Mandolin Writes:
January 4th, 2008 at 2:14 pm

Did you miss that I’m a moderator?

Spawn meet ban. Bye.

lol, nice one… I loved that movie.

Spawn meet ban. Bye.

You will stop hijacking this thread, however.

Just because you don’t like the discussion does not mean that it is a hijack.

[Further text deleted by Mandolin because it's irrelevent.]

Take it to an open thread. If you need me to email you the text of your comment that’s currently in moderation, I will do that. You will stop hijacking this thread, however.

The superbowl controversy — which happened over two decades ago, didn’t it? — has never been discussed on “Alas,” that I recall, so your prediction that it’ll come up on this thread any moment now seems unfounded.

My impression of you is that you’re a feminist-basher who has a sneering tone whenever he speaks to (or, more often, of) feminists, and whose style of “debate” is to recycle prefab arguments whether or not they’re directly relevant to the current discussion (as you’ve already done one on this thread, with the 20-year-old superbowl sunday crap).

If your subsequent posts prove me correct about all that, you’ll be banned pretty quickly (after which you can run off to an MRA newsgroup and whine about how the meanie feminists censored you). But if you decide to improve your behavior — including disagreeing with a tone of respect, rather than a tone of contempt — you could remain posting here for quite a while, as other dissentors have done. It’s your choice.

I’m puzzled by this. Did you even look at his cite?

She is probably seeing the first version of my post where I included that cite as well as several other studies which demonstrated the percentages of false rape allegations well above 2%. That comment was rejected, so I resubmitted it with what I considered the most important point: refuting the bad fact which is the basis for Maia’s belief that “this must be a man getting away with it because only this small percentage of rape allegations are false”.

Trust me, it’s not the only bad fact which is out there. Pretty soon you’ll be hearing about how DV increases over Superbowl weekend (debunked the year the “report” came out).

but how to ascertain the meaning of a figure from a non-existant study raises epistemological questions that are beyond my humble brain.

It’s easy when you stop thinking about it logically:
It means whatever the speaker wants it to mean as it can’t be challenged.

AFAIK the 2% figure may not have been ascertained for rape in particular. However, also AFAIK it has been tested as well as can reasonably be done for other crimes,…

Has it? Can you cite?

I know that for several years in the late 90’s the FBI UCR gave a 2% unfounding rate for other violent crimes. But I don’t know if this figure was recalculated each year, or if it was just cut&pasted from report to report. Therefore I do not know how stable or representative that figure is.

Nor can I see any reason to assume that the average unfounding rate is a good proxy for the false allegation rate for these crimes.

…and we have no particular reason to assume that rape exhibits significantly different levels of false reporting than do other crimes…

We have no reason to assume anything about it at all. We do have reason to believe that the figure is higher than 2%. One of those reasons is that all the published research that has looked into the matter has found higher rates.

The problem here, surely is not so much what the real figure is, (no one knows), but that feminists are quote a figure of 2% as though it were established fact, when it is nothing more than a baseless myth.

Also, “false” in this context is a synonym for “maliciously false.” In other words, accusations made in bad faith where the accuser knows at the time of the accusation that the accusation is improper.
It is NOT a synonym for incorrect, i.e. “accusations of rape which are made in good faith but for which the behavior of the accused fails to meet the legal standards for rape.”

I realise that the word false has these two meanings, and others, but I’m having some difficulty with your claim about the meaning the word has in the context of the 2% figure. When MRA’s quote a figure of 41%, I can find out what it means by referring to Kanin’s paper, but how to ascertain the meaning of a figure from a non-existant study raises epistemological questions that are beyond my humble brain.

AFAIK the 2% figure may not have been ascertained for rape in particular. However, also AFAIK it has been tested as well as can reasonably be done for other crimes, and we have no particular reason to assume that rape exhibits significantly different levels of false reporting than do other crimes.

Also, “false” in this context is a synonym for “maliciously false.” In other words, accusations made in bad faith where the accuser knows at the time of the accusation that the accusation is improper.

It is NOT a synonym for incorrect, i.e. “accusations of rape which are made in good faith but for which the behavior of the accused fails to meet the legal standards for rape.”

And you probably know this, and it is described above, but it is also NOT a synonym for not guilty, i.e. “accusations of rape which are made in good faith, and which result in a trial where the accused is acquitted.”

The court system is designed to sort things out which aren’t clear, so there will always be a significant number of accusations which are incorrect. And the court system is imperfect and biased towards the accused, so there will always be a decent number of accusation which ARE correct and which nonetheless result in acquittal. That’s not what the 2% statistic refers to.

Demonspawn - That brings up something else I meant to mention. I’m not saying that men might not be falsely convicted of rape through misidentification. It it is completely different when a woman was raped, but identifies a wrong person as the rapist (this seems to be what your article is talking about with DNA evidence, DNA evidence would be meaningless if the defence was consent). I would expect the misidentification rates to be the same as with any other circumstances.

