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A false accusation of rape is the intentional reporting of a rape by an alleged victim when no rape has occurred.

Estimates of the prevalence of false accusations

Rates of false accusation may have been misrepresented as larger or smaller than they are. A rape case may be closed as "unfounded" without a conclusion, but there are many reasons other than falsity for which a report that is not false may be classified as "unfounded." Furthermore, there are many accusations that cannot be proven false, but cannot be proven true either. These are classified as founded rape allegations and are pursued.

Crown Prosecution Service report (2011–2012)

A report by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) examined rape allegations in England and Wales over a 17-month period between January 2011 and May 2012. It showed that in 35 cases was it considered that there was enough evidence to prosecute a person for making a false allegation of rape compared to 5,651 prosecutions for rape. Keir Starmer, the head of the CPS, stated that the "mere fact that someone did not pursue a complaint or retracted it, is not of itself evidence that it was false" and that it is a "misplaced belief" that false accusations of rape are commonplace. He added that the report also showed that a significant number of false allegations of rape (and domestic violence) "involved young, often vulnerable people. About half of the cases involved people aged 21 years old and under, and some involved people with mental health difficulties. In some cases, the person alleged to have made the false report had undoubtedly been the victim of some kind of offence, even if not the one that he or she had reported."

Lisak (2010)

David Lisak's study, published in 2010 in Violence Against Women, classified as false 8 out of the 136 (5.9%) reported rapes at a major northeastern university over a ten-year period.

Applying IACP guidelines, a case was classified as a false report if there was evidence that a thorough investigation was pursued and that the investigation had yielded evidence that the reported sexual assault had in fact not occurred. A thorough investigation would involve, potentially, multiple interviews of the alleged perpetrator, the victim, and other witnesses, and where applicable, the collection of other forensic evidence (e.g., medical records, security camera records). For example, if key elements of a victim’s account of an assault were internally inconsistent and directly contradicted by multiple witnesses and if the victim then altered those key elements of his or her account, investigators might conclude that the report was false. That conclusion would have been based not on a single interview, or on intuitions about the credibility of the victim, but on a “preponderance” of evidence gathered over the course of a thorough investigation."

It is important to point out that this report commits what is commonly termed The Argument From Ignorance, i.e., that it assumes an allegation to be true unless it is proven to be false. This method by Lisak goes against the generally accepted scientific method, in which a statement is considered false until shown to be true with evidence.

Police in Victoria, Australia (2006)

A large-scale study was conducted in Australia, with 850 rapes reported to the Victoria police between 2000 and 2003. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, the researchers examined 812 cases with sufficient information to make an appropriate determination, and found that 2.1% of these were classified by police as false reports. All of these complainants were then charged or threatened with charges for filing a false police report.

Rumney (2006)

A 2006 paper by Philip N.S. Rumney in the Cambridge Law Journal offers a review of studies of false reporting in the USA, New Zealand and the UK. Rumney draws two conclusions from his review of literature. First, the police continue to misapply the "no-crime" or "unfounding" criteria. Studies by Kelly et al. (2005), Lea et al. (2003), HMCPSI/HMIC (2002), Harris and Grace (1999), Smith (1989), and others found that police decisions to no-crime were frequently dubious and based entirely on the officer's personal judgement. Rumney notes that some officers seem to "have fixed views and expectations about how genuine rape victims should react to their victimization." He adds that "qualitative research also suggests that some officers continue to exhibit an unjustified scepticism of rape complainants, while others interpret such things as lack of evidence or complaint withdrawal as 'proof' of a false allegation."

Rumney's second conclusion is that it is impossible to "discern with any degree of certainty the actual rate of false allegations" due to the fact that many of the studies of false allegations have adopted unreliable or untested research methodologies. He argues, for instance, that in addition to their small sample size the studies by Maclean (1979) and Stewart (1981) used questionable criteria to judge an allegation to be false. MacLean deemed reports "false" if, for instance, the victim did not appear "dishevelled" and Stewart, in one instance, considered a case disproved, stating that "it was totally impossible to have removed her extremely tight undergarments from her extremely large body against her will".

