Quote:
Originally posted by James
The numbers don't bare that out. As many as one quarter to one half of rape claims are false . . and thats being on the conservative side.
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Please.
You have one study guessing that that's the case -- a study that never defines the definition of "rape" but seems, from what is written, to have a narrower view of it than is written in the law. (This study also seemed to be promoting an agenda to me, but maybe I'm just reading too much into it. However, when you quote Katie Roiphe multiple times, it's obviously not trying to be an objective work.) There are many others that have concluded a much smaller number -- as Nikki said above, 2-8% are the most-quoted figures -- ranging up to a small study that showed 41% as false. How do we know which is most valid?
Basically what it comes down to is that the statistics are almost always used to serve an agenda. Sexual assault counselors will almost always quote the 2 percent figure. Anti-feminist groups and "men's rights" groups will give you the 41 percent. In some cases, these studies were engineered to pander to a specific end of the spectrum -- in some studies, rape is defined as any coerced sex; in others, it is only obviously forced sex when the woman is saying "NO" the entire time. Some studies take alcohol or drugs into account, others don't.
AND THEN (sigh, this is going to get long) there is the fact that, with rape, you have a crime that is not easily compared to most other crimes because the victim is made to feel much more guilty than she otherwise would -- which I'm sure can throw off statistics like changing stories and issues with the polygraph test. (I can't say that with scientific accuracy, so point me to a study that proves/disproves this theory if you know of one -- but it feels like common sense to me.) Are you more likely to change details of your story if you know you're going to get blamed by some people for not wearing the right clothes/drinking alcohol/being alone with the guy? Of course you are. This is a much different experience than reporting a robbery, for example. In those cases nobody is going to blame you for wearing a short skirt/drinking three beers/etc.
Furthermore, ignoring the vast amount of unreported rapes means the numbers are a lot harder to judge. Or how about the rapes that ARE reported but without an accusation against any one particular person? Many studies would say that these vastly outnumber the cases where women hurl an accusation at somebody. So even if your figure is correct and 25% of rapes where a woman accuses someone are false accusations, this still probably leaves the number of total rapes that are lied about a much smaller number. If the #1 reason for lying about rape is revenge/spite, then we have to assume that rape allegations where no one person is accused, and those that are unreported, are more likely to be true than the figure where an accusation is made.
Lastly, this is what the court system is for. If a woman can't prove that a man raped her, he's not going to get convicted (unless something is very wrong with the system, which is entirely plausible but an entirely new debate). So if he didn't rape her, he shouldn't have much to worry about, right?
Here is an article that I think takes the middle ground and sums things up pretty nicely:
http://www.statenews.com/op_article.phtml?pk=25893
As I've said many times on this board, you can make statistics say anything you want -- and the statistics in regards to rape, in particular, have always been highly susceptible to skewing and appropriation for propaganda on both ends -- so I tend to take them with a grain of salt. While I don't know for certain the exact percentage of women who lie about rape, I do know for certain that at least five of my female friends have been to hell and back because of what they suffered through (none of them reported it, by the way). The isht they went through is more real to me than any statistic.
I think that many, many men fail to grasp the ubiquitousness of rape simply because they aren't ever told by their female friends who have been raped. I know at least five of my friends (and probably more who haven't told me about it) have been raped -- but none of them have ever felt comfortable mentioning this to their guy friends. So the guys go on believing that few if any of their female friends have ever been raped, and think that the statistics about how so many girls get raped must be overblown and that lots of girls probably lie about it. Most women growing up today know enough of their friends who have been raped that they know better.
At any rate, the misogyny in this thread -- some if it perpetuated by women -- is making me pretty ill.
And carnation, regardless of whether or not the incident in the letter actually happened as reported -- it does happen in fraternity houses (and, of course, non-Greek houses and dorms) across the country. I think those of you who think this was written by somebody with an anti-Greek agenda are both paranoid and delusional. The fact of the matter is that fraternity men are not always angels, some of them are rapists, and that, in fact, some reports have shown that they are more likely to be rapists than the general male college population. Is it fair to paint all fraternity men as rapists? No. But is it fair to paint all fraternity men as Boy Scouts? Again, no.