“It seems to be extremely rare for anyone to be wrongfully convicted as a result of a false accusation of rape,” she says. To put that data into perspective, Newman consulted data on wrongful murder convictions. In his column, Stephens shared a misrepresented statistic, stating that false rape allegations are “ at least five times as common as false accusations of other types of crime.” However, even the abstract from the very study he links to presents a more complicated figure - the authors write that a 5 percent false-report figure (which, again, is a misleading figure to begin with) is “at least five times higher than for most other offence types.” Most, but not all, as Stephens implies. How do false rape report rates compare to false reports of other crimes? “There are plenty of police officers who are getting trained on this, and then there’s a whole history of police perpetrating sexual violence, including while on the job.”
“Just because the police say something is an unfounded rape, because they don’t think it happened, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” says Belknap. Belknap described one story she heard from a rape crisis counselor, who’d spoken with a survivor whose assault was deemed “false” because she’d allowed her eventual rapist to remove her ski boots for her after skiing. Police might also deem an accusation “false” if there are details they find incriminating on the part of the accuser. “If you don’t want to go through a police investigation, for any reason - and there are many many reasons why you might not want to, it’s really traumatizing - then the easiest and quickest way to get out of it is to recant and say you were lying,” says Newman. Though “false accusation” is often used synonymously with “made-up accusation,” there are many factors that might result in an allegation being deemed “false.” One is that the woman who initially made the accusation chooses to recant it - which doesn’t necessarily mean that she was lying. Why might a rape allegation be deemed false? But her research suggests that, if anything, we underestimate the number of rapes that go unreported. Of course, these figures are estimates, and Belknap doesn’t doubt they’re imperfect - we can’t count what isn’t being counted. This puts the actual false allegation figure closer to 0.5 percent. 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. 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. Typically, this figure comes from studies done on college students, an estimated 95 percent of whom do not report their assaults to police.
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. How common are false allegations of rape or sexual assault?
Pathological fear of rape professional#
This is nothing to sneer at.”īut 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. It inflicts psychic, familial, reputational and professional harms that can last a lifetime. In an editorial for the New York Times, opinion columnist Bret Stephens, after misinterpreting a statistic regarding the prevalence of false rape allegations, wrote: “Falsely accusing a person of sexual assault is nearly as despicable as sexual assault itself. During Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony last week, several senators apologized for the damage supposedly inflicted by these claims (which, by affirming their belief in Kavanaugh’s denials, they implied were false) on Kavanaugh’s life and reputation. Much mention has been made recently (mostly by men) of false rape accusations, and how frequently they occur. Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch listen to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh during Senate hearings.
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