Turn that argument around to see what mischiefmanager is asking of men.

Hell, the majority of rapes are committed by womens’ husbands, partners, and members of the women’s own family, particularly if the victim is a child. So staying at home isn’t even a safe option, because rapists attack women there as well.

You should take your pro-rapist victim-blaming to some other site.

…and we can keep educating women that it’s ultimately their responsibility to avoid putting themselves in situations in which they can be raped, right?

Also, about the fighting back thing…it’s ridiculous to expect someone to attempt to fight off a rapist. In many cases, it is clear that the rapist is completely in control of the situation and that any fighting would only make things worse. My child was pinched into submission and told he would get in trouble if he made noise. He was too little to believe anything else. Fighting just isn’t always an option, physically, emotionally, or otherwise.

I hope that as the people who wrote this article, and those who responded to it consider the subject of rape in the future, that they will remember that rape happens to more than just college girls.

Daran, I’d never even heard of the study you’re talking about.

I’m surprised, though perhaps I shouldn’t be, that you are unaware of where the myth came from. References in the literature to the rate of false reporting for rape being the same as for other crimes do indeed date back to the seventies, an influential source being Susan Brownmiller’s “Against Our Will” published in 1974. Rumney discusses this claim at length.

As far as I’d heard, the basis for that statement was from the FBI’s 1996 Uniform Crime Reports, which (last I checked) listed a ~8% rate of unfounded reports for each of rapes, physical assaults, robberies and arsons.

I just downloaded this, which says the following on the page numbered 24, (page 21 according to my viewer.):

As with all other Crime Index offenses, complaints of forcible rape made to law enforcement agencies are sometimes found to be false or baseless. In such cases, law enforcement agencies “unfound” the offences and exclude them from crime counts. The “unfounded” rate, or percentage of complaints determined through investigation to be false, is higher for forcible rape than for any other Index crime. Eight percent of forcible rape complaints in 1996 were “unfounded”, while the average for all index crimes was 2 percent.

This, I think, is sufficient to refute this as a source for the claim that the rates are the same, (which in any case predated it by two decades)

I’m not, however, arguing that the rate for rape is higher than for other crimes. The claim that complaints which are “unfounded” have been “determined through investigation to be false” should be taken with a pinch of salt, Complaints are not always investigated thoroughly, and are sometimes “unfounded” for other reasons. Also, as I pointed out before, complaints determined to be false may be disposed of through other codes.

Unaddressed is the question of how reliable are police determinations of truth or falsity, and how one accounts for the substantial proportion of cases which end up in the “don’t know” pile.

For these reasons, I do not consider “unfounding” rates to be indicative of false reporting rates.

(IIRC the unfounded rates were dropped in favor of non-conviction rates after that,…

My recollection from when I looked at this a few years ago, was that I found that the paragraph I just quoted was repeated near word-for-word in several successive UCRs from the earliest I could find online, until it was dropped completely from some point onward. I don’t know why it was dropped, nor whether it has been reinstated in more recent reports.

The near word-for-word repetition lead me to wonder if the numbers really were being recalculated on the basis of the data for that year, or if the paragraph was just being cut and pasted from one report to the next.

…which is pretty useless since everyone knows how miserable rape conviction rates are,…

If we indulge in the fictions that false rape reports are a well-defined category, that all reports are thoroughly investigated, that unfounded reports really are precisely those found to be false, that the police are always correct in that assessment, and that only true allegations ever lead to convictions…

They we can still say no more than that the false reporting rate is somewhere between the unfounding rate and the non-conviction rate. Not very helpful. If we dispense with those fictions, then we can’t even say that much.

…though we probably disagree on the reasons why…

There are, broadly, two reasons:

1. The police and prosecution services aren’t very good at investigating and prosecuting rape.

2. One of the elements of rape – non-consent – rarely leaves a physical trace, leaving many reported incidents open to reasonable doubt.

To what extent the low conviction rate is attributable to the one, or the other is debatable. Nor are the two really independent. The low chance of establishing guilt in a he said/she said case may result in the police deciding that their investigative priorities are elsewhere.

If I’m wrong, I’d love if someone could point me to the more up-to-date results.) I’ve also seen other government reports, from Britain and Canada as well as the US, that pegs the unfounded rape rates in those countries at within a few percentage points of the UCR results, so it’s hardly “one department”.

