“The research community defines false accusations as those that can be proven false beyond a reasonable doubt, and all others as true.”

This isn’t the case. If you look at the methodology on the Lisak study you cited (and the other 7 that he cites), you’ll see that they use a preponderance of the evidence standard for determining false accusations among reported rapes. This is a big fucking difference between ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ because it means that the 2-10% number is NOT a lower bound on the numbers. The only thing coding a false rape accusation was direct admissions from the complainant (which isn’t always definitive either the well documented pressure to recant from police departments, cited in the DOJ presentation below) or if the researchers thought that it was more likely than not that the report was false.

“All of these would go down as “false allegations” under the “victim has to admit she was lying or contradict herself” criteria. No doubt this does happen. But the opposite critique seems much stronger: that some false accusers manage tell their story without contradicting themselves”

It doesn’t ‘just happen’, it happens pretty damn frequently. See this presentation on the neurobiology of trauma to see the problem of jumbled accounts and dropped cases from police departments incorrectly coded (by the departments) as false http://nij.gov/multimedia/presenter/presenter-campbell/Pages/welcome.aspx. For the opposite critique to be ‘much stronger’, there would have to be an overwhelming number of false accusers who make it through the system to trial. As you pointed out with the low rate of cases going to trial and even lower convictions, this seems unlikely.

“A police-based study that took pains to avoid this failure mode by investigating all cases very aggressively (Kanin 1994) was criticized for what I think are ideological reasons – they primarily seemed to amount to the worry that the aggressive investigations stigmatized rape victims, which would make them so flustered that they would falsely recant. Certainly possible. On the other hand, if you dismiss studies for not investigating thoroughly enough and for investigating thoroughly, there will never be any study you can’t dismiss.”

Completely, completely misses the mark on criticism of the Kanin study (which again, if you read the Lisak work you cite you would see his issues with it). The small sample taken from the police department in question used polygraphs on every person coming in to report rape. Polygraphs, which aren’t even accepted as evidence of lying from the accused themselves because they overreport ‘lying’, were used on people reporting rape when they have historically been used only on people accused of crimes. What other message than ‘we think you’re lying’ could that possibly send to rape victims? The study is bullshit.

“While rape victims have some incentives to report their cases to the police – a desire for justice, a desire for safety, the belief that the evidence will support them – false accusers have very strong incentives not to – too much work, easier revenge through other means, knowledge that the evidence is unlikely to support them, fear of getting in trouble for perjury if their deception gets out. So I consider it a very conservative estimate to say that the ratio of unreported to reported false accusations is 4:1 – the same as it is with rapes. A more realistic estimate might be as high as double or triple that.”

You’re too quick to dismiss the fact that, to a public that cannot easily distinguish between true and false claims, the incentives to report or not report are essentially the same. Many rape victims don’t report because they know they will be harassed, and false accusers would be derided (like rape victims are) for not reporting. In general, I think you underestimate the fact that not reporting to police is routinely used a reason to dismiss rape victims, and the same would apply to false accusers.

Also, a ‘conservative estimate’ using the conservative numbers YOU CITE (and probably less conservative when we consider that the reliable studies still use a preponderance of the evidence standard).

84,000 rapes * 2% conservative false reporting rate= 1680 falsely accused per year (making the less than conservative estimate that these are all different men, despite what we know about undetected rapists in the Lisak work)
53 million men/ 1680 falsely accused= 1/31,547 rate
spreading that out evenly over 24 years: 31,547/24=1/1,314. That’s a rate of 0.07%, or 0.35% once we take into account false accusations that don’t reach police (again, I think you’re giving way too much credit for in terms of negative effects on the falsely accused).

“What estimate do I personally find most likely? Suppose we keep everything else the same, but allow that for every false accuser who later confesses, there is also one false accuser who does not later confess. This raises the false accusation rate to 16% – which, keep in mind, is still less than half of what the police think it is, so it’s not like we’re allowing rape-culture-happy cops to color our perception here. Now 3% of men will get falsely accused.”

This assumes that the entirety of the 8% is people who confessed to false reporting, which isn’t anywhere close to being true. In fact, this is pretty much taken into account with Lisak and similar studies by using a preponderance of the evidence standard for other cases, meaning the 2-10% should stand as is.