British Home Office study (2005)

A 2005 study, "A gap or a chasm? Attrition in reported rape cases" was the largest and most rigorous study to date commissioned by the British Home Office on UK rape crime, from the initial reporting of a rape through to legal prosecutions. The study was based on 2,643 sexual assault cases (Kelly, Lovett, and Regan, 2005). Of these, police departments classified 8% as false reports.

The researchers noted that some of these classifications were based simply on the personal judgments of the police investigators and were made in violation of official criteria for establishing a false allegation. Closer analysis of this category applying the Home Office counting rules for establishing a false allegation and excluding cases where the application of the cases where confirmation of the designation was uncertain reduced the percentage of false reports to 3%. The researchers concluded that "one cannot take all police designations at face value" and that "here is an over-estimation of the scale of false allegations by both police officers and prosecutors." Moreover, they added:

The interviews with police officers and complainants’ responses show that despite the focus on victim care, a culture of suspicion remains within the police, even amongst some of those who are specialists in rape investigations. There is also a tendency to conflate false allegations with retractions and withdrawals, as if in all such cases no sexual assault occurred. This reproduces an investigative culture in which elements that might permit a designation of a false complaint are emphasised (later sections reveal how this also feeds into withdrawals and designation of ‘insufficient evidence’), at the expense of a careful investigation, in which the evidence collected is evaluated.

FBI statistics

FBI reports from 1996 consistently put the number of "unfounded" rape accusations around 8%. In contrast, the average rate of unfounded reports for "Index crimes" tracked by the FBI is 2%.

However, "unfounded" is not synonymous with false allegation. Bruce Gross of the Forensic Examiner says that:

This statistic is almost meaningless, as many of the jurisdictions from which the FBI collects data on crime use different definitions of, or criteria for, "unfounded." That is, a report of rape might be classified as unfounded (rather than as forcible rape) if the alleged victim did not try to fight off the suspect, if the alleged perpetrator did not use physical force or a weapon of some sort, if the alleged victim did not sustain any physical injuries, or if the alleged victim and the accused had a prior sexual relationship. Similarly, a report might be deemed unfounded if there is no physical evidence or too many inconsistencies between the accuser's statement and what evidence does exist. As such, although some unfounded cases of rape may be false or fabricated, not all unfounded cases are false.

Kanin (1994)

In 1994, 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 number of false rape allegations in the studied period was 45; this was 41% of the 109 total complaints filed in this period. The researchers verified, whenever possible, for all of the complainants who recanted their allegations, that their new account of the events matched the accused's version of events.

Criticism

Critics of Kanin's report include David Lisak, an associate professor of psychology and director of the Men's Sexual Trauma Research Project at the University of Massachusetts Boston. 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."

According to Lisak, Kanin's study lacked any kind of systematic methodology and did not independently define a false report, instead recording as false any report which the police department classified as false. The department classified reports as false which the complainant later said were false, but Lisak points out that Kanin's study did not scrutinize the police's processes or employ independent checkers to protect results from bias.

Kanin, Lisak writes, took his data from a police department whose investigation procedures are condemned by the U.S. Justice Department and the International Association of Chiefs of Police. These procedures include the almost universal threat, in this department, of polygraph testing of complainants, which is viewed as a tactic of intimidation that leads victims to avoid the justice process and which, Lisak says, is "based on the misperception that a significant percentage of sexual assault reports are false." The police department's "biases...were then echoed in Kanin’s unchallenged reporting of their findings."

