IT SEEMS CLEAR THAT THEY’RE LESS RARE THAN MANY CLAIM: Ashe Schow: Even if false rape reports are rare, they shouldn’t be ignored.
Whenever a high-profile account of alleged campus sexual assault comes crashing down – such as Rolling Stone’s gang-rape accusation – activists predictably fall back on the claim that only 2 percent of rape accusations are false.
This isn’t accurate. First, the 2 percent figure refers to false reports made to the police. Making a false police report carries a penalty, which exists to deter people from doing so (although sometimes that penalty isn’t enforced, such as with the Duke Lacrosse rape hoaxer). No such penalty exists on college campuses. (Indeed, even the accuser in the Rolling Stone article, though proven to have lied, did not face any punishment from the school.)
Not having that penalty is meant to make accusers feel more comfortable coming forward, although it’s difficult to see how being punished for lying would make truthful victims fearful. Regardless, a lack of consequences makes it easier for student accusers to come forward and punish fellow students who may have hurt them or with whom they had a previous regretted encounter that has come to be seen as assault. . . .
So what does this all mean? Francis Walker, who runs an exceptional blog taking down statistics such as the MAD study, has done the math. He found that from all the statistics listed above, just 7.8 percent of rape reports in the MAD study could be classified as true.
“From this we can see that 39.1% of the cases end in either a guilty verdict or a guilty plea. Multiplying that by the 20% of police cases that result in arrest, we are left with the 7.8% I used at the start of my first post,” Walker wrote. “Even this isn’t a good number to use though. If a confession that a report is false isn’t enough to classify the report as false, then the corollary is that a guilty plea isn’t enough to classify a case as true. After all, it would not be difficut [sic] to imagine a scenario where, for any number of reasons, someone pleads guilty to a crime that they didn’t commit. 20% x 5.9% leaves us with a ‘true’ rate of just 1.2%. Even if we decide to be generous and include not just the 20% arrested, but also the 17.9% exceptionally cleared, the number still only goes up to 2.2%.”
From all of this one could determine that 15.6 of reports could reliably be determined as false, another 17.9 percent weren’t actually crimes and just 1.2 percent (or 2.2 percent) could be reliably determined as true. The remainder would fall into a “we’ll never know for sure” category.
Perhaps only 2 percent of rape reports are false. That doesn’t necessarily mean that 98 percent are true. But assuming that is the case, one can’t possibly know which category a report falls into until after a proper investigation (which would include due process). And to pretend that false reports don’t happen just because they are rare minimizes the impact such reports have on those falsely accused.
And beyond all of this, none of this data can be applied to reports of campus sexual assault. There is no data available on the number of campus sexual assault accusations that turn out to be false, as it hasn’t been studied. And again, without a penalty associated with false police reports, false accusations made to campus administrators are likely to increase.
People behave differently when there are consequences, and when there are not.