The rate of false reporting of being raped to police is a couple percent. You can pretty safely guess that anyone who tells the police they were raped, was raped. You’ll be wrong a couple percent of the time, but unless you’re personally involved, it’s probably not worth worrying about. The rate at which the wrong guy is accused in rapes by strangers is actually pretty high. Pre-DNA testing, it was greater than 20%, where DNA testing was later used on the initial evidence. It’s not much of a surprise that police are often happy to throw some black guy with a low IQ in jail and call it a day.

But there’s no ambiguity in identity here, so if these women allege what the Swedish government alleges they allege, you’re pretty safe assuming it’s true. I don’t trust the Swedish government in this case, and haven’t seen any other source I’d consider trustworthy get information directly from the women involved; that’s the only sticking point that’s reasonable. At such time that one or the other (or both) make public statements, one really has to give up the ghost.

(Oh, and amen about “the public’s widespread misunderstanding of what “theory” and “proof” mean outside of science”.)

Which is a really long way of saying that if you think that rape victims as a class are more credible than those accused of rape as a class, you are not going against logic or stereotyping.

I’ve studied a lot about lynching, Jim Crow, and the practice of using the virtue of white women to justify racist aggression against black men. I feel pretty comfortable looking at those cases and first assuming the man DIDN’T do it, based on the pattern and reality of the time.

It is that same inclination based on systemic inequality (this time gender-based as opposed to race-based) that leads me to first believe the woman in these cases today. I just can’t shake it and I’m starting to wonder why I am obligated to do so. I guess I don’t want to be a hypocrite, condemning most people for automatically believing the man and then I’m going to automatically believe the woman.

Shoot, I’m the only person I know who believes that the woman in the Duke rape case actually was sexually assaulted.

I don’t see the specter of false rape allegations having any significant impact on the life of the average man today. I don’t see that they are any more careful about the women they deal with, the parties they go to, the alcohol they drink. So if I’m to be a “man-hater” because I think it takes a lot for a woman to come forward with such an accusation and I take her seriously, so be it.

I have serious problems with the idea of “innocent until proven guilty” when directed at citizens outside the courtroom because I think it panders to exactly this sort of simplistic thinking. It seems that people simply cannot reserve judgment in the face of ignorance — if we must assume “innocent until guilty” then it follows as a fact, apparently, that these women are purposefully and maliciously lying. If people could, as a default, assume that all parties are accurately and in good faith reporting their subjective experience and that the court, full of trained professionals in exactly this (not that they’re infallible, but at least they’re knowledgeable), will determine what action the state should take, if any — maybe then it wouldn’t be so bad. But as things are, it’s a joke.