I'd hazard to say that we're beginning to derail this thread even though we're discussing a fear I have as a man that women don't have to deal with thanks to gender roles. Let me know if you agree.
thaluikhain said:
Lightknight said:
Some interesting data: Somewhere between 2.5% and 5% of the people in prison are innocent. [http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2012/05/01/the-price-of-freedom-what-happens-to-the-wrongfully-convicted/] So 1 in every 200 or 1 in every 400. To put that in total terms, in 2006 there were 7.5 million people in prison. If we use the low end estimate of 2.5% that would be 187,500 people in prison for a crime they did not commit.
False accusations of rape specifically are believed to run between 2% to 8%. David Lisak's 2010 study that was published in a magazine dedicated to violence against women put the number at 5.9% when they only counted cases where actual evidence turned up to show that the claim was false. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape#Lisak_.282010.29] So it isn't counting other people for whom there was no evidence to exonerate but were innocent. So that 8% may not be that unlikely but study results can vary wildly by who is doing the study and what criteria they use to define a false accusation. That's why I used the study put out by Violence Against Women since I assume they wouldn't want to print particularly high numbers unless they were true.
The proportion of false accusations might be more than the proportion of people, in general, wrongfully convicted? That says nothing about the amount of false accusations leading to a conviction.
What's your point? We have a number presenting the liklihood that a person is in jail wrongfully and we have the liklihood that they were falsely accused.
Both numbers are separately harmful and certainly aren't 0.
We know that 35% of all exoneries were convicted as rapists [http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/05/21/11756575-researchers-more-than-2000-false-convictions-in-past-23-years?lite]. That requires the highest degree of confidence that the person did not commit the crime.
Look, you may not consider it to be a big enough problem. But for it to run as high as 6% of cases that met real criteria for the accusations is insane. If it's higher? If it's 8% or even 10%? I mean, we're already at more than 1 in 20 being a false accusation and potentially 1 in 10. This not only ruins lives but trivializes or puts into question the people who really are victims. Sorry if you don't think that's a big deal but I'm not sure what your goal is here? What are you trying to prove or disprove?
Are you trying to put my fears at ease or just trying to trivialize me?
That's assuming that the authorities take the allegation seriously, mind, which is also far from a given.
I would appreciate you returning the same courtesy I did in presenting actual data to back up your claim. I've seen specific examples here and there of it not taken seriously and I've also seen examples of prosecutions carried out that should not have been taken seriously but were (situations where enough evidence of innocence was present to prevent booking but the police just forwarded it to the court system anyways and put them through months of hardship just waiting for a judge to throw it out and chastise the officer for doing so).
I have seen articles on policies that are set in place that wantonly dismiss cases that it shouldn't just because they meet certain criteria. For example, the article that comes to mind was about a police agency that just entirely dismissed cases where the woman had been drinking at all. So that kind of crap has to stop, I have no problem with pursuing legitimate cases and I'm in favor of harsher punishments. I think our legal system is being a bit silly when it leaves no room for degree of certainty. Like, there's evidence beyond a reasonable doubt and then there's absolute certainty as in there he is on camera with a name tag and we have DNA evidence. If we ever instituted that I'd like harsher limits imposed across a number of crimes consistent with blatantness while the regular ol' beyond reasonable doubt can continue to be pursued regularly.
It's something to be afraid of, in that it is bad when it happens, yes. It happening once is too many.
However, it's not something any given individual is going to need to be particularly concerned with, it is very rare.
Now, the fear of this is very real, of course, our society has a real dread of false rape accusations, but that's a problem that is almost separate to the reality of them.
In order for them to have met the requirements set forth in David Lisak's 2010 study, they had to have been seriously investigated. These weren't just dismissed cases. They had to have investigated everything. Questioned witnesses, acquired DNA evidence where relevant, etc. This doesn't even include the cases where an allegation was made and thrown out. These are the ones that were investigated and in order to be counted as a false allegation it actually had to have acquired evidence that the allegation was false. Not merely a dropping of charges.
"Applying IACP guidelines, a case was classified as a false report if there was evidence that a thorough investigation was pursued and that the investigation had yielded evidence that the reported sexual assault had in fact not occurred. A thorough investigation would involve, potentially, multiple interviews of the alleged perpetrator, the victim, and other witnesses, and where applicable, the collection of other forensic evidence (e.g., medical records, security camera records). For example, if key elements of a victim?s account of an assault were internally inconsistent and directly contradicted by multiple witnesses and if the victim then altered those key elements of his or her account, investigators might conclude that the report was false. That conclusion would have been based not on a single interview, or on intuitions about the credibility of the victim, but on a ?preponderance? of evidence gathered over the course of a thorough investigation."
That's why a study that came up with a 6% false allegation percentage was published in Violence Against Women. Because this followed the most stringent guidelines available.
So that's 6% of allegations that were actually investigated that were found to have actual evidence indicating them as false. These aren't the ones that don't have direct evidence falsifying them and these aren't the ones that make it all the way through being convicted that we find out are false years later.