Lastly, I’m going to make one more estimate based on the Lisak undetected rapist information, which goes as follows: 6.4% of men admit to rape using questions like ‘have you ever had sex with someone who did not want to have sex with you by getting them so intoxicated that they could not fight back’. Among that 6.4%, 63.3% have raped more than once, with an average of 6 (assuming that these are all college students who have finished their college careers, that’s 1.5/year in college).

84,000 rapes a year- (8 million men in college* 4% men that are repeat rapists*1.5 rapes/year *5% estimated reporting rate for college rapes)=84,000-24,000=60,000 separate rapists per year
60,000 separate rapists*6% false reporting rate (the number Lisak finds and the even split between 2-10%) = 3600 falsely accused men
53 mill men/3600 falsely accused=1/14722
14722/24 years=1/613 lifetime chance of being falsely accused. this is a 0.16% chance, or a 0.81% chance when we take into account false accusations that don’t reach police. Even this is probably conservative, since it assumes that all repeat rapists are in college. Yet it is still way below the 3% stat you cite as ‘likely’.

Comparing this to the estimated 1/33 men who will themselves be sexually assaulted at some point in their lifetime, men are more than 3X as likely to be sexually assaulted themselves than to ever face a false accusation. And those men will likely be disbelieved by people who think they are false accusers.

Report comment

“3% of men are falsely accused of rape. 15% of women are raped. If someone you know gets accused of rape, your prior still is very very high that they did it.”

The percentage of women who are raped is not necessarily equal to the percentage of men who are rapists. The 15% figure is the maximum possible for male rapists, assuming each rapist strikes only once. If, on the other hand, 1% of men are responsible for raping 15% of women, then 3% of men who are falsely accused of rape compared to 1% of men who are rapists still puts my odds at 3:1 against a randomly accused man being guilty of rape. If 3% of men are responsible for raping 15% of women while 3% of men will be falsely accused, then my prior is that a random man accused of rape has equal odds of being guilty or innocent.

It seems likely to me that most men who are willing to commit rape would be likely to commit rape more than once, so that 5:1 prior of the accused being guilty is an upper bound on the probability of a random accusation being true, which falls as the number of rapes becomes more concentrated in a smaller population of rapists committing them.

On the other hand, actual rapists probably attract a disproportionate share of the rape accusations, so I really have no idea how likely it is that any given alleged-rapist is actually a rapist. I wouldn’t start with the 15:3 assumption, though.

Report comment

Report comment

Well, once it’s widespread for people to have camera implants (possibly in the form of cybernetic eye implants, but any device that is always-on, records video, and can’t be easily removed will do), it should become quite difficult to rape people without a great deal of effort.

Or alternatively, culture will shift so that certain people become acceptable targets for rape, and even if they record the event the general social response will range from indifference towards the victim to praise for the attacker.

Universal compassion doesn’t *have* to be a thing, you know.

Report comment

Well, once it’s widespread for people to have camera implants (possibly in the form of cybernetic eye implants, but any device that is always-on, records video, and can’t be easily removed will do), it should become quite difficult to rape people without a great deal of effort.

Report comment

Report comment

Report comment

The actual political issue has to do with social attitudes regarding burden of proof, assumption of guilt or innocence, and so on — in legal contexts, in “quasi-legal” contexts (like college policies), and in social mores. In this actual political issue, there is a genuine conflict of interest between men and women, which has to be carefully balanced, not “won” by one side or the other. Trying to frame the matter as a battle between “justice” on one side, and thus injustice on the other, strikes me as a disastrous distortion (and actually, since you mention it — a pretty bad argument, in terms of rationality if not effectiveness).

Just to be clear, though — is “your side,” as you conceive of it, one that says “always believe the [alleged] victim”?

Report comment

I suspect that more sex offenders might be prosecuted and convicted in a system where we recognized lesser degrees of crime, of which they could unambiguously be judged guilty and punished commensurately, than in a system where we are forced to either conflate people with a lesser degree of ill intent with some of the worst criminals we recognize in our society, or not find them guilty at all.

Report comment

Report comment