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The extents of false reporting and false accusations of rape are disputed. A.W. Burgess and R.R. Hazelwood state that "little is published which addresses the issue and concept of false allegation", asserting that classification of "false reporting" generally makes no distinction between complainants who wilfully misreport and complainants who mistakenly identify innocent people. The journalist Dick Haws discusses cases in which figures on false reporting used by journalists have ranged from 2% to 50% depending on their sources:

"... one explanation for such a wide range in the statistics might simply be that they come from different studies of different populations... But there's also a strong political tilt to the debate. A low number would undercut a belief about rape as being as old as the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife: that some women, out of shame or vengeance ... claim that their consensual encounters or rebuffed advances were rapes. If the number is high, on the other hand, advocates for women who have been raped worry it may also taint the credibility of the genuine victims of sexual assault."

Michelle J. Anderson of the Villanova University School of Law states: "As a scientific matter, the frequency of false rape complaints to police or other legal authorities remains unknown." The FBI's 1996 Uniform Crime Report states that 8% of reports of forcible rape were determined to be unfounded upon investigation, but that percentage does not include cases where an accuser fails or refuses to cooperate in an investigation or drops the charges. A British study using a similar methodology that does not include the accusers who drop out of the justice process found a false reporting rate of 8% as well. DiCanio (1993) states that while researchers and prosecutors do not agree on the exact percentage of false allegations, they generally agree on a range of two to eight percent.

In 1994, Dr. Eugene J. Kanin of Purdue University investigated the incidences of false rape allegations made to the police in one small urban community between 1978 and 1987. He states that unlike those in many larger jurisdictions, this police department had the resources to "seriously record and pursue to closure all rape complaints, regardless of their merits." He further states each investigation "always involves a serious offer to polygraph the complainants and the suspects." and "the complainant must admit that no rape had occurred. She is the sole agent who can say that the rape charge is false." The falseness of the allegations was not decided by the police, Dr. Kanin, nor upon physical or testimonial evidence. The number of false rape allegations in the studied period was 45; this was 41% of the 109 total complaints filed in this period.

Criticism of Dr. Kanin's report include Dr. David Lisak, an associate professor of psychology and director of the Men’s Sexual Trauma Research Project at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. In the September/October 2007 issue of the Sexual Assault Report he states “Kanin’s 1994 article on false allegations is a provocative opinion piece, but it is not a scientific study of the issue of false reporting of rape. It certainly should never be used to assert a scientific foundation for the frequency of false allegations.” He further states “ simply reiterates the opinions of the police officers who concluded that the cases in question were ‘false allegations.’” Lasik cites page 13 of Investigating Sexual Assaults from the International Association of Chiefs of Police which says polygraph tests for sexual assault victims are contraindicated in the investigation process and that their use is “based on the misperception that a significant percentage of sexual assault reports are false,”. Lasik goes on that “It is noteworthy that the police department from which Kanin derived his data used or threatened to use the polygraph in every case… The fact that it was the standard procedure of this department provides a window on the biases of the officers who conducted the rape investigations, biases that were then echoed in Kanin’s unchallenged reporting of their findings.”

A 2006 paper by N.S. Rumney in the Cambridge Law Journal provided an exhaustive account of studies of false reporting in the USA, New Zealand and the UK. A tabulated list of studies on false reporting published between 1968 and 2005 placed the percentage of false reports between a minimum on 1.5% (Theilade and Thomsen, 1986) and a maximum of 90% (Stewart, 1981).

Rumney notes that early researchers tended to accept uncritically Freudian theories which purported to explain the prevalence of false allegations, while in more recent literature there has been "a lack of critical analysis of those who claim a low false reporting rate and the uncritical adoption of unreliable research findings" (p.157). Rumney concludes that "as a consequence of such deficiencies within legal scholarship, factual claims have been repeatedly made that have only limited empirical support. This suggests widespread analytical failure on the part of legal scholarship and requires an acknowledgment of the weakness of assumptions that have been constructed on unreliable research evidence."

According to a 2005 U.S. Defense Department Inspector General report, approximately 73% of women and 72% of men at the military service academies believe that false accusations of sexual assault are a problem.

Taylor (1987) wrote that "suspicion and disbelief of women who charge men with rape have for centuries had a stranglehold on laws nominally designed to protect women against rape. As a result, many women did not report or prosecute rapes because the process was so often humiliating."

Widely reported examples of false accusations of rape include those of Mabel Hallam, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, Cathy Crowell Webb, Tawana Brawley, Crystal Gail Mangum and Danmell Ndonye.

See also

• False allegation of child sexual abuse

References

1. Hazelwood, R. R., & Burgess, A. W. (2001). Practical aspects of rape investigation: a multidisciplinary approach. CRC series in practical aspects of criminal and forensic investigations. CRC Press. ISBN 0849300762 - p.178
2. The Elusive Numbers on False Rape November/December 1997
3. The Legacy of the Prompt Complaint Requirement, Corroboration Requirement, and Cautionary Instructions on Campus Sexual Assault Forthcoming
4. Crime Index Offenses Reported 1996
5. A gap or a chasm? Attrition in reported rape cases Home Office Research - February 2005
6. DiCanio, M. (1993). The encyclopedia of violence : origins, attitudes, consequences. New York : Facts on File
7. Kanin, Eugene J., "False Rape Allegations", Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 23, No. 1, Feb 1994, p. 81. (MS Word document at the Internet Archive)
8. Rumney, N.S., "False Allegations of Rape", Cambridge Law Journal, 65, March, 2006, pp.128-158
9. "How to Recognize False Allegations of Rape". The Center for Military Readiness. September 4, 2006. Retrieved 2008-02-15.
10. Taylor, J. Rape and women's credibility: Problems of recantations and false accusations echoed in the case of Cathleen Crowell Webb and Gary Dotson. Harvard Women's Law Journal (now Harvard Journal of Law & Gender), 1987, volume 10, page 59.
11. Twisted motive behind rape story, New York Post, Sept. 18, 2009

• Rape