False Rape Accusations Far Less Common Than Believed

Almost No One Is Falsely Accused of Rape

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But how common are false rape allegations, really? What constitutes “false?” And what evidence is there of the “psychic, familial, reputational and professional harm” suffered by those people on the other end of those accusations? The Cut spoke to Joanne Belknap, a sociologist, criminologist, and professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, and to Sandra Newman, a novelist with extensive research expertise in false rape allegations. How common are false allegations of rape or sexual assault? One commonly cited figure holds that 5 percent of rape allegations are found to be false, but that figure paints a very incomplete picture, says Belknap. Typically, this figure comes from studies done on college students, an estimated 95 percent of whom do not report their assaults to police. Overall, an estimated 8 to 10 percent of women are thought to report their rapes to the police, which means that — at the very highest — we can infer that 90 percent of rapes go unreported, says Belknap. Obviously, only those rapes that are reported in the first place can be considered falsely reported, so that 5 percent figure only applies to 10 percent (at most) of rapes that occur. This puts the actual false allegation figure closer to 0.5 percent. Of course, these figures are estimates, and Belknap doesn’t doubt they’re imperfect — we can’t count what isn’t being counted. But her research suggests that, if anything, we underestimate the number of rapes that go unreported.

Very informative article if you follow all the links. One thing that struck me as really important to keep in mind is this particular section:

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To put that data into perspective, Newman consulted data on wrongful murder convictions. “It seems to be extremely rare for anyone to be wrongfully convicted as a result of a false accusation of rape,” she says. “I was only able to find 52 cases in 25 years where a conviction was later overturned after a wrongful conviction based on false rape allegations. In the same period, there were 790 cases where people were found to be wrongfully convicted of murder.” For what it’s worth, 790 divided by 52 is 15.2, meaning that by Newman’s data, you were 15 times likelier in that 25-year period to be wrongfully convicted of murder than of rape. And, let’s keep in mind, rape allegations resulting in convictions are already vanishingly rare: Newman cites a study that found that, of 216 assault complaints classified as false, only six led to arrest, and only two led to actual charges. (And even then, they were eventually deemed false.)

Emphasis added. Nowhere near even the 5-8% figure that most people like to throw around, let alone the 20% figure that conservatives like to pull out of their asses.

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2IMWepQ