Has anyone encountered this study that says 50% of raper accusations are false? Here we have a guy defending it to the hilt.
There's a small Canadian politics themed subreddit that I like to follow. I was surprised to find a post claiming that a study showed that 50% of rape accusations are false:
The reforms we should be aiming for are lower reporting of sexual and domestic violence. We should primarily support paths of separating lives of complainants and accused.
The main reason for the low conviction rate is not only that there is usually no evidence, but the best information is that about 50% of rape complaints made to police are false.
Any effort to increase reporting is one that would make false reporting even worse. The primary reasons for false accusations are to escape accountability, but as shown in the Gomeshi trial, it can easily be a revenge.
The author of this post then tries to say that rapes that involve no "serious physical injury" should be tried in a criminal court. Which seems like a monumentally bad idea for someone scared of "false rape accusations" because civil courts render guilty verdicts based on a mere balance of probabilities, while criminal courts operate on guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But that's an issue for r/BadLegalAdvice.
Unless someone suffered serious injury, the courts should not make it their business to guess what might have happened. Unless serious injury occurred, it is a far more significant harm to merely be accused of sexual or domestic violence (even without conviction) than the accused offense.
I looked up the article this guy linked to, and I saw a study by a man named Eugene Kanin written in 1994. It turns out that he examined the police records from a small midwestern town from the 1970s, and based on what he found there he came to the conclusion that 50% of all rape accusations are false.
I then looked the article up on Wikipedia, and found that it has quite a large "criticism" section:
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."[21]
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.[14]
Kanin, Lisak writes, took his data from a police department which used investigation procedures (polygraphs) that are discouraged by the U.S. Justice Department and denounced by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. These procedures include the "serious offer", in this department, of polygraph testing of complainants, which is viewed as a tactic of intimidation that leads victims to avoid the justice process[14] and which, Lisak says, is "based on the misperception that a significant percentage of sexual assault reports are false."[21] The police department's "biases...were then echoed in Kanin's unchallenged reporting of their findings."[21] While also noting some of the same criticisms of Kanin, Rumney's 2006 metastudy of US and UK false rape allegation studies adds that "if, indeed, officers did abide by this policy then the 41% could, in fact, be an underestimate given the restrictive definition of false complaints offered by the police in this study. The reliability of these findings may be somewhat bolstered by the fact that the police appeared to record the details and circumstances of the fabrications."[22]
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."[2] 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."
The comment itself presents the study uncritically as the absolute truth despite these criticisms, and many of these criticisms are brought up in the Reddit thread. For example:
What a ridiculous statement. And no I do not believe your one source, from 1994, which referenced out dated statistics most of which predate the 1970's, which was not peer reviewed.
To which the OP replies:
The Kanin study is the only possible methodology for obtaining a lower bound estimate of false accusation rates. That the truth is unpopular, and doesn't fit the political narrative doesn't change the truth. Attacks on sampling and dating, merely support repeating the study methodology (has been done with repeated results) on a wider scale. Dishonest political forces punish these studies and repress the truth. Your linked statistics are the results of that systemic dishonesty.
[Note that the OP's comment was originally deleted by the mods for a personal insult of some sort, was edited by the OP, and reinstated.]
He doesn't even attempt to explain how the study is "the only possible methodology for obtaining a lower bound estimate of false accusation rates." This leads to a common theme in all of the OP's replies: critics are trying to suppress the truth (revealed by this one study), and critics are "evil supremacists," which I have no idea what that means.
Another critic of the Kanin article:
As others have pointed out, not only is that the best information, but it is extremely uncredible information. Kanin's "review" has been roundly criticized as being unscientific and methodologically unsound. It's been called nothing more than a "provocative opinion piece." As Lisak points out, it simply isn't capable of being called scientific, because instead of using anything resembling the scientific method, Kanin accepts uncritically the opinions of police officers in a small midwestern town about whether the rape allegation was true or false? Why does he do that? We don't know. Why were these cops so good? He doesn't tell us. He does tell us that they made every rape complainant submit to a polygraph -- a practice so useful for intimidating victims into silence and confusion that its use on complainants is banned in many jurisdictions. You might want to look for a credible study.
Lisak
He's the author of the feminist propaganda studies you prefer. That study used an interview protocol that forced investigators to presume belief in the complainant. For sure that protocol finds fewer liars than protocols designed to test for lies.
they made every rape complainant submit to a polygraph
Not true. Though they "offered" a polygraph test to most. The only criteria for determining whether a reported rape was false was the complainant admitting it was false. They furthermore followed up every admission where possible and confirmed that it matched what the accused's version of events was. The polygraph is merely an aggressive investigation technique. Its use is "this man in the white lab coat suggests you are lying, do you want to admit to that?" The only false-rape classifications are when the complainant says Yes. They admit to it because they were lying. There are plenty people strong enough to stick to the lie despite whatever the machine says. And so the total liars are underreported.
I'm not sure calling people "liars" or critics authors of "feminist propaganda studies" is good social science.
The main reason for the low conviction rate is not only that there is usually no evidence, but the best information is that about 50% of rape complaints made to police are false.
Funny since that study has been debunked. First of all, it studied a small Midwestern town, it wasn't national, or anything close to it. Everyone in the social sciences knows that you can't have such a small sample size, because it leads to all sorts of biases.
Second, it lumped the police not pressing charges, a not guilty verdict (doesn't mean the person was innocent, just not enough evidence for a guilty verdict), the victim getting the charges dropped, and other things as "false rape."
None of those things mean there was a false rape accusation. It just means that the case never went to trial, or never resulted in a guilty verdict for whatever reason.
Third, the study let the police determine what a "false rape accusation" was. The study never independently verified what any case of "false rape accusation." The police also used polygraphs to determine if someone was lying, which has been debunked as an evidence gathering method.
More credible studies place the rates of false rape accusations at ~2%. Which, it turns out, is around the same of any false crime reporting.
My guess is the Kanin study, the study you linked to, was actually measuring the proclivity of a small town Midwestern American police force to not take rape as seriously as other crimes, to actively discourage rape victims from coming forward, and to throw out rape accusations and never pursue them.
debunked
No. And right away, certain that only dishonest information is influencing you. While its better to have larger sample sizes than small, its not debunked. It was repeated with 2 other Kanin supervised investigators, and a somewhat similar US Air force protocol found over 60% false reporting rate. Its actually better evidence that its repeated accross multiple investigators, to prevent biases from any single one.
it lumped the police not pressing charges, a not guilty verdict (doesn't mean the person was innocent, just not enough evidence for a guilty verdict), the victim getting the charges dropped, and other things as "false rape."
Absolutely positively not. You didn't even read part of it, most likely. The only criteria for classifying a report as false was the complainant saying/admitting that no rape happened. False rape accusations were necessarily underclassified due to the ability of many to stick to a lie no matter what.
More credible studies place the rates of false rape accusations at ~2%
No study whatsoever has those results. Those are the "police department determinations" you criticized.
My guess is that evil supremacism motivates your information. Of course, powerful mainstream political forces can produce media criticism of facts that contradict their supremacy. It doesn't make the criticism honest.
I'm not sure what "evil supremacism" is, but if it debunks bad social science, I'm in.
Posted Feb 21, 2016, 9:35 PM UTC · edited