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The existence and prevalence of false accusations of rape is a controversial topic. Detailed investigations using differing samples and methodologies have found between two and sixty percent of rape reports false, although both of those are extremes.
Statistics
The statistics on false accusations of rape vary widely, from 2% to Eugene Kanin's (1994) figure of 41%, which derived from a case study of a police agency in a metropolitan city in the Midwest. John Bancroft states that a search of the literature on false rape reports reveals that Kanin's figure of 41% false rape reports is regarded as unusually high. 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." 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%.
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 and as Bruce Gross of the Forensic Examiner explains,
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.
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 the 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.
Criticism
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:
"Kanin describes no effort to systemize his own ‘evaluation’ of the police reports—for example, by listing details or facts that he used to evaluate the criteria used by the police to draw their conclusions. Nor does Kanin describe any effort to compare his evaluation of those reports to that of a second, independent research— providing a ‘reliability’ analysis. This violates a cardinal rule of science, a rule designed to ensure that observations are not simply the reflection of the bias of the observer simply reiterates the opinions of the police officers who concluded that the cases in question were ‘false allegations.’"
Lisak 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,”. Lisak argues 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.” Lisak later performed his own study, published in 2010 in Violence Against Women, that classified 8 out of the 136 (5.9%) reported rapes at Northwestern University over a ten year period to be false.
Rumney
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."
Other
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."
A widely reported example of false accusations of rape is that of Danmell Ndonye. Other infamous examples of rape hoaxes include the Scottsboro boys (in 1931), the Tawana Brawley rape allegations in 1987 and the Duke lacrosse case in 2006.
See also
References
- Glenn Sacks (9/15/04). "Research Shows False Accusations Of Rape Common". San Francisco Daily Journal.
- The Legacy of the Prompt Complaint Requirement, Corroboration Requirement, and Cautionary Instructions on Campus Sexual Assault Forthcoming
- DiCanio, M. (1993). The encyclopedia of violence : origins, attitudes, consequences. New York : Facts on File
- Crime Index Offenses Reported 1996
- http://www.oregonsatf.org/resources/docs/False_Allegations.pdf
- A gap or a chasm? Attrition in reported rape cases Home Office Research - February 2005
- 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) - "Abstracts Database - National Criminal Justice Reference Service". Ncjrs.gov. Retrieved 2010-12-31.
- 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)
- http://www.ndaa.org/pdf/the_voice_vol_3_no_1_2009.pdf
- Lisak D., Gardinier L., Nicksa SC., Cote AM. (2010). False allegations of sexual assualt: an analysis of ten years of reported cases. Violence Against Women. 2010 Dec; 16(12):1318-34.
- Rumney, N.S., "False Allegations of Rape", Cambridge Law Journal, 65, March, 2006, pp.128-158
- 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.
- Twisted motive behind rape story, New York Post, Sept. 18, 2009