A compendium of studies from the 1990s found that the Feminist Fantasy Tax is calculated based on faulty inputs.
ABSTRACT: Empirical evidence does not support the widespread belief that women are extremely unlikely to make false accusations of male sexual misconduct. Rather the research on accusations of rape, sexual harassment, incest, and child sexual abuse indicates that false accusations have become a serious problem. The motivations involved in making a false report are widely varied and include confusion, outside influence from therapists and others, habitual lying, advantages in custody disputes, financial gain, and the political ideology of radical feminism. […]
Begin with evidence of false accusation of rape, the crime which has become not only the metaphor for all cases of sexual misconduct but for male sexuality itself. Alan Dershowitz (1991), for example, has further harassed his students by telling them that an annual F.B.I. survey of 1600 law enforcement agencies discovered that 8% of rape charges are completely unfounded. That figure, which has held steadily over the past decade, is moreover at least twice as high as for any other felony. Unfounded charges of assault, which like rape is often productive of conflicting testimony, comprise only 1.6% of the total compared to the 8.4% recorded for rape.
Unfounded rape charges are twice as high as any other felony. More women lie about being raped than about any other criminal perpetration upon them. Why is this? One, women gain a lot from passing off a rape lie. Psychologically, they gain “re-virginization” from an awkward welling of regret after, say, a one night stand (or a UVA shattered glass ganglia rape). Socially, they gain an air lifted provision of support — financial and emotional — from family and friends. They also avoid potential social ostracism from dating badboys. Finally, some women are simply malevolent and impulsive, and utilize the expedience of a false rape accusation to slake a thirst for vengeance or to assuage a bitterness brought on by sexual market failure. (Recall from CH tomes of yore that success in the sexual market is defined differently for women than it is for men. If women don’t extract commitment from a worthy man, they have failed.)
And false rape accusations, vile as they are, are undoubtedly encouraged by rooted social and legal incentives. If the jurisprudence, academic, and media industrial complexes are biased to favor women’s accounts of lurid sexual events, then some women at the margins will be tempted to leverage that spontaneous favoritism for their own ends. This is precisely what happened in the catfishing UVA rape hoax story.
Although useful, the F.B.I. and DNA data on sex crimes result from unstructured number gathering. More informative, therefore, are the results of a focused study of the false allegation question undertaken by a team headed by Charles P McDowell (McDowell & Hibler, 1985) of the U.S. Air Force Special Studies Division. Its significance derives not only from its scholarly credentials but also its time of origin, 1984/85, a period during which rape had emerged as a major issue, but before its definition included almost any form of non-consensual sex.
The McDowell team studied 556 rape allegations. Of that total, 256 could not be conclusively verified as rape. That left 300 authenticated cases of which 220 were judged to be truthful and 80, or 27%, were judged as false. In his report Charles McDowell stated that extra rigor was applied to the investigation of potentially false allegations. To be considered false one or more of the following criteria had to be met: the victim unequivocally admitted to false allegation, indicated deception in a polygraph test, and provided a plausible recantation. Even by these strict standards, slightly more than one out of four rape charges were judged to be false.
It’s easy to lie about rape, there is sometimes incentive to do so, and the numbers back it up. Reminder: Men’s lives are ruined by false accusations of rape. Women who lie about rape know this, but they don’t care.
Needless to say, false rape fabulists also harm real victims of real rape, who must suffer under the pall of incredulity incited by their femme fatale sistren.
The McDowell report has itself generated controversy even though, when rape is a frequent media topic, it is not widely known. Its calculations are no doubt problematic enough to raise serious questions. If, out of 556 rape allegations, 256 could not be conclusively verified as rape, then a large number, 46%, entered a gray area within which more than a few, if not all, of the accusations could have been authentic. If so, the 27% false allegation figure obtained from the remaining 300 cases could be badly skewed. Moreover, the study itself focused on a possibly non-representative population of military personnel.
The McDowell team did in fact address these questions in follow-up studies. They recruited independent reviewers who were given 25 criteria derived from the profiles of the women who openly admitted making a false allegation. If all three reviewers agreed that the rape allegation was false, it was then listed by that description. The result: 60% of the accusations were identified as false. McDowell also took his study outside the military by examining police files from a major midwestern and a southwestern city. He found that the finding of 60% held (Farrell, 1993, pp. 321-329).
Here’s a bet I’m willing to take: There are more false rape accusations than there are false paternity accusations. The big difference? Women aren’t vilified or thrown in jail for cuckolding men.
Finally, the false rape accusation money shot: The prevalence of FRAs on college campuses.
Equally revealing were addenda following Kanin’s basic report. They reported studies in two large Midwestern state universities which covered a three-year period ending in 1988. The finding of the combined studies was that among a total of 64 reported rapes exactly 50% were false. Kanin found these results significant because the women in the main report tended to gather in the lower socioeconomic levels, thus raising questions about correlations of false allegation with income and educational status. After checking figures gathered from university police departments, he therefore reported that “quite unexpectedly then, we find that these university women, when filing a rape complaint, were as likely to file a false as a valid charge.” In addition, Kanin cited still another source (Jay, 1991) which supported findings of high frequency false allegations in the universities. On the basis of these studies, Kanin felt it reasonable to conclude that “false rape accusations are not uncommon” (p.90).
Some women who file false rape allegations are mentally ill. Some women, especially college students, are doctrinaire feminists. Some women push the FRA button to blow up dull relationships or stoke jealousy and white knight-ism in third parties. But most, I’d bet, are women showing acute symptoms of Regret Rape, that condition of emotional duress primarily afflicting women who have made voluntary and consensual, if rash, decisions to sleep with men who didn’t fancy the women as much as they fancied the men. Or, similarly, these Regret Rape women consensually slept with men whom the women later retroactively deemed unworthy of their sex.
It’s time to have a serious national conversation about false rape accusations. NPR… your move.
Filed under: Feminist Idiocy, Ugly Truths
