On September 5th,I will have been a Kossack for 14 years. Counting this one, I have written 252 diaries and nearly 40,000 comments. Many of those diaries have been on so-called women's issues, but those issues, affect every American with a heart and a conscience. This is a diary about rape, and it affects every one of us who isn't a sociopath. If you are a woman, it affects you. If you have a child, it affects you. If you care for a woman, it affects you. If you are or know an inmate, it affects you. If you care about justice, it affects you. Last, but hardly least, if you are a man, it affects you because men and boys are also victims. ( I personally know of a case where a pair of female Dominants roofied a man, beat, tortured, sodomized him, then dumped him in his car, which they drove to a back road and left him there, naked , bruised and battered. He was too ashamed to report it to pppthe police, fearing he would be ridiculed and not believed.)
Before I proceed further, let us look.at some cold, hard, horrible facts. These numbers are from RAINN.org's stat page.
STATISTICS
WHO ARE THE VICTIMS
80,600 Inmates
60,000 Children
321,000 12 or older
18,900 Military
90% WERE FEMALE
_________________
WHERE
55% at or near the victim 's home
15% in an open public place
12% in or near a relative's home
10% in an enclosed but public space like a parking lot or a garage
8% on school property
___________________
WHAT THEY WERE DOING
48% sleeping or other activity at home
29% traveling to or from work or school or traveling to shop or run errands
12% at work
7% attending school
5% unknown or other activity
______________________
WHO ARE THEIR RAPISTS
80% of rapists are known to their victims
19.5% strangers
39% acquaintances
33% current or former spouses or boy/girlfriends
6% more than one person or victim can remember
2.5% non-spouse relative
More than half of rapists referred to prosecutors have at least one prior conviction
____________________________
REPORTING And OUTCOMES
Out of every 1,000 rapes:
230 are reported to police
46 reports will lead to an arrest
9 cases will be referred to a prosecutor
5 will be lead to a felony conviction
____________________________
All too often, articles about rape, whether scholarly or popular, focus on how women can stay safe and avoid being sexually assaulted. There are lists of things women should and shouldn't do. The problem is that these "solutions" aren't realistic. Women often have no choice. Their job may require them to work at night. The classes they need may only be available at night. They may only have a chance to get to a college library at night if they are also working. The only parking available may be poorly lit. Ditto the streets they have to walk,or the corners they have to wait on for public transportation ( in urban areas, people often rely on it because cars, gas and parking are often prohibitively expensive). Don't open the door to strangers, but what about the guy delivering takeout you ordered? And how can you avoid being assaulted while asleep in your own home? No lock is foolproof and landlords aren't thrilled with your adding additional ones.
You can take all the precautions in the world and still be sexually assaulted. you can be very careful to avoid all the places where a Ted Bundy might be lurking,but your rapist is far more likely to be the guy who.sits next to you in math class, a co-worker, or an ex-boyfriend. Or even the man you invited in for coffee after a date, some one you liked but weren't ready to have sex with yet but who wouldn't take no for an answer.
And now to the one statistic that seems to matter most to.a few ( but fortunately not most) men:
FALSE REPORTS AND WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS
One myth that is always raised when#Me Too is discussed is that we shouldn't automatically believe women who report rape because women lie. They lie frequently, according to Men's Rights Activists, for revenge, because the sex wasn't terrific, to.get attention or to cover their butts. But is it actually true?
According to one study, 2 to 10%of reports are false. The F.B.I puts it at 8%. There is one poorly done study that found the rate to be, 40% but no other studies have replicated that figure, and the methodology was extremely flawed. Most false accusations are easily proven false after a background check, which the police do automatically as they should on both accuser and accused, because the reporter has a history of lying to police or of mental illness or both ( not that the mentally ill aren't raped; they are most definitely at risk, especially in a medical setting). This failure to do basic due diligence, compounded by a prosecutor facing an election, is what led to the botched handling of rhe Duke lacrosse team rape accusations. The accuser had made similar accusations befire and had a history of mental issues and lying to police and simply was not credible.
No,I cannot give you a link because I can't cut and paste on my Kindle. The figures come from a BBC report on Christine Blasey Ford's testimony on Brett Kavanaugh. Other sources ( other than sites like A Voice For Men or Return of Kings, which are not exactly unbiased) pretty much agree.
How often is some unfortunate innocent man ( and I am not being sarcastic here; being wrongly convicted and spending years in prison for a crime you didn't commit is horrible) falsely convicted? And for what reason? Lets look.beyond the obvious vengeful ex.
I looked at several extremely reputable sources like the Innocence Project cases for information on sexual assault cases where the accused was exonerated, usually by DNA evidence. Most of these cases ( either 69% or 72% depending on the source) were not the result of false accusations ( though in some, witnesses actually committed perjury) but of misidentification. These were usually stranger rapes, which are easier to prosecute because the defense can't argue this was a revenge accusation or the usual consensual sex defense.
