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A false accusation of rape is an allegation of rape that is not true. As a scientific matter, the frequency of false rape complaints to police or other legal authorities is difficult to determine and the absolute value remains unknown.

FBI statistics

FBI reports consistently put the number of "unfounded" rape accusations around 8%. The average rate of unfounded reports for Index crimes is 2%. However, "unfounded" is not synonymous with false allegation. Bruce Gross of the Forensic Examiner's 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.

It should also be considered that any confession to a false allegation is unlikely given the inherent social stigma associated with such false allegations (Duke Lacrosse scandal). In the US Army, rape allegations are often used as a means to gain leverage for benefits. Since the US Army has its own definition of criteria which they acknowledge meets no legal or medical definition, statistics are unfounded at best, yet these separate statistics about the same population of purported victims are reported to social agencies inflating any data provided. There are multiple cases where service members are forced under lawful order to provide both housing and financial support during an investigation, making the payoff for false allegations, and the subsequent silent action (no legal recourse) for confirmed cases of false accusations to obvious to ignore. Controversy over false allegations is usually founded under the concept of presumption. It is generally presumed the accuser is telling the truth since accusations are almost entirely subjective. This often puts police entities at a disadvantage, because they genuinely want to do what’s right socially and legally but inherent abuse of an unchecked system denies lawmakers accurate statistics to apply effective legislation for officers to enforce.

As it stands now, in the US Army, grabbing or attempting to grab another person’s butt is defined as sexual assault alongside forcible rape; they make no differentiation on the tile of the crime, just the punishment. These variants in data make it almost impossible to view the problem with any real insight and propagate the idea that women "make it up" across the DoD as a whole. The effect this has on actual victims of rape will likely never be known.

It’s clear that from evidence stand point it is extremely difficult to prove rape, physically. There are too many variants to count, however, in practice at least, most jurisdictions simply lower the bar for accusations and widen the definitions of rape rather than raise the bar for the elected DAs that have been prosecuting them (again Duke Lacrosse scandal). This leaves both parties with what is known as "video standards evidence" socially at least, against subjective claims of wrong doing. Because these claims are subjective both against and by the accused, it’s widely understood that the only level of evidence qualified to dispute claims of false allegations is an undisputed electronic confession of the accuser. Short of this most false allegations will likely never be investigated or pursued because of social blowback of questioning a "victim". This isn’t to say all women are lying, but like men, some simply do.

Another widely accepted problem with false rape accusations is the general and official education of the military population and their spouses. They are taught to believe that any contact without the express permission of the recipient can be viewed as sexual assault. Under Army regulations this permission can be revoked verbally during the conduct of an investigation, which places all married military service members at risk of false accusations under AR 608-18. This makes the practice of system abuse almost inevitable, and with no actions taken against false claims, it’s guaranteed. The US Army uses an agency known as the Family Advocacy Program (FAP) for its handling of suspected abuse claims. FAP is neither a medical or legal body, but uses both approaches to case management. Since this service is congressionally mandated with conditioned federal money, FAP is free to use either legal or medical course of action and interrogation when substantiating a claim by their definitions, to support their program. This practice often denies the service member any recourse, as they are not protected by their patient rights, nor is there a legal venue of defense. This is evident by the open availability the program for both spouse and service member, and no visible dependent enrolled as a patient in any program in NC. Spouse enrollment does not qualify FAP for the conditioned federal monies; there is simply no profit in this (AR 600-18). The office at Ft Bragg NC currently employs approx. 2 dozen highly paid GS grade counselors and is commanded by an O-6 Colonel, which counsels roughly 300-400 soldiers quarterly. In this revolving door program, in order for the FAP to qualify for the conditioned dollars, they must maintain a certain number of soldiers enrolled, based on the size of their post, in order to stay relevant they NEED substantiated cases or they close. This effectively has created a widely citizen audience for any and all accusations levied at service members. More often than not, when cases are dismissed in local jurisdictions even in light of Polygraph examinations by the service members, they are taken and used by the Army despite this, and we see double reporting in statistics. For example:

If 500 cases of suspected abuse or rape come thru Cumberland County courts and 250 of them are dismissed, that would be 250 cases of substantiated accusations. In a military community if 300 of the accusations were against service members, then all 300 of them would nominally be substantiated with in FAP accepted practice. Since the Ft Bragg offices report statistics to the county, the over count for substantiated and filed cases would jump from 250 out of 500 to 550 (total of military and civil findings) out of 800 (total number of civil case and military cases. This makes looking at accusations and even substantiated data almost impossible from a legislative point of view. With the final count of 800 being used to quantify regulation and law, and 550 substantiated cases to warrant conditioned federal moneys when applied against their population bases. It’s an endless loop, of federal dollars from the Violence against Women Act (VAWA), which low income districts in most states can’t afford to pass up. This is a silent partnership, that has largely devastated military marriages in droves by promoting and rewarding acrimonious divorces against service members, and substantially increases the suicide rate among Males in the Army. (No Statistics are available yet, the Army will not formally release data relevant to FAP and suicide rates publically)

Recently the refusal of the Army’s FAP to disclose the total number of investigations involved in pending divorces has drawn criticism by local elected officials in NC under its newly elected majority. Official fact finding meetings and talks are suspected to be underway by Mar2013 in Cumberland and Moore counties.

British Home Office

The largest and most rigorous study was commissioned by the British Home Office and based on 2,643 sexual assault cases (Kelly, Lovett, and Regan, 2005). Of these, 8% were classified by the police department as false reports. Yet 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.

Police in Victoria (Australia)

Another large-scale study was conducted in Australia, with 850 rapes reported to the Victoria police between 2000 and 2003 (Heenan & Murray, 2006). 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.

Kanin's report

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 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 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. 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."

Rumney

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".

Lisak

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

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."

Other

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%.

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."

See also

• False allegation of child sexual abuse
• Recovered memory therapy
• Innocence Project
• Centurion Ministries
• Duke lacrosse case, a famous example of a false rape allegation in 2006

References

1. The Legacy of the Prompt Complaint Requirement, Corroboration Requirement, and Cautionary Instructions on Campus Sexual Assault Forthcoming
2. "Section II: Crime Index Offenses Reported". FBI, 1996.
3. "False Allegations, Recantations, and Unfounding in the Context of Sexual Assault". Attorney General's Sexual Task Force, SATF Oregon.
4. ^ Gross, Bruce (Spring 2009). "False Rape Allegations: An Assault On Justice". Forensic Examiner.
5. Kelly. L., Lovett, J., Regan, L. (2005). "A gap or a chasm? Attrition in reported rape cases". Home Office Research Study 293.
6. 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.
7. 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)
8. Heenan, Melanie; Murray, Suellen (2006). "Study of Reported Rapes in Victoria 2000-2003, Summary Research Report". Abstracts Database – National Criminal Justice Reference Service.
9. 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)
10. ^ 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)
11. ^ 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.
12. ^ Rumney, Philip N.S. (2006). "False Allegations of Rape". Cambridge Law Journal 65 (1): 128–158. doi:10.1017/S0008197306007069.
13. Stewart (1981) quoted in Rumney, Philip N.S. (2006). "False Allegations of Rape". Cambridge Law Journal 65 (1): 128–158
14. DiCanio, M. (1993). The encyclopedia of violence: origins, attitudes, consequences. New York: Facts on File. ISBN 978-0-8160-2332-5.
15. Taylor, J. (1987). "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) 10: 59–116.

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