Debunking The Debunking Of 2 Percent False Rape Report Claim: Part 1

I saw the article: The Truth Behind Legal Dominance Feminism's "Two Percent False Rape Claim" Figure by Edward Greer given as proof that the claim that only 2% of rape reports are false reports (the person who reported being raped lied about having been raped) has been debunked.

However, while this paper claims to debunk a claim about the low rate of false rape reports, the proof given in this debunking contains no actual proof that the 2% rate of false rape reports is lower than reality.

[...] many of its empirical claims regarding the sexual abuse of women are erroneous. [...] This article attempts to demonstrate that the LDF discourse on rape is fundamentally false.

At the core of LDF discourse on rape is the proposition that "women don't lie" about sexual abuse.

The problem here is that while Greer is officially claiming to debunk a 2% rate of false rape reports (where women lie about having been raped) and thereby proving that a higher rate of girls and women who report having been raped are lying, he is also claiming that the real feminist claim is that there is a rate of false reports of 0.0000000000000000%.

In reality the core of the genuine feminist discourse is that the anti-feminist mantra, "women lie about rape" attempts to baselessly discredit the testimony of girls and women who report being raped and it attempts to justify baselessly mistreating rape victims throughout the criminal justice process.

This "women lie about rape" mantra implies that men are more honest than women when it comes to cases where a woman reported being raped by a man. Men, even those guilty of rape, must never feel victimized by the criminal justice system while this feeling of revictimization is a requirement for women who report rape.

Jurors are instructed to consider issues of credibility for all witnesses. This includes defendants if they choose to testify. The "women lie about rape" mantra seeks to baselessly taint the credibility of victim testimony but only when the victim is female and the crime is rape.

Greer makes a fundamental error by saying that women who report rape have the burden of proving that the allegation is true beyond a reasonable doubt. That legal responsibility has always belonged to the prosecution and it will continue to belong to the prosecution.

If Greer doesn't know this he is incompetent. If he knows this, he is trying to obscure this fact and has proven himself to be untrustworthy.

Unlike those who oppose the LDF program because of its alleged "malebashing" this article concedes that were it empirically true that only two percent of those charged with rape were innocent, LDF's solutions might represent a reasonable public policy. But if, as may well be the case, as many as a quarter of the men currently accused of rape are actually innocent, then the goals of LDF are truly destructive. [...]

Whether by trial or by plea-bargaining, roughly half of accused rapists are convicted. Even if we assume arguendo that all those convicted are indeed guilty, and that a full two-thirds of those acquitted at trial were also guilty, we would still wind up with a situation in which one-sixth of those actually tried are really innocent.

Here's where we get the statistical switcheroo. The 2% allegedly debunked was the rate of false rape reports and now it is the rate of men charged with rape who are innocent.

It is notable that not only does Greer do a statistical switcheroo, his claim that roughly half of accused rapists are convicted can easily be proven to be a false claim. According to RAINN, if a rape is reported (about 40% are) there is only a 50.8% chance of an arrest. If there is an arrest there is an 80% chance of prosecution. If there is a prosecution there is a 58% chance of a conviction. If there is a felony conviction there is a 69% chance the convict will spend time in jail.

That means that in reality the percentage of those accused who are convicted is 23.6%. Of the reported rapes there is only a 16.3% chance the rapist will go to prison.

That new statistical measurement of defendant innocence is based on assumptions and guesswork so not only is the range of 16.6% to 25% not a measurement of false rape reports which can be used to disprove the feminist estimate it is not an accurate measure of how many rape defendants are factually innocent. Greer is doing the equivalent of sticking his thumb out and squinting to come up with a number.

The rate of rape defendants innocence is not the rate of false rape reports. There is some overlap but identification problems allow men charged with rape to be innocent while the reports of rape in those cases are true.

A gap in the law or an error in which statutes were included in the indictment doesn't make the original report of rape false either.

A true report of rape doesn't become false even if the rape victim was coerced into recanting. But this injustice against a rape victim can elevate the recorded rate of false reports. For all of Greer's concern for the innocent, he shows no genuine concern for the harm done by these false allegations. As far as I can tell Greer views cops coercing rape victims into recanting a crime that really happened as an acceptable disinsentive for false rape reports.

By way of comparison, there is an elaborate body of literature and numerous examples suggesting that a significant number -- way beyond the two percent range -- of capital murder convictions are of innocent men. Why should criminal trials involving sexual assaults on women be more accurately discriminating than those involving capital crime?

For this comparison to have any meaning in debunking the claim that about 2% of rape reports are false reports, Greer must be claiming here that the number of false murder reports (no murder occurred and the person who reported the murder knows it) is way beyond two percent.

Notice that the high rate of wrongful convictions are only suggested from literature and examples. That's called guesswork.

Greer makes the false assumption that any rejection of his belief that 20 to 25 percent of rape claims are false reports is proof that people have been suckered by feminists. This again is a sign of sloppiness on his part.

Greer has done nothing to prove that the rate of false police reports is higher than 2% or that it is higher than the general rate of false police reports.

By Greer's decision to go against the law and assign rape victims with the burden of proof, he shows a basic level of disrespect for our legal system.

He complains that the raw data and inability to review that data and the analysis behind the original claim from the book by Susan Brownmiller Against Our Will cannot be analyzed to determine whether this source number meets a minimum criteria for accuracy, but his complaints can be applied to all the data he himself puts forth to debunk the idea that only about 2% of rape reports are false.

The closest Greer comes to any data which attempts to measure the rate of false reports is 40% from Eugene Kanin's study, but that data relied entirely on recantations given to investigators who used polygraphs as a standard part of their rape investigations.

Greer fails to recognize or note that tools such as polygraphs have been shown in studies to facilitate false confessions. This makes Kanin's study data tainted and therefore meaningless at determining the actual number of false rape reports. In the Kanin study none of the rape reports which Kanin identified as false were proven to be false by police investigation. So the number of proven false rape reports in Kanin's study is 0.

Greer implies that a review of unfounded rape cases, which are often included in the number of false rape reports, contradicts the 2% false rape report claim.

For Greer the significance was that there were no new prosecutions from that review, but what Greer fails to make note of is that none of those unfounded cases were proven during the review to be false reports. The data that Greer uses to contradict a 2% rate of false reports actually has a rate of 0% proven false reports. The only way to get a number of false reports from that sample higher than 0 is to guess.

It must be noted that Greer's statistical scrutiny, which is so important to him as he rejects feminist claims, is nowhere to be seen when he is tossing out higher rates of false rape reporting.

Continue to part 2.

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