Bruce Gross writes in the Forensic Examiner that Kanin's study is an example of the limitations of existing studies on false rape accusations. "Small sample sizes and non-representative samples preclude generalizability." Philip N.S. Rumney questions the reliability of Kanin's study stating that it "must be approached with caution". He argues that the study's most significant problem is Kanin's assumption "that police officers abided by departmental policy in only labeling as false those cases where the complainant admitted to fabrication. He does not consider that actual police practice, as other studies have shown, might have departed from guidelines."

Other studies

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 2% to 8%.

Profile

The typical person making a false accusation is a white woman between 21 and 30 years of age. A false accusation may be perpetrated out of a desire for attention or sympathy, anger or revenge, or to cover up inappropriate behavior.

See also

• False allegation of child sexual abuse
• Recovered memory therapy
• Innocence Project — advocacy
• Centurion Ministries — advocacy
• Duke lacrosse case — a famous example of a false rape allegation in 2006
• Tawana Brawley rape allegations — an example from 1987
• Racial hoax

References

1. ^ Hazelwood, Robert R.; Burgess, Ann Wolbert, eds. (2008). Practical Aspects of Rape Investigation. CRC Press.
2. ^ Gross, Bruce (Spring 2009). "False Rape Allegations: An Assault On Justice". Forensic Examiner.
3. Bowcott, Owen (March 13, 2013). "Rape investigations 'undermined by belief that false accusations are rife'". The Guardian. Retrieved April 25, 2013.
4. Starmer, Keir (March 13, 2013). "False allegations of rape and domestic violence are few and far between". The Guardian. Retrieved April 25, 2013.
5. "Charging perverting the course of justice and wasting police time in cases involving allegedly false rape and domestic violence allegations" (PDF). Joint report to the Director of Public Prosecutions by Alison Levitt QC, Principal Legal Advisor, and the Crown Prosecution Service Equality and Diversity Unit. March 2013. Retrieved April 25, 2013.
6. ^ Lisak, David; Gardinier, Lori; Nicksa, Sarah C.; Cote, Ashley M. (2010). "False Allegations of Sexual Assualt: An Analysis of Ten Years of Reported Cases". Violence Against Women. 16 (12): 1318–1334. doi:10.1177/1077801210387747.
7. Heenan, Melanie; Murray, Suellen (2006). "Study of Reported Rapes in Victoria 2000-2003, Summary Research Report". Abstracts Database – National Criminal Justice Reference Service.
8. ^ Rumney, Philip N.S. (2006). "False Allegations of Rape". Cambridge Law Journal 65 (1): 128–158. doi:10.1017/S0008197306007069.
9. Stewart (1981) quoted in Rumney, Philip N.S. (2006). "False Allegations of Rape". Cambridge Law Journal 65 (1): 128–158
10. ^ Kelly. L., Lovett, J., Regan, L. (2005). "A gap or a chasm? Attrition in reported rape cases". Home Office Research Study 293.
11. Lonsway, Kimberley A.; Aschambault, Joanne; Lisak, David (2009). "False Reports: Moving Beyond the Issue to Successfully Investigate and Prosecute Non-Stranger Sexual Assault". The Voice 3 (1): 1–11.
12. Cybulska B (2007). "Sexual assault: key issues". J R Soc Med. 100 (7): 321–4. doi:10.1258/jrsm.100.7.321. PMC 1905867. PMID 17606752. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
13. "Section II: Crime Index Offenses Reported". FBI, 1996.
14. 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)
15. ^ Lisak, David (September/October 2007). "False allegations of rape: a critique of Kanin". Sexual Assault Report. 11 (1). {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
16. DiCanio, M. (1993). The encyclopedia of violence: origins, attitudes, consequences. New York: Facts on File. ISBN 978-0-8160-2332-5.

Further reading

• Lisak, David; Gardinier, Lori; Nicksa, Sarah C.; Cote, Ashley M. (2010). "False Allegations of Sexual Assualt: An Analysis of Ten Years of Reported Cases". Violence Against Women. 16 (12).

• Rape
• Criminal law
• Hoaxes
• Criminology