sacha wrote:AnonymousCowherd wrote:Dick Strawkins wrote:sacha wrote:Dick Strawkins wrote:
In response to Sacha's question about evidence for the levels of false claims compared to unreported rapes, I think it is reasonable to use anonymous surveys and police data to try to get a handle on this. It is a difficult question and probably impossible to answer completely correctly but it should be possible to get some kind of generalized figure for the prevalence of each type of incident.
I agree that may be the only way to even begin to have any idea of unreported cases, although I find it significantly flawed, and certainly not
evidence
my questions were in regard to the declaration that "there is a large number of unreported cases than the other way around." stated as fact.
Anything I state as fact can easily be backed up with evidence, and if it turns out my evidence is flawed, I will be more than happy to withdraw my statement and give reasons for the withdrawal.
This
is a sceptic/skeptic website and thread, after all.
I agree.
If anyone has a good data source, paper, survey result etc, that answers this question, could you link it here please.
FWIW.
The issue of the reporting of sexual assault is notoriously difficult to overcome. The best that anyone has come up with is the various Victims of Crime surveys conducted in various places. These vary in quality, but one of the best is done by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (one summary of "personal crimes"
here This is a large survey, done by trained interviewers, who can (technically) get you fined if you refuse answer, so about as good as these things get. The take-away number is that 31% of sexual assaults (which includes male victims) are reported to Police.
Some objections are;
a) it only applies to Australia. But other juridictions show results in the same general range so, while there may be variation, there is no reason to dismiss the ABS result out of hand.
b) it underestimates the actual amount of sexual assualt because, although more likely to report to the interviewer, some people are still reluctant to report at all. This is likely true, but we can't estimate that number.
c) it conflates "sexual assault" with "rape". This is a problem if there are reporting differences between non-rape and rape assaults. Getting respondents to give details of their sexual assaults to an interviewer is not easy, to say the least, so we are unlikely to find out of there are such reporting differences. One difficulty is that after an "incident" occurs, one person may label that a sexual assault, another a rape, and (in theory) the law may disagree with both of them (and vice versa). Technically we can't talk about "unreported rape" (or any other offence) because no offence has been shown to be committed, we can only talk about "unreported incidents" and these may vary in interpretation.
Moreover, we don't really know that the character of the unreported incidents is the same as the reported ones. Radfems tend to assume that they are similar in there various statistical "posters", but there is little evidence of that beyond gross generalisations. If they aren't similar, then conclusions drawn about rape figures based on those reported to police don't generalise to the unreported ones (e.g. conviction rates may be very different for the two cases, even if they were suddenly all reported).
Whatever the actual figure for unreported "possible rape incidents", there is no survey that suggests that the majority of such incidents are reported to police (the closest is the US DOJ which seems to say about 46% are reported, but with a large relative standard error).
False reports, on the other hand, are (by definition) a subset of all reported incidents. To claim that there are more false reports than unreported incidents implies that the number of unreported incidents is less than the number of reported ones, even if every report is "false", which no-one accepts. The more reported incidents that are admitted as "not false", the lower the number of unreported cases there must be to keep them less than "false" reports and, therefore, the greater the ratio of reported to unreported incidents.
Or, in even less clear English, false reports can't outnumber unreported incidents unless the reporting rate is greater than 50+% and, if there are any true reports (which we assume), that number will be higher. So, for example, if there are 100 reports to police, but we think 50% are false, there can't be more than 49 unreported incidents, which implies a reporting rate of 100/(100+49) or about 67%. If the "false" report rate is 20%, then there can't be more than 19 unreported incidents, for a reporting rate of 100/(100+19) or about 84%, and so on. These figures are well outside any survey findings.
Even without knowing the actual false reporting rate, there is no empirical support for the idea that false reports can outnumber unreported incidents. The evidence doesn't conclusively
prove that the idea is false, but the weight of evidence makes it very unlikely to be true.
There is more to all this, but surely that's enough!
well done. good work, Sherlock. That is the best response I've ever received on this subject.
As I've said the best way we currently have to determine the statistics is significantly flawed and at best a provisional conjecture.
There is a vast difference in numbers depending on who is conducting the survey, and the same people will respond differently when the question is worded another way. Rape statistics should
not include inappropriate touch, sexual harassment, sexual assault without rape, and so on, but it almost always does.
In the western world there is far more of a stigma attached to a man reporting being a victim of rape, whether the offender was male, or female, and I absolutely believe there are huge numbers of unreported rapes when the victim is male. Prior to the change in perspective regarding a woman being raped, and the change in how she is treated when reporting it, which was 40 years ago, I would agree that there were far more unreported rapes against women. Perhaps much more than were reported at all.
Times have changed. In the present, in the western world, I'd rather be raped, than be a man accused of rape.
When flawed statistics are repeated as fact-based evidence, and no gender is specified, the assumption is a female victim, and a male offender, and it perpetuates the notion that women must be believed without any evidence, and that men should be condemned without evidence. That women are inherently "good" and men are inherently "evil".
It also leaves a door wide open with a welcome mat for malevolent, vindictive reporting of rape by women, against innocent men. This is not uncommon. The statistics do not include the reporting of rape, if the police find she is obviously lying, or if she recounts her accusation prior to a full report being made.
It also allows male victims of rape to be so marginalised as to almost not exist, which increases the unreported cases by a significant amount. What is being considered as "rape" against women, would never be taken seriously if a man were to report the same incident.
It does an enormous disservice to women who have truly been raped, and to men who have been raped when those statistics are not gender specified, and repeated as evidence-based fact. Rape is not a
woman's issue. It is a human issue.
There is a considerable advantage to those who happen to have female genitalia, both as accuser and as potential victim, that advantage is maintained, supported, and defended by a good majority of women as well as men.
There is some bizarre code of
Omerta among women. We all know how easily the current system can be used against innocent men, and we all know women who wouldn't hesitate to make false allegations against men who they felt scorned by.
The pussy pass has a massive amount of power, and very little responsibility.
I simply cannot let anyone perpetuate the inequity without speaking up.
For those of you who are new, I'm an attractive older woman who knows first hand just how easy it is to use that power, and I will continue to be a lifelong outspoken Gender Traitor until I'm dead.