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<p>That’s what I meant: someone who uses their own knowledge of rapes among their friends and acquaintances to estimate the incidence of rape is going to underestimate. Men will underestimate even more than women, because someone who has been raped is more likely to tell female friends than male friends.</p>
<p>If that was your point as well, dstark, then I misunderstood you. I apologize.</p>
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<p>Oh, so here you are saying that only cases that end in convictions should be counted as actual statistics. People who say not all perps get convicted are “advocates” and making false claims. </p>
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<p>People who say the conviction rate accurately represents cases, and who also say that many cases of rape are he-said she-said and therefore there is not enough evidence to convict, need to make up their minds.</p>
<p>After further thought, I’d definitely confide in Dstark. And I don’t do all that much confiding.</p>
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Tv4caster, when awcntdb said this, my impression was police approach an accusation in a neutral manner the same way I do unless further statements or findings lean towards one side.</p>
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<p>And yet, as the dstark link from a while ago demonstrates, police do not approach an accusation in a neutral manner. They disbelieve accusers. They turn some accusers away even before the accusers file a report. In other words, Krlilies, you need to adjust your impression.</p>
<p>This is a strawman… </p>
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<p>Nobody said rape is limited to college campuses and universities…</p>
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<p>This is a recurring theme with your posts: the idea that if one bit of an accusation is misremembered or false that it is just a woman making the incident up to advance a “rape culture agenda”. </p>
<p>That is what I mean with my accusation. You would give the accused every benefit of the doubt because the worst thing in the world is that one person be wrongly convicted. Yet you find one thing wrong with a woman’s story and she must have made the entire incident up. </p>
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<p>I think you’re jumping to the wrong conclusion. It’s not a matter of believing the accused and not the accuser–more like not believing either side 100% until the investigation is done. The police shouldn’t stop investigating because of minor inconsistencies, but they shouldn’t ignore the inconsistencies, either.</p>
<p>@awcntdb you also said that you don’t “run away from answering a post”. I asked earlier (I thought specifically to you but perhaps not). Anyway, I will do so now.</p>
<p>Would you agree to a system where there is 1 innocent person convicted to every 10 that get away? </p>
<p>How about one where only 1 innocent person is convicted and 1 million guilty people get away with rape?</p>
<p>@stevensmama Thanks. I can see how you might think that from just one of two posts. It is by taking all his posts in totality that you get the impression that while he says the thinks an accuser should be taken at “face value” that what he really means is less than that. I am convinced that if he were hooked up to a mythical lie detector that was 100% accurate that he would believe many (maybe most?) women make up their accusations when statistics say it is on the order of a few percent and less than other violent crimes. </p>
<p>Here is just one more example of what I mean, and this is in just the next few posts of his that I checked.</p>
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<p><a href=“Should You Kill The Fat Man?”>http://www.philosophyexperiments.com/fatman/</a></p>
<p>First, I talk to my son and daughter about never getting into one of these situations. The college should do that too.</p>
<p>Second, if my daughter or son gets involved in one of these situations, we are going to the police. We are not going to mess around with any amateur from the college.</p>
<p>Third, if the college tries to expel my kid or put something life/career altering on his transcript in the absence of professional criminal justice, I will be all over the school like a spider monkey. No way a nice well meaning (but ultimately unqualified) person like Dean Eramo is going to be in charge of my kid’s future. I sue the school for violating my kid’s civil rights, I collect a nice payment from the school’s insurer. And that settlement will pay my kid’s tuition at a successor college. </p>
<p>@alh Very interesting. I love things like that. I got “very consistent” in my responses. I will leave it to the readers to postulate on what my profile was. </p>
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<p>Parents who assert that if their daughter was raped, they’d go to the police: How would you know? Many daughters don’t tell their parents. I wouldn’t have told my parents.</p>
<p>I got “very consistent” on the first test, but not on the second test: <a href=“Should You Kill The Backpacker?”>http://www.philosophyexperiments.com/loopback/Default.aspx</a></p>
<p>Here some statistics that might be helpful. Some researchers found a statistically unbiased sample of physical evidence from sexual assaults (mostly rapes and homicides) that occurred mostly in Virginia in the 70s and 80s, before DNA testing. This was unusual since most evidence isn’t preserved for that long under good conditions.</p>
<p>They then applied modern DNA testing to the old evidence. If I understand the report correctly, their results were that between 8% and 15% of the people convicted were likely candidates for exoneration (certainly reasonable doubt is raised !) Mostly moot, since most of the convicted had been released/ died. A lot of the convictions were as a result of false eyewitness testimony and things like bitemark forensics. Remember though that unlike on a college campus, most of the suspects were strangers to the women and so problems with eyewitness identification can occur without any intentional falsehood on the part of the victims. </p>
<p>Thus, even when a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard was applied and with the due process the courts provided, about 8-15% of the convicted people may have been likely innocent of the specific rape charges. Today, with DNA testing, I would imagine it’s quite a bit lower. </p>
<p>People who are pressing for lower standards and tougher prosecutions should weigh the potential costs as well as benefits.</p>
<p>I get inconsistent, and then stern warnings to educate myself. Basically the preliminary questions seem like trick questions to me. Torture is always morally wrong, imho, but may be the lesser of evils in certain situations. That isn’t one of the possible answers.</p>
<p>I’m also not clear whether we are supposed to say what we think is the right action, or what action we would actually take. Because that isn’t always the same for me.</p>
<p>We can’t compare innocence rates for people convicted of stranger rape to innocence rates for people convicted (or accused) of acquaintance rape. The sources of error are completely different. In the case of wrongful convictions of stranger rape, most likely the victim was raped, but not by the person convicted. In the case of wrongful convictions or accusations of acquaintance rape, most likely no rape occurred at all. </p>
<p>@al2simon Thanks for the stats. I wonder what the %age would be today with the advent of DNA testing. I recently read somewhere (on CC I think) that eyewitness testimony is even worse than believed. The study took a group of military men (maybe women too) who were being trained to understand what hostile interrogations might be like. Most of the group completely misidentified their instructor and routinely gave accounts of things that weren’t present (like weapons etc). Can you imagine how throwing even more trauma into the equation would affect their recollection (like if they were actually assaulted or weapons were involved). </p>
<p>People also have a much harder time identifying someone from another ethnic group than their own (the old all _____s look alike syndrome)</p>