What we don't know about false claims of rape

Any number of pieces have recently been written suggesting that we actually know — or have a pretty good idea — how many rape reports are false. Deadspin, for example, of the Jameis Winston case: “There’s no doubt that being falsely accused of rape is a dreadful thing that no one should have to endure. One of the reasons it is such a dreadful thing is that false accusations of rape basically do not happen. Statistically, between 2% and 8% of reported rapes are found to be false, but only about 40% of rapes are reported. Do a little math and that means that, for every false accusation of rape, there are up to 100 actual rapes that take place.” When I pointed out on Twitter that the author did not know the percentage of false rape reports, and therefore could not possibly calculate the ratio of false reports to rapes, he suggested that this was a matter of opinion: Maybe I liked one study better, but he thought his was pretty good. This is not a difference of opinion; it is simply a misunderstanding about the data. He has substituted a number he knows — which is, presented in its absolutely best light, the percentage of reports that can definitely be shown to be false by investigators using stringent criteria — for a number he does not know, which is how many reports of rape are actually false.

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Perhaps a parallel will make what I mean more clear. Every year, it’s virtually certain that some number of people get away with killing their spouses. More than occasionally, it happens that investigators think they killed their spouses. They’re maybe even pretty sure that they killed their spouses. But they can’t prove it. In the statistics, this will not show up as “spousal murder” or “intimate partner violence”; it will show up as an unsolved case. But they still killed their spouse. How often does this happen? We have absolutely no idea.

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