Completely agree. Rape will land you jail for a long time (as it should) but rape hoaxing has almost no consequences.
How exactly do you propose to deal with them, without a chilling effect on reporting real rapes? It is a crime that is notoriously hard to convict, to the point where most victims keep silent.
As with any crime, the evidentiary standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt" -- to convict someone for false testimony, you would need to conclusively prove that they did so willfully. This is already the law, the crime is called perjury -- it's just that the punishments are so mild that they are not serious deterrents. Imagine if making willfully false allegations of a crime was punished by twice the prison sentence of the crime being accused -- I bet one VC wouldn't try to poke another in the eye with a false sexual harassment blog post.
Rape and sexual harassment are problems that are both serious, and incredibly wide-spread. They are also under-reported and under-prosecuted, and even when they are, well, that young gentleman is such a good athlete, and has such a bright future, we can't destroy his life over something minor like that.
You could also bet that actual rape victims would not come forward. Why the would they, if they could end up in jail, if the case against their rapist falls apart for any one of a million reasons.
> Rape and sexual harassment are problems that are both serious, and incredibly wide-spread
Are you being intentionally obtuse or just didn't read the comment before replying? Giving you the benefit of doubt in case you were wondering about the down votes, the parent was talking about false claims of rape/harassment being less widespread.
OP was saying that you should go to jail if you manufacture a rape accusation, and that is proven to the usual standards of the criminal trial (i.e. "beyond a reasonable doubt"), not if the case against rapist falls apart for any random reason.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape#Rum...
This seems like almost certainly an exaggeration, and I think an unhelpful one.
Also, just for rape, or for any crime? If I falsely accuse the President of treason, and he is found innocent, should I be convicted of treason?
(Note that it didn't say "same crime", only "same sentence".)
Perhaps I'm being too literal and the call for "same sentence" is just for effect.
>If I falsely accuse the President of treason, and he is found innocent, should I be convicted of treason?
Please go into detail in regards to how this hypothetical scenario would unfold. I can't wait to hear your explanation for how some random person accusing the President of treason could possibly lead to any sort of trial.
There can be reasonable doubt in both directions.
It's also wrong. Even assuming rape and false accusation being equally harmful, the rape penalty would have been for a crime that actually succeeded, whereas the false accusation would have only been an attempt.
This is not a statement of fact, that's an assumption you've made.
Actual studies of this are rare and usually bitterly disputed, but part of the reason they're rare is that they tend to reveal alarmingly high false reporting rates. I mean truly disturbingly high.
If you look at cases which are proven to be false, the rate is usually suggested to be somewhere between 5% and 10% of all claims depending on the study.
But this does not imply 90% of accusations have merit. The definition of "false claim" is extremely strict, such that a case that does not proceed because e.g. the alleged victim is caught lying about the events does not count as "false" on the grounds that they might just genuinely be confused. Virtually all claims of rape or sexual assault fail to proceed to actual charges.
The most famous study (by Kanin) examined every single allegation of rape reported to the police department of a small midwestern city. It defined a false accusation to be "any accusation in which the victim admitted it was false". It reported a rate of around 40% of all allegations being false.
> It is a crime that is notoriously hard to convict, to the point where most victims keep silent.
You can't know that. Given that false reporting definitely occurs, victims that keep silent may or may not be real victims. Only investigations can resolve that question. And one reason it's a hard crime to convict is the rate at which accusers recant their accusations or stop cooperating with investigations as they proceed.
And that study is deeply flawed: that one small midwestern police department used polygraphs on accusers. That's a practice that has long been shunned because (a) polygraphs are (now) known to usually find the investigator's opinion reflected in statistical noise, and (b) the victims (rightfully) see the test as an accusation and prefer to recant for fear of prosecution.
The study mostly used the investigator's judgement, and used the victims admission only when it that was given. Question: if you go to 100 actual false accusers ten years after that incident, and ask them "Did you falsely accuse X of rape back then?". Do you really believe that 40% would be stupid enough to tell you?
If the USA believes polygraphs are unreliable they should be banned from all usage, for all types of crimes and government screening. That hasn't happened.
Instead, people who didn't like Kanin's conclusions - and noted that many rape accusers prefer to drop their accusations rather than take a polygraph test - decided it should be banned for that specific crime only. This is not internally consistent but is consistent with the long-term trend towards trying to increase the number of rape reports.
The critics then retroactively claimed the usage of this technique made the entire study invalid, which it does not do. These people are actually trying to subtly argue something different and much more extreme - that US police statistics and records for rape accusations in that entire period are completely worthless due to the use of polygraphs and therefore no conclusions can be drawn about the accuracy of rape reports during this time at all. This also isn't the case. Attrition between rape reports and prosecution is extremely high in other western countries that don't use lie detectors, and there is attrition at every stage of the pipeline. Offering to use a polygraph and having some complainants decide to drop their cooperation entirely is just one source of attrition amongst many.
The Kanin study is utterly damning on many levels and aligns with the self-reported perceptions of police (that false accusations are very common), not just in that study town but across the USA and in other countries as well, like the UK.