Unfounded rates are all over the place, and as I already pointed out, have little to do with false accusation rates.

BTW, if you’re implying what I think you are with the comparison to violent assault* estimates, you are mischaracterizing Rumney’s study. The ridiculously-high estimates were from early years and are very flawed.

I’m not sure what you think I’m implying, but I cited Rumney solely for the proposition that “estimates of false reporting rates for non-sexual assault range from 0% to 17%.”. The latter figure was a typo – should have been 19%. See footnote 126.

I didn’t provide a citation for the proposition that “Estimates from other sources for the proportion of rape reports which are false range, quite literally, from 0% to 100%.”. Rumney’s selection of findings range from 1.5% to 90%. To my recollection (I don’t have the paper in front of me) Kanin found estimates from as low as 0.25% to as high as 98%. (There is, of course, a difference between “finding” and “estimate”.) It should be obvious that both the ridiculously high figures and the ridiculously low ones are very flawed. In fact, every figure is flawed because of the failure to account for the “don’t know” pile.

You can’t compare sexual assault data with violent assault data because societal attitudes towards the two are so much different.

Our discussion started with your claim that the figures were “similar”. I’m the one objecting to that proposition.

People find it harder to believe a suspect who claims “(s)he consented” to being violently assaulted.

One reason for that is that sex is something that people quite often do consensually. People rarely consent to being punched in the face outside of a boxing ring or dojo.

BTW, if you’re implying what I think you are with the comparison to violent assault* estimates, you are mischaracterizing Rumney’s study. The ridiculously-high estimates were from early years and are very flawed. Some include speculation from Freudian psychology, horrible definitions of rape (eg., marital rape doesn’t count as “real rape”), and poor data sources (such as a police dep’t that threatened to polygraph rape victims who didn’t recant). You can’t compare sexual assault data with violent assault data because societal attitudes towards the two are so much different. People find it harder to believe a suspect who claims “(s)he consented” to being violently assaulted. Our society is so lacking in serious, accessible discussions about sexuality but so prolific with the Cosmo/PUA type nonsense, which leads people to believe some strange and twisted ideas about rape and sex that most would never buy about nonsexualized violence. Marital rape was legal in most (if not all) western countries just thirty years ago, and while it was outlawed in the US, most states still treat marital rape as a lesser crime; it’s not uncommon for people (inc. those in law enforcement) to hold the belief that marital rape is impossible by definition. AFAIK, domestic violence is considered an additional charge on top of assault in most places, not a lesser charge. Of course, the average rape victim & rapist fit different profiles than the average assault victim & assaulter. While DV is sadly too common, I’d be very surprised if “date assault” or “domestic assault” composed 4/5 cases. And I’m pretty sure anyone who cited Freud while estimating the number of unfounded violent assaults would be laughed out of town.

* I’m going to use this as shorthand for nonsexual aggravated assault, if you don’t mind. I know there’s some overlap between sexual assault and aggravated assault that causes physical injury, and that sexual assault could legitimately be categorized entirely within violent assault (whether or not any injury is caused), and that it is usually categorized entirely within aggravated assault. But I think this comment is already turning into a text wall without me clarifying that every time.

Those who buy into rape myths make it hard on real victims.

It’s ironic that the very next sentence propounds a myth.

The rate of false rape accusations is similar to the rate for other crimes.

The claim that these rates are the same (2%) originated within the New York City Rape Analysis Squad in the early Seventies. The original source has long since vanished, but it certainly pertains to the unfounding rate of the department. But “unfounded” does not mean “false”. Reports can be, and often are, unfounded for reasons other than being false, and false reports are sometimes disposed of under other codes. This is particularly true for rape, where the unfounding rate can be subject to political pressures.

Also the figures for one department cannot be regarded as definitive. Estimates from other sources for the proportion of rape reports which are false range, quite literally, from 0% to 100%. Rumney points out that estimates of false reporting rates for non-sexual assault range from 0% to 17%.

Not guilty and innocent are miles apart. I’m not sure how much of the feminist discourse you have been listening too, but just because a person recants doesn’t mean they weren’t raped. Just because a charge wasn’t filed, or a person wasn’t found guilty doesn’t mean that the whole world is, in fact, peachy keen.