.archive.org/4/items/FalseRapeAllegations...