<p>Kayf, I believe that the vast, vast majority of those who report they are raped are indeed raped. The problem is that we can’t pick them out for sure. But that NYC story is full of wholes on the part of the victim I do not believe a couple of police officers went there to rape the woman in collusion. This was consensual sex gone wrong, and when and where and whether it constitutes rape is what was in question. When the accusation of rape is levied and is not true, a lot of times it is due to abuse that occurred during or immediately after sex as opposed to before. Those cops deserved to get into a lot of trouble for a number of issues in that case, but I don’t think that the burden of proof for rape was met.</p>
<p>The victim was drunk. She admitted that. Of course she had memory issues. But the cops’ stories? What was their excuse?</p>
<p>But my point was to BC Eagle, who thinks the womans word is always accepted. It isnt.</p>
<p>No it isn’t. In fact, more often than not it isn’t. It’s only been in the last 20 or so years that things are changing where women are being encouraged to speak out and levy accusations. Sometimes it is the only recourse women have even if the chance of winning the case in a criminal court is non existent. By making the accusation loud and clear, both parties get flak. By keeping the whole thing quiet, the alleged assailant gets off scott free with the victim having to deal with that fact along with the trauma of the assault.</p>
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<p>Please don’t tell me what or what I don’t think.</p>
<p>I merely talked about the law, in many states, in that you have to believe the woman.</p>
<p>Juries are free to do with it what they will.</p>
<p>I merely talked about the law, in many states, in that you have to believe the woman.</p>
<h2>Juries are free to do with it what they will. </h2>
<p>Not certain who the you is in your first sentence. If the you is Kayf, then its not true, and likely not relevant.</p>
<p>I think what the jury does is what matters.</p>
<p>It’s in the instructions to the jury.</p>
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<p>And that’s why it matters.</p>
<p>BC – </p>
<p>so you are saying that the instructions to the jury (and I am not aware of any state who says you must beleive the woman in jury instructions) are irrelevant? </p>
<p>Not certain your point</p>
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<li><p>You dont approve of jury instructions to the effect of you must beleive the woman.</p></li>
<li><p>What states require that jury instructions?</p></li>
<li><p>Even if so, jury can still aquit.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>So whats your point.</p>
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<p>A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position.[1] To “attack a straw man” is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the “straw man”), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.</p>
<p>– Wikipedia</p>
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<p>Yes.</p>
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<p>I do not recall. There was a long, drawn out discussion over this at the Durham in Wonderland blog in the latter part of the year, 2006, I believe.</p>
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<p>Yes, it can.</p>
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<p>As I said before, equal scales of justice.</p>
<p>BCEagle, you offered a cherry-picking statistic from Kanin about the prevalence of false rape accusations. Most studies of false accusations come of rape come out with a figure of 10% or lower, but you seize on the figure of 60% from one particular study, a study which has been questioned by many. Instead of noting the controversial nature of the study, you presented the 60% as if it were well-respected among people who understand the issue. It is not.</p>
<p>You further muddy the waters when talking about the Innocence Project. We can all be glad that innocent men are freed, but their cases were not at all cases of false allegations of rape. Those victims were raped. They then incorrectly (and in most cases not on purpose) misidentified their attackers, who were not known to them. This is not a problem unique to rape victims. People are just <em>bad</em> at identifying perpetrators they don’t know. Undoubtedly many innocent people are in prison today, falsely identified as perpetrators of other crimes-- but those innocent people will never be freed by the Innocence Project, because robbers generally don’t leave DNA evidence behind for the Innocence Project to use.</p>
<p>But mistaken identification has nothing to do with the rape accusations we’ve been talking about here, where the alleged victim already knew the alleged attacker.</p>
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<p>I did not. If you think that I said something, please quote it.
That way we can see who is the liar.</p>
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<p>I came up with a figure of around 50% from the military study. Not
the Kanin study. I merely referenced the Kanin study as being more
recent. I did not specify a number from that study.</p>
<p>The significance of the Kanin study and the military study were the
methodology. They did not use a self-reporting approach; they did
in-depth analysis of the individual cases. Can you cite a similar
methodology in any of your studies with a 10% number?</p>
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<p>I listed the cases in the Innocence Project as a response to someone
who wrote that a conviction means that innocence or guilt is settled.</p>
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<p>I didn’t say that it does. I was merely responding to a point that
someone else made.</p>
<p>Please try to keep track of what I respond to. I quote what other
people say so that they and others know what I am responding to.</p>
<p>Please, please, please, quote me if you think that I said something.
