The rate of false claims is much, much lower than actual rape and sexual assault. It’s not non-existent, but we shouldn’t immediately assume a rape victim is lying.
More often than not, the default is to dismiss and downplay claims.
For the one case at Duke, I can pull dozens (probably hundreds) of real rape cases at universities.
My problem with lowering the legal standard from “beyond a reasonable doubt” to “believe victims”, isn’t that there are a lot of false reports.
Right now no one believes or prosecutes real reports because of rape culture, why would anyone bother with a fake report? However, if we decide all someone has to do is say “this person raped me” and that’s enough to put someone in jail then assholes are going to start filling false reports to hurt people they don’t like.
I believe that men and women are all people and that many people are assholes. So I think the same women who, as men, would commit violent crimes now have a shockingly easy way to hurt people. And even if you believe that women are better people than men and they would rarely do it no matter how easy it is, men can do it to.
All it would take is to meet up with someone, escape to a private space ideally with witnesses and now I can claim they raped me. I think that makes it dangerously easy for assholes of any genders to really hurt someone through the legal system.
I’d like to see what a functional legal system that cares more about protecting victims than it does about protecting “promising young men” looks like. One where we exterminate the rape culture that saturates our legal system. If we actually prosecuted and punished rape cases that currently ALREADY MEET the threshold of “beyond a reasonable doubt” that would by itself fix a huge part of the problem.
Also, until we fix our general rape culture you would just have tons of jury nullification, tons of judges and prosecutors throwing cases because the “threshold is too low”. People talk about jury nullification as if was a good thing, but 90% of the time it was used was for protecting white racists in Jim Crowe and protecting usually drunk drivers in vehicular homicide cases. It will be used here if people think the threshold of “believe victims” is too low.
“Believe women” for me works when interacting with the victim. Why people have to start picking apart a traumatic story when they hear it is insane to me. It’s crazy that we need rhetoric to tell people “if someone trusts you with a traumatic story, don’t be a dick about it”.
But we shouldn’t automatically believe as well. We need to doubt, not believe anyone who claims to be a victim.
The rate of false claims is much, much lower than actual rape and sexual assault.
And this is minimum debatable for me, at least.
There are good evidence and arguments that point to the direction that there are not so few false claims.
Edit: I said opposite before, that was imprecise. I don’t agree with the opposite either (that there are less actual rapes and sexual assaults than false claims). Sorry for that one.
I have my sources too; it’s debatable as the metodology used to collect that data it’s at least suspicious, to say the least.
And, hear me out, I’m not here to argue or to say that women are the villainesses of the story and that they’re manipulating everything, nor to deny that millions of women are assaulted and raped everyday, but hey, there are some big biases, fallacies and metodological errors that are distorting how the data is collected and interpreted, whether it’s deliberate or not.
PS: I’d actually like to debate this in good faith, because both sexual abuse and false allegations are really serious problems that our society has to address by yesterday, and I personally suffered both (my mom and I were both sexually abused when we were children, and around five or four years ago I was victim lf false allegations on supposedly inappropiate behaviour towards a women, and while it was on a Discord server, it was still serious because she and her friends were spreading false and deceptive information about me, and even if I managed to reverse that and prove my innocence, the damage was already done and she was not properly held accountable there [that would have warranted a ban]) so these topics touch me a lot.
I can more or less understand what your mother should have lived and I send her my most sincere hugs and good desires, and actually the same for you.
I know I phrased it horribly. What I meant was, there are good evidence and arguments on the fact that they’re not that low.
Sorry for the confusion, I’ll be more careful with the words I use in the future, and also, sorry for claiming you put words in my mouth, I’l address that. Thanks for pointing it out!
The official FBI stats indicate that less than 5% of claims investigated turn out to be false. That’s counting hoaxes, false alarms, and malicious reporting. I want to say they investigate around 388,000 reports annually on average so the combined number of events that don’t turn out to be true is less than 20k and the number of purposely false claims is going to be a lot less than that.
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The rate of false claims is much, much lower than actual rape and sexual assault. It’s not non-existent, but we shouldn’t immediately assume a rape victim is lying.
More often than not, the default is to dismiss and downplay claims.
