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It might not be that every man is falsely accused of rape, but that the false positive rate might be high. Which would mean that the existence of an accusation

It might not be that every man is falsely accused of rape, but that the false positive rate might be high. Which would mean that the existence of an accusation provides little predictive power regarding the guilt of the accused. If 90% of rape allegations resulted in convictions then the existence of an accusation would usually be meaningful. If only 10% of accusations result in convictions, the existence of an accusation would not be very meaningful statistically for the guilt or innocence of any one alleged perpetrator. What makes the situation even more difficult is that there's often little hard evidence of a crime. There can be evidence of sexual contact, but that doesn't ipso facto make the accusation true, because statistically sexual contact in overwhelmingly consensual. When police find a body that's been shot or stabbed that's generally hard evidence that a crime has taken place. There's often no question as to the existence of the crime (except when suicide is a possibility) and it's their job to figure out who did it and bring them to justice. But many rape cases start with the identity of the perpetrator known, and the objective is to figure out who is telling the truth in a situation with no hard evidence to back up either party. It's very different from a murder, but with just as much import. And since prosecutors don't like to lose cases (their job is to win them, and they are judged on their conviction rate) they often don't prosecute unless they have a strong case. So what happens is that it's very difficult to tell if most accusations are false, or merely not provable-enough to win in court. And because there are conflicting motivations by a number of parties in the legal process it's very difficult to suss out the actual truth and then measure the error from the actual truth that the legal system achieves, and then use that to reform the process. Because of all this, it's entirely possible that people who are accused are "often" the victims of trumped up charges while at the same time, only a very few people are accused.

DanBC 11y ago
Your answer is weirdly confused. You describe the problems of obtaining a conviction - proving lack of consent beyond a reasonable doubt such that jurors will return a guilty verdict. But you start with > If 90% of rape allegations resulted in convictions then the existence of an accusation would usually be meaningful. If only 10% of accusations result in convictions, the existence of an accusation would not be very meaningful statistically for the guilt or innocence of any one alleged perpetrator. Which seems to miss the obvious point that "not guilty" sometimes means "not guilty - didn't do it" and sometimes means "not guilty - not proven beyond reasonable doubt". (Obviously all not guilty verdicts should be interpreted as "Not guilty - didn't do it". It's important to protect that legal principle.)
- msandford 11y ago
  Yeah, you're right! So I guess there are maybe three (or four) data sets? 1. the actual truth (rape or not rape) 2. what a prosecutor decides to prosecute (reasonably provable case versus not provable case) 3. what is claimed by the accuser (this is always rape, else there is no accusation) 4. what is not claimed by a could-be accuser (a person who gets raped but doesn't report it) In order to get a conviction you need someone from set 3 and set 2. That completely neglects set 4 and should have some correlation with set 1, but this correlation probably isn't going to be amazing because there are both false positives (people who claim to have been raped, but were not) and false negatives (rapes which did happen, but that go unreported or unprosecuted). What really sucks about everything surrounding this particular category of crime is that unlike many other crimes, there's a lot of possibility (not necessarily probability though!) for false accusations. I don't honestly know what the underlying probabilities are, and in fact they might well be unknowable. As an engineer the idea that you can't even measure the error to figure out how well the system is performing at its job is deeply troubling. I certainly HOPE that the error rate is low and that innocents are being jailed and criminals aren't walking freely. But keeping up with the news certainly causes me to have some doubt that the error rate is truly low. I'm not saying that there's a pandemic of false accusations or a pandemic of unprosecuted criminals. But it's hard to hear about a few high profile accusations gone wrong (Duke, mattress girl, etc) and not wonder. Anyhow thanks for pointing out the contradiction in my post!

DanBC 11y ago

Your answer is weirdly confused. You describe the problems of obtaining a conviction - proving lack of consent beyond a reasonable doubt such that jurors will return a guilty verdict. But you start with > If 90% of rape allegations resulted in convictions then the existence of an accusation would usually be meaningful. If only 10% of accusations result in convictions, the existence of an accusation would not be very meaningful statistically for the guilt or innocence of any one alleged perpetrator. Which seems to miss the obvious point that "not guilty" sometimes means "not guilty - didn't do it" and sometimes means "not guilty - not proven beyond reasonable doubt". (Obviously all not guilty verdicts should be interpreted as "Not guilty - didn't do it". It's important to protect that legal principle.)

msandford 11y ago
Yeah, you're right! So I guess there are maybe three (or four) data sets? 1. the actual truth (rape or not rape) 2. what a prosecutor decides to prosecute (reasonably provable case versus not provable case) 3. what is claimed by the accuser (this is always rape, else there is no accusation) 4. what is not claimed by a could-be accuser (a person who gets raped but doesn't report it) In order to get a conviction you need someone from set 3 and set 2. That completely neglects set 4 and should have some correlation with set 1, but this correlation probably isn't going to be amazing because there are both false positives (people who claim to have been raped, but were not) and false negatives (rapes which did happen, but that go unreported or unprosecuted). What really sucks about everything surrounding this particular category of crime is that unlike many other crimes, there's a lot of possibility (not necessarily probability though!) for false accusations. I don't honestly know what the underlying probabilities are, and in fact they might well be unknowable. As an engineer the idea that you can't even measure the error to figure out how well the system is performing at its job is deeply troubling. I certainly HOPE that the error rate is low and that innocents are being jailed and criminals aren't walking freely. But keeping up with the news certainly causes me to have some doubt that the error rate is truly low. I'm not saying that there's a pandemic of false accusations or a pandemic of unprosecuted criminals. But it's hard to hear about a few high profile accusations gone wrong (Duke, mattress girl, etc) and not wonder. Anyhow thanks for pointing out the contradiction in my post!