Why is misidentification somcommon? Many studies have shown that eyewitness testimony simply isn't reliable. Human memory doesn't work like a video recorder. People under high stress and in a traumatic situation make mistakes, and police can unintentionally give clues that influence the witness' identification in a photo array or line-up which can lead the witness to choose the person closest to what they remember. It turns out, as Elizabeth Loftus discovered in her research on memory, that human memory is extremely malleable and false memories are all.too easy to create. Distance can also affect how accurately someone sees a perpetrator, as can vision issues and lighting. Last, but hardly least and most pernicious of all, mistaken identity is most likely when witness and accused of different races, and it doesn't matter which races are involved or in what role. We simply do not see the more subtle differences in races other than our own.
According to the Innocence Project, where misidentification led to a wrongful conviction:
42% were cross-racial identifications
32% involved misidentification by multiple witnesses
27% involved misidentification based on a composite sketch
African-Americans were 62% of those exonerated of all crimes based on DNA Evidence.
When I took a class in criminal.law ( I am a paralegal as well as a librarian, teacher and writer), my instructor was a retired Navy JAG corps judge who had served as prosecutor and defense lawyer as well as teaching the UCMJ at the Navy's law school. In that last capacity, he used to do an experiment to show his students how unreliable eyewitness testimony is. He would leave his briefcase and wallet on his desk and walk to the window and fiddle with the shade while complaining about the sun being in his eyes. A confederate would run in, grab the wallet and run out. The students, of course, would yell at the thief, alerting the professor to the theft.
He would then ask students to write down a description while waiting for the MPs to arrive, " while their memories were still fresh". He would then have them read their description to the class. The thief was tall, short and average height; heavy and slender; wore a red, purple, blue jacket with black, brown or navy pants; had an olive, fair complexion; young and middle-aged. In other words, all.over the map. The one thing they got right was the race--because he was blond. Then he would call in the confederate, who was a white, blond man, aged 31, in a navy jacket and pants, 5'10" and average build. Nobody, even the ones in the front row about 10 feet away, got it completely right.
He had to stop his little demonstration after a burly Marine launched himself at the intruder, wrestled him to the ground and nearly broke the volunteer,'s wrist wrenching his arms behind his back.
There were other reasons for wrongful convictions beyond misidentification.
44% misapplication of forensic science. People make mistakes.
17% involved informants
28% were false confessions
*******49% were 21 or younger at the time of the arrest
*******33%were 18 or younger
*******10% had mental health or mental capacity issues
In other sources, I found a small number of cases where an innocent man went to.prison due to prosecutorial malfeasance, such as concealing exculpatory evidence from the defense.
So, yes, there are real problems of wrongful convictions, but false accusations are not the main reason. Even among the cases which are called false, there are distinctions. There are no universal definitions of "false" or "unfounded" cases. Sometimes, someone is lying--an actual false accusation under oath or in an official.statement by a a "victim". In other words, perjury is committed. Sometimes it is someone other than the victim is lying. The problem I ran into is that when you look up perjury in rape cases, there is no differentiation between the alleged victim making a false accusation and, say, a forensics tech or an officer lying under oath. And that makes a huge difference numberwise... I looked at a lot of websites and found several.factors lumped together. In some cases unintentional misidentification is thrown into .the mix.
Sometimes what occurred doesn't match the legal definition of assault. In others, the victim refuses to continue cooperating because of the trauma or doesn't come in for follow-up interviews as quickly as police would like, so the police close it down. In still others, the police simply don't accept it because of their own bias, especially if the accused is an ex and claims it was consensual. That last category is very important. Police have human biases, as Black Lives Matter has shown us over and over and over again. Those biases influence how thoroughly investigations are conducted, who is believed, and who gets prosecuted. Not every law enforcement officer is an Olivia Benson on SVU, sympathetic to the victim, willing to work with him or her, understanding of how trauma affects victims, and well trained in how to question a victim to elicit the best information possible from a person who has just been through the worst experience of his or her life. Some of them are far more sympathetic to the accused man, especially if there was a prior sexual relationship, if the woman has been drinking, orif, like Rush Limbaugh, they consider a sexually active woman to be slutty. Some are even rapists themselves. Remember that next time the subject of false accusations of rape comes up.
There are probably some errors here. I don't have access to a university library where I could use Lexis or solid criminal justice statistics. I tried to find the best, least-biased sources available to me. If you have better information from better sources, please share.
I intend to write a follow-up describing what a victim faces if she chooses to report and why she may choose not to. The research for a diary like this takes time, so it may be next week or the week afterBut I suspect it may be eye-opening for some people. It isn't a fun process. I worked with victims as a volunteer at a rape crisis center, so I actually have some real life experience.
UPDATED: thanks to ksmoore777 for finding more recent data on how many rapes go unreported. In 2017, it was 77%. It makes the percentage of arrests and prosecutions even lower.
