A MetaFilter post yesterday linked to a month-old story from Orlando, Florida, about an "epidemic" of false rape allegations that led police to start a crackdown on those making false reports. According to the post, the United Kingdom is likewise so concerned it's considering anonymity for defendants and ending anonymity for their accusers.
As Emily Bazelon wrote in Slate after a false allegation of rape at Hofstra University last year, most respectable studies settle on a rate of false allegations of between 8 percent and 10 percent. But it's unclear how that compares to false allegations of other crimes. And while men's groups routinely point out how terrible those cases are for falsely accused men, I'm not convinced it's more terrible than being falsely accused of robbery or murder. Either way, the defendant has to spend money, time, and effort fighting the charges; is deemed suspect by the friends and family members who formerly trusted him; and risks losing his job.
The perception that false allegations are more likely to happen in rape cases has to do with the fact that the vast majority of complainants are women, and this fits into stereotypes of women as sexually wily and manipulative. But it's also true that officers are, and should be, generally charged with assessing the credibility of complainants. Since a victim's statement is often enough to give probable cause for an arrest, that duty should be taken seriously. At the same time, officers are particularly suspicious of rape allegations, as these stories show, and their attitudes probably do more to discourage reports of real rape than weed out false allegations.
And all of this stems from how tenderly we treat rape, a particularly intimate, invasive crime, to which there are often few witnesses. It's worth remembering that many other crimes face the same problems -- lack of witnesses, little physical evidence, and one person's statement against another's. Bazelon, and many others, have made the argument that the criminal-justice system is ill-suited to handle many types of sexual-assault accusations, but the criminal-justice system lets us down in many other areas as well. Our desire to protect women has to incorporate the knowledge that our legal system is imperfect, and the best resolution for many crimes might well lie outside the system.
-- Monica Potts