> The study mostly used the investigator's judgement
That is not correct. The study only marked a rape complaint as false if the accuser stated it was false. Cases where the investigator concluded it was false were not counted.
This standard is clearly far too strict - women who made provably false claims and steadfastly refuse to ever admit it would not be counted in this statistic, thus the 40% figure for that study must be too low when using a more reasonable definition of false claim.
> Question: if you go to 100 actual false accusers ten years after that incident, and ask them "Did you falsely accuse X of rape back then?". Do you really believe that 40% would be stupid enough to tell you?
It might be worth reading the original study. It is here:
https://ia800209.us.archive.org/4/items/FalseRapeAllegations...
The answer is yes, 41% said they lied. I don't know where your 10 year requirement came from. Most cases were resolved as false far quicker than that, usually because inconsistencies in the stories surfaced very quickly. As you can see from the case files the study quotes directly, admission that the story was false is usually accompanied by an explanation of why they did it and the study shows almost all false accusations were motivated by just three reasons.
I don't know why you think this requires stupidity. Prosecution for making false rape claims nearly never happens. It is extremely safe to admit you lied. But irritating the police makes it much less safe. It makes more sense to admit you lied quickly than to drag it out and risk the police deciding to prosecute for perversion of justice.
UK police are pretty clear that false allegations of rape are very rare, and are much rarer than either occurances of rape or true reports.
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100408125722/htt...
The study is deeply biased, doesn't try to hide it and quite clearly tries to tell politicians what they want to hear. Nonetheless it has a lot of useful data and states two things of interest in this thread:
1 - the false reporting rate is stated as being about 10% in the UK.
2 - all police interviewed for the the study believed that figure was far too low.
With respect to point (1) - once again this is a very, very generous definition of "false". For instance it doesn't include cases where someone reports a rape on behalf of the alleged victim and the alleged victim later states that no rape in fact took place. This is clearly a false accusation and it'd be just as distressing to the accused, but isn't counted as false.
The inconsistency between the figures the study reports and the perception of police themselves is noted and discussed in the study:
"Even if all those designated false by the police were accepted (a figure of approximately ten per cent), this is still much lower than the rate perceived by police officers interviewed in this study"
Example quotes from working police officers:
"I do deal with a lot of allegations that don’t go anywhere, because it transpires that it’s not quite a rape, certainly with juveniles ... we spend a lot of time dealing with allegations of rape that really aren’t rape, that take a lot of time up. I would say a good half that come through are not genuine ones."
A different officer:
"We have a lot of allegations that are then retracted, we have a lot of allegations that it comes out in the wash one way or another that it was consensual."
And a different one:
"Well, honestly, it’s because most of them are not telling the truth ... I mean I have dealt with hundreds and hundreds of rapes in the last few years, and I can honestly probably count on both hands the ones that I believe are truly genuine."
There are no quotes or interviews with police officers who believe the 10% figure is accurate or think it's too high.
Polygraphs are unreliable. Countries are aggregates to which beliefs can be attribute only by misleading anthropomorphization, however.
> they should be banned from all usage, for all types of crimes and government screening.
They should be. We're not actually there, though a majority of state and federal courts hold them as inadmissible per se, IIRC, largely due to their unreliability.
edit: I should note something else here. Kanin's study has an appendix where he reports a similar analysis on two university campuses. In this case polygraphs were not used and were thus not a factor. They also used the same definition of false (only the accuser can render an accusation false). The false reporting rate in both these cases was 50% - higher!
One might reasonably expect that if I wanted to comment on the broader issue of the study rather than the issues of polygraphs, I would.have done so.
HN discussion threads aren't simple two-sided structured debates, and there are reasons to respond to comments besides rebuttal to the central thesis of the comment to which a response is offered.
It is well known that polygraphs are completely unreliable. It is also well known that they are useful for tricking people into admitting things that they wouldn't otherwise admit. That is why they are still in use.
Can you provide a source for that?
Other numbers:
- 7% (of all women) had been raped,
- Around 75% of those cases were reported to police
- only 14% of cases resulted in a trial
- less than half of trials resulted in conviction
- Police officers guess that 30% of reported rapes are false accusations when asked in general terms, even though these same officers came to such a conclusion in only 9% of specific cases they handled.
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110218141141/htt...
The only real data that you provided is that 5.25% of all claimed rapes (1 x 75% x 14% x 50%) are actually proven to be true in a court of law, which means that the only real data you have is that, according to justice only 0.37% of all woman have been found victims of rape. You know absolutely nothing about of what are the real numbers, just that the lower limit is those 0.37%, yet you claim that 7% of all woman have been raped, based on exactly what?
Do you have access to some data that we don't (and that isn't present in the numbers you just provided)? If so, what data is that?
In any case, it'd be quite strange to personally know two cases where such a false accusation was proven, considering how rare both false accusations are, and how difficult it is to prove them.
You data would furthermore suffer from the fact that almost no one will tell you they were raped, whereas accusations of rape and a trial are usually widely known.