For some reason, a lot of people here continually get it wrong.</p>
<p>BC is there any states where jury can not choose to beleive whomever they want? I still wonder which if any states require jury to be instructed to beleive the woman. What is so unequal?</p>
<p>BCEagle, does it occur to you that the “in-depth analysis” of rape accusations, in some cases including polygraphs, might cause a lot of actual rape victims to withdraw their allegations rather than go through yet another grilling? That actual rape victims, being hounded in this way, might say, “OK fine I made it up” rather than continue the process?</p>
<p>I don’t know the actual prevalence of false rape accusations. I suspect it might vary by location. But I do know that having to go through a long grueling process just to report a crime would tend to discourage reports. For example, my house was recently burglarized. I called the police, who responded and took a report. But if they had said, you have to be grilled, you have to take a polygraph to continue this report, I would have stopped. It’s just not worth it-- the criminal probably won’t be caught anyway, my insurance deductible is so high I won’t get any insurance, what’s the point. Similarly, a true rape victim having to undergo the “in-depth analysis,” knowing his/her rapist probably won’t be convicted anyway, might well decide to give up even though he/she was telling the truth. He or she might decide she just wants it to be over with. So I’m deeply skeptical of the military analysis.</p>
<p>my point about being a black american was an historical one. i was responding to mini’s comment (which was a response to my comment) about america’s long history of false rape accusations. in context, white females made many false accusations of rape against black men (which persists to some extent today, note the innocence project data cited above). </p>
<p>i should have qualified my statement by reiterating that HISTORICALLY, rapes committed against black women by white males (especially during slavery, jim crow era, and up to today but probably not to the same extent) went largely unpunished. i realize that’s not the point of this thread, but wanted to clarify my statement.</p>
<p>I understood your point.</p>
<p>I also understand the guy from the IMF was hoping this was still the case.</p>
<p>I want to say that I’m very opposed to the habit we have gotten into of trying people in the press. I also agree that arrests ought not be made prior to investigation. I do believe the alleged rapist ought to have some protection before arrest and conviction, frankly. I think the press fails to respect our consitutional rights to “innocence until proven guilty.”</p>
<p>However, I find the false rape allegations numbers at 50 or 60% to be highly suspect. I would take anything the military alleges in regard to rape reporting with an entire salt-lick since quite frankly the institution has an abysmal record on this issue, and we probably don’t even want to get into the exploitation of women, at a sexual level, in the military, up to and including commanding officers and admirals.</p>
<p>In the years I have counseled rape victims, I have found very few even willing to come forward to name their attackers, even in cases of severe PTSD. There is actually nothing that causes PTSD more reliably, with the exception of soldiers who have been in battle. The incidence of women I have seen for symptoms related to PTSD related to acquaintance rape far outstrips the number of women who have reported the incidence. “I don’t want to go through that.” “It’s not worth it.” “I just want to get on with my life.” etc…</p>
<p>I have, in my experience, not met even one person who has ever been falsely accused of rape. Actually, I’ve only ever met ONE person who has been accused of rape, and he is a priest, and he is accused of raping boys. I have yet to find out a friend of mine is a rapist, and I’m in my mid-forties. Over the years, I’ve found out plenty of women I know have been sexually assualted.</p>
<p>Anectodally speaking, and given the population I interact with, I don’t think this false accusation issue is quite the wieghty issue of non-reporting women, or women who have been “blamed” for thier own rape.</p>
<p>I respect your opinion, BCEagle, and everyone needs an advocate. But I just don’t see this as the main injustice in the argument at hand.</p>
<p>I’m trying to find any example of a case where the Innocence Project freed a man for a rape because the victim made up the accusation of rape. Can anyone supply such a case? In all the cases I’ve found, the victim was apparently actually raped, but the attacker was misidentified. I haven’t even found a case where the victim seems to have deliberately misidentified her attacker. These are not cases of false rape accusations. These are cases where the victim, perhaps impelled by faulty police work, wrongly identified her attacker.</p>
<p>poetgrl: i know it’s very serious, but i had to giggle a little about your IMF comment. yeah, he’s probably wishing he could turn back time a bit to the “good old days”… </p>
<p>also agree about the state of our media when it comes to criminal allegations. their behavior is shameful in many cases.</p>
<p>But I just don’t see this as the main injustice in the argument at hand.</p>
<p>Neither do I.</p>
<p>Fact: in post #143 in this thread, BCEagle, in discussing “false accusation rate[s]” and “false accusers,” set forth at length details of several cases (including the Central Park rape case, of all things) which very clearly and very obviously had nothing to do with false accusations of rape, but involved mistaken identification of the culprits in rapes that had indisputably taken place. I do not for a moment believe that in posting those details, he suddenly intended to change the subject from false accusations to mistaken identity. The post was highly misleading, if not intentionally disingenuous. As was his cherry-picking of one study finding absurdly high false accusation rates (which, for all I know, also involved mistaken identity rather than false accusations per se). After pulling these two little stunts, he has no more credibility on this subject.</p>
<p>The number of women I know who’ve never been raped or sexually assaulted is virtually zero. Out of all those women I know against whom such crimes have been committed, the total number of resulting convictions (so far as I know) is one. The percentage of total sexual assaults against women resulting in convictions is infinitesimal, largely because the consequences to women of reporting such an assault are almost uniformly horrifying. </p>
<p>The idea that the percentage of made-up, false accusations of men accused of rape is remotely comparable is laughable.</p>
<p>And yet, every single time a famous man is accused of rape (from Polanski to DSK), enormous numbers of people think “she made it up.” Because any woman would want to have to go through all that. Or else she asked for it. </p>
<p>So some of the comments on this thread don’t surprise me one bit.</p>
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<p>I find this very, very, very hard to believe, unless you are working with an EXTREMELY low threshold for defining “sexual assault.”</p>
<p>Consolation, any woman who has spent significant time riding a crowded subway has been sexually assaulted. A lot of men have grabbing and pinching fingers-- not most men, to be sure, but enough men so that a woman on crowded public transit will encounter one sooner or later.</p>
<p>And Donna, you’re perfectly right about BCEagle’s disingenousness. In post #143, he gives four supposed examples of false rape accusations, and in every case the victim was in fact raped. The Central Park jogger was found four hours after her assault, nearly dead of hypothermia, beaten to a coma, with one eye hanging out of its socket. Does BCEagle think she made up the story of her attack? Or maybe she consented? As I understand it, the victim did not identify the wrongly convicted youths-- bad police work led to their convictions. So what was the point of listing that attack in a conversation about women who made up stories of being raped?</p>