Rape victims among those to be asked to hand phones to police

There are various studies that look into this. Some of them work by examining police reports and looking at cases where the police concluded the woman was lying. These routinely give a figure as high as 50%. In interviews with individual policemen and policewomen, when asked to estimate the false reporting rate they also ballpark it at 50%.

The 2% number is outright fraud. Try and find the original source for this figure and you won't be able to - others have tried. It gets repeated endlessly anyway because it suits the feminist cause to make false reports look extremely rare, but the 2% figure correlates with nothing. For instance the FBI's own figures show at minimum an 8% false reporting rate, which is much higher than for any other crime, and that's based on DNA tests alone. When the cases discarded by the police even before that are taken into account (e.g. because the woman admitted the next day she was drunk and hadn't really been raped, a surprisingly common occurrence) the rate climbs much further.

See here for a writeup:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/7/false-sex-as...

Unfortunately what you see in this space is rampant manipulation of the figures. For instance it's common for a woman retracting her claim (i.e. saying she wasn't raped after all) to not be considered a false accusation, although there was an accusation, and the woman later decided her accusation should not stand. We can see a user in this thread stating that a woman admitting she lied is not sufficient evidence that the accusation was false - it's apparent that such people are desperate for the narrative to hold up, but what standard of proof would be sufficient for them? Of course in extremely rare cases someone might file a claim, and then retract it, whilst having been correct originally. But very often claims are retracted because the accuser realises an investigation will reveal that they're lying.

Wikipedia is a tertiary source; if you are going to cite something, don't cite Wikipedia, cite it's sources (after reviewing them to see if they are worth citing.)

This isn't true. False accusations of rape are more likely to be prosecuted than rape.

Logged in accounts to a few sites. Ssh/pgp keys.

A Bitcoin/Ethereum wallet without password.

Secret drafts of midterms we will administer in the university.

(I actually only have two of the four.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

tl;dw - "Anything you say can and will be used against you"

So someones life should be ruined if you falsely accuse them simply because you shouldnt be allowed to incriminate yourself?

https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/vulnerable-women-routi...

If your "easiest and cheapest" solution involves the violation of liberties, let alone people in vulnerable positions such as rape victims, you might wish to rethink it.

> It's evidence that would probably be required for the case in court anyway, right?

If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear, right?

I genuinely don't understand how this is still a valid argument in the minds of some people. Yes, it might probably be required, but the law was written like this for a reason. You're further disincentivizing rape victims from reporting the crime, which already is a huge issue due to stigmatization and the psychological trauma.

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And as others have mentioned, I would like to see a source on "'Fake' rape reports being a growing problem", that would warrant this kind of response.

Now obviously, the easiest and cheapest thing for the taxpayer would be to simply lock up the partner when a woman with a partner is murdered.

That would be unjust, even if it is nearly always right and easiest and cheapest. Ok, but MRA folks would go ballistic, so let’s make it easier:

If a woman with a male partner is murdered, we simply require the male partner to give up their cell phone’s contents. No silly paperwork for a warrant, no laws about self-incrimination or any of that, we just cite the “Taxpayer’s Efficiency Act of 2019” and they have to hand it over, or sit in jail for contempt until they do.

Is that still unjust?

It is, isn’t it?

I put it to you that if false accusations of rape, which happen rarely, justify examining phones belonging to the victims, then murder of a woman by her male partner, who is usually the perpetrator, justifies the exact same thing.

What stops us in both cases is the notion of justice. It is unjust whether the person is likely or unlikely to b a law-breaker. And we as a society have decided that justice is a greater good than saving a few bucks or making things easier for police.

But if there was some evidence along these lines, my first question would be whether rape reports are growing. One thing that used to happen was that there was an enormous amount of disincentive to report rape.

Society assumed by default that the woman was “asking for it.” The defence was allowed to grill her in open court about her sex life, and paint her as a harlot, implying or even openly arguing that she asked for it and/or deserved it.

The notion of consent was weak, to say the least.

Police where sexist AF and often laughed off reports, or went to investigate and told the suspect exactly who had reported them, opening them to retaliation.

Women reported rape much less often, because there was almost no incentive for them to do so, and that’s exactly how society liked it.

Naturally, this meant fewer accusations that couldn’t be proved, as well as outright fabrications. But also naturally, this meant many fewer guilty perpetrators were charged, much less convicted.

If changes in the way rape is viewed, investigated, and prosecuted produces many more accusations, it is not necessarily a “problem” that there are more false accusations.

If there are twice as many false accusations and simultaneously twice as many convictions, there is no problem at all, there is simply more reporting with exactly the same proportion of falsehood.

If there are twice as many false reports and four times as many convictions, perhaps society is much better off.

The fact is, false reports are sensational and get lots of attention. As they should, a false report is not only a crime, but a great injustice. We should work to discourage and disincent them.

But not at the expense of discouraging all reports. And the side-effect of invading the privacy of those eho report rape is a return to the days when there were fewer false eports because women didn’t want to report rape at all.

In reality it is no different from ANY other crime in that there needs to be evidence that a crime has actually been committed.

Typically, a search warrant will be limited in scope, whereas a consent search will not be. In fact, law enforcement is usually trained to ask for consent to search even if they have a warrant, because it precludes a lot of legal issues. For example, if they are executing a search and they see something out in the open that suggests some other crime but isn't conclusive, and they want to search for more evidence related to that other issue, they are supposed to seek another warrant unless an exception applies (e.g., exigent circumstances). If they have consent to search the house (or car, or ...), then they do not need to stop, and they do not need to worry about the evidence being excluded if the judge disagrees that there were exigent circumstances.

For this reason, I think a lot of the reactions in this thread against compelled evidence are misplaced. A victim is much more likely to implicate herself or himself in collateral conduct in a consent search than they would be if the evidence were compelled. A search warrant, for example, would likely be limited to text messages between the alleged victim and the alleged perpetrator... and not include, e.g., text messages between the alleged victim and her/his drug dealer.

Defense access will depend on discovery rules, which vary widely between jurisdictions. Either way, it won't be admissible in court unless a judge rules that it is relevant to the case.

If the complainant said the phone was used during the rape to record the act then the phone would be seized as evidence.

> I'm also assuming that there is an implicit accusation of false accusation by the originally accused.

This is the difficult balancing act the police have to do: they have to treat complainants with respect and robustly investigate the alleged crime, but they have to hold open the (small) possibility that it didn't happen like the complainant says.

If the accused is convicted, we can infer that the accuser was indeed a victim. However, if the accused is acquitted, we cannot infer that the accuser was not a victim--we can only infer that if they were a victim, they were victimized by someone other than the accused.

(There's also some fuzziness in here because of the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard from criminal cases).

Your observation would only be correct in judicial systems in which an alleged victim has to undergo some sort of trial or hearing at which they must prove that a crime occurred against them before the system moves on to finding and trying someone for perpetrating that crime.