For the one case at Duke, I can pull dozens (probably hundreds) of real rape cases at universities.
My problem with lowering the legal standard from “beyond a reasonable doubt” to “believe victims”, isn’t that there are a lot of false reports.
Right now no one believes or prosecutes real reports because of rape culture, why would anyone bother with a fake report? However, if we decide all someone has to do is say “this person raped me” and that’s enough to put someone in jail then assholes are going to start filling false reports to hurt people they don’t like.
I believe that men and women are all people and that many people are assholes. So I think the same women who, as men, would commit violent crimes now have a shockingly easy way to hurt people. And even if you believe that women are better people than men and they would rarely do it no matter how easy it is, men can do it to.
All it would take is to meet up with someone, escape to a private space ideally with witnesses and now I can claim they raped me. I think that makes it dangerously easy for assholes of any genders to really hurt someone through the legal system.
I’d like to see what a functional legal system that cares more about protecting victims than it does about protecting “promising young men” looks like. One where we exterminate the rape culture that saturates our legal system. If we actually prosecuted and punished rape cases that currently ALREADY MEET the threshold of “beyond a reasonable doubt” that would by itself fix a huge part of the problem.
Also, until we fix our general rape culture you would just have tons of jury nullification, tons of judges and prosecutors throwing cases because the “threshold is too low”. People talk about jury nullification as if was a good thing, but 90% of the time it was used was for protecting white racists in Jim Crowe and protecting usually drunk drivers in vehicular homicide cases. It will be used here if people think the threshold of “believe victims” is too low.
“Believe women” for me works when interacting with the victim. Why people have to start picking apart a traumatic story when they hear it is insane to me. It’s crazy that we need rhetoric to tell people “if someone trusts you with a traumatic story, don’t be a dick about it”.
But we shouldn’t automatically believe as well. We need to doubt, not believe anyone who claims to be a victim.
And this is minimum debatable for me, at least.
There are good evidence and arguments that point to the direction that there are not so few false claims.
Edit: I said opposite before, that was imprecise. I don’t agree with the opposite either (that there are less actual rapes and sexual assaults than false claims). Sorry for that one.
I can bring sources for my claims. It’s not as debatable as you want to push here.
I have my sources too; it’s debatable as the metodology used to collect that data it’s at least suspicious, to say the least.
And, hear me out, I’m not here to argue or to say that women are the villainesses of the story and that they’re manipulating everything, nor to deny that millions of women are assaulted and raped everyday, but hey, there are some big biases, fallacies and metodological errors that are distorting how the data is collected and interpreted, whether it’s deliberate or not.
It is not true that there are more false allegations of rape than true allegations.
I never said that there are more false allegations, either. You’re putting words in my mouth.
I’m only saying that there are more false allegations than the official sources assume.
Edit: This was a confusion generated by my own poor word election, sorry.
Do you understand what the word ‘opposite’ means?
PS: I’d actually like to debate this in good faith, because both sexual abuse and false allegations are really serious problems that our society has to address by yesterday, and I personally suffered both (my mom and I were both sexually abused when we were children, and around five or four years ago I was victim lf false allegations on supposedly inappropiate behaviour towards a women, and while it was on a Discord server, it was still serious because she and her friends were spreading false and deceptive information about me, and even if I managed to reverse that and prove my innocence, the damage was already done and she was not properly held accountable there [that would have warranted a ban]) so these topics touch me a lot.
I can more or less understand what your mother should have lived and I send her my most sincere hugs and good desires, and actually the same for you.
I know I phrased it horribly. What I meant was, there are good evidence and arguments on the fact that they’re not that low.
Sorry for the confusion, I’ll be more careful with the words I use in the future, and also, sorry for claiming you put words in my mouth, I’l address that. Thanks for pointing it out!
The official FBI stats indicate that less than 5% of claims investigated turn out to be false. That’s counting hoaxes, false alarms, and malicious reporting. I want to say they investigate around 388,000 reports annually on average so the combined number of events that don’t turn out to be true is less than 20k and the number of purposely false claims is going to be a lot less than that.
And is 10-20k people per year falsely punished for rape okay to you? I’m just trying to understand your statement in context better.
Agreed!