According to this essay, about 3% of men will get falsely accused of rape in their lifetime: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/17/lies-damned-lies-and-so...
The real number is impossible to determine, but is uncomfortably high.
The real number is impossible to determine, but is uncomfortably high.
(See for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_assault_in_the_United_S...)
> 23 percent of women and 4 percent of men reported experiencing unwanted sexual contact
Even worse, 3% of false positives is a twenty-eighth of the percentage of unreported rapes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#United_States
> Only 16% of rapes and sexual assaults are reported to the police
>> The real number is impossible to determine, but is uncomfortably high.
> May I argue that it is uncomfortably low? The estimated percentage of women that are the victims of sexual assault is an order of magnitude higher.
If I'm reading you correctly, you seem to think the solution to the problem of rape is to falsely report more men?
How does arresting non-rapists for rape prevent rapists from raping?
EDIT: gender agnostic phrasing
To me, it goes without saying that I wish all of those numbers to converge to the lowest possible value.
I agree it feels very low - the UK has something like 90,000 rapes per year.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20982105
> The Independent uses its front page to highlight what it describes as the justice system's failure to protect women - and men - from sexual assault. It reports that research by the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office and the Office for National Statistics suggests that about 1,000 rapists are convicted every year despite up to 95,000 people being subjected to rape.
(about 12,000 of those (or maybe as well) are male victims.)
You may; but it is certainly high enough to lend credence to those concerned about false accusations.
I don't know that anyone is claiming it to be "the problem"; but rather "a problem".
False accusations are, like corruption, something that makes the law look bad; and that makes cooperating with the law look bad. It's a problem not only for those falsely accused but also for those who have true accusations to bring!
> If in a community of cats and mice cat's kill 30% of mice, and mice kill 3% of cats, some cats may personally find that 3% to be uncomfortably high for their taste, but they can't say that this constitutes the worrying part of the violence problem in society.
"Now they have two problems."
1) I simply don't have time to read the citations of everything I read (and then check the citations' citations).
2) Even with a solid factual basis, it's easy to twist and spin and fool people who lack expertise in the field. For example, the author could simply omit essential facts.
I've not been able to find the number of rape convictions in 2012. I found a claim of 85000 rapes in 2012 [1], and claims that 3-10% of rapes lead to a conviction.
If one really wanted to do this right, it would be necessary to look at what fraction of those who are convicted and claim they are innocent are able to get a retroactive DNA test on the evidence, and also take into account that such testing often comes after years in prison and so the comparison should be taking into account the rape convictions in the year that someone was sentenced, not the year they their conviction was overturned.
Considering that I was not even able to find a good number on the number of convictions by year, though, I have no hope of reasonably finding the information necessary for the aforementioned analysis. I've been noticing this kind of thing (not being able to find some statistics that I would have expected to be trivially findable in an intuitively obvious way by the most casual searcher) happening quite a lot over the last couple of years, and it puzzles me.
Ridiculously low rate of conviction
[0] https://rainn.org/get-information/statistics/reporting-rates