I’m puzzled by this. Did you even look at his cite?

The article said nothing about DNA evidence. Greer’s paper focussed on a single issue: The origin of the claim that two percent of rape reports to the police are false. He shows that the myriad citations for this figure within feminist academic literature all, without exception, lead back to a single source: The remarks of a judge whose speech was prepared by members of the New York City Rape Squad, “trained in judo, [but] not as far as can be ascertained in statistical analysis”, whose “best recollections are that they did not rely upon any report, but they cannot remember precisely how they did obtain the 2% figure”.

In short, the 2% figure is without empirical foundation whatsoever.

Just to clarify, though: when i say “legal rape” I mean “behavior that meets the criteria for convicting someone of rape.” I’m talking about the rapist’s actions, not the legal outcome. So extending your murder/burglary example to rape, I think we’re in complete agreement.

I think, possibly, I did prove my point about the NZ left. Because I didn’t think my statement would be controversial. I was talking about this with a friend of mine and the first thing they’d thought about when they’d read about the struggle within the ANC was ‘is this the rapist’. I am not going to vote in the NZ election that happens this year because the co-leader of the party I had voted for in the last election said that Clint Rickards had consensual sex with Louise Nicholas - and most people understand this decision. I think seeing over the course of several years just how much a powerful man can

I’d leave out the sentence if I was to write the post again. Actually I’d write a completely different post. I was reaching for something more and stopped before I got there, I may try again.

But what I meant, something I stand by, is that forces that act against any accusation of rape going to trial are huge. Apathy and misogyny are systemic in the police and justice system. Those forces are even stronger when the man involved is powerful, when he has people to act in his interests, when he can afford a legal team (or knows someone who can subsidise him), when he’d make a dangerous enemy.

The police and prosecutors are screening for false accusations. Often they’re operating under the assumption that women are lying. Some police officers/prosecutors delibrately give rape survivors a hard time, and make it clear they don’t believe the women invovled. This process means a hell a lot of women never make it to court - there are a lot of false negatives. But it doesn’t let through women who haven’t been raped, particularly not for powerful men.

I’m not saying all legal systems work this way at all times (to choose an obvious example - it didn’t work that way for white women and black men in the South). But it’sthe way it works in NZ, and having read the judgement in the Zuma case, I’m fairly sure it works that way in South Africa and Radfem seems to know enough about how it works in the US.

Thanks for all the comments - I’ve enjoyed reading them now I’ve got back.

Demonspawn - That brings up something else I meant to mention. I’m not saying that men might not be falsely convicted of rape through misidentification. It it is completely different when a woman was raped, but identifies a wrong person as the rapist (this seems to be what your article is talking about with DNA evidence, DNA evidence would be meaningless if the defence was consent). I would expect the misidentification rates to be the same as with any other circumstances.

Sailorman - You’re sort of on the mark with your paraphrase, although I’m not sure about hte terms. While yes I believe any woman who says she is raped as a matter of course, and my definition of rape does go beyond the legal definition of rape, that wasn’t quite what I was saying.

For a case to go to trial what the woman states happened would have to meet the legal definition of rape (otherwise it would be dismissed sometime earlier in the process).

You seem to be implying that if the level of reasonable doubt can’t be met (whether for reasons that are good, or monumentally stupid as in this case) then it’s not ‘legal rape’. And I’d disagree. If a murder, burglary, or whatever takes place there was still a ‘legal murder’ or a ‘legal burglary’ whether or not someone gets convicted or found not guilty.

And gives pause to those who praise multi-culturalism.

Oh please. Multiculturalism, as a stance towards the world, as an academic practice, equals neither moral nor cultural relativism. It is, at best, intellectually dishonest of you to use Zuma’s twisted defense as representative of what multiculturalism stands for.

Two percent of rape complaints to police are fictious -

http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v33-issue3/greer.pdf

That statement is not true. It is one of those things repeated so often it as accepted as true, despite the fact that it’s basis is false. As such, it is something that needs to be challenged every time it is mentioned until it is no longer presented as fact. Bad facts make for bad policies and bad opinions, and I know everyone wants to have the “best” opinions out there.

Taking the stand for the first time this week in [his] rape trial, Mr. Zuma cast himself as the embodiment of a traditional Zulu male, with all the privileges that patriarchal Zulu traditions bestow on men. Mr. Zuma, who turns 64 this week, said his accuser, a 31-year-old anti-AIDS advocate, had signaled a desire to have sex with him by wearing a knee-length skirt to his house and sitting with legs crossed, revealing her thigh.

Indeed, he said, he was actually obligated to have sex. His accuser was aroused, he said, and “in the Zulu culture, you cannot just leave a woman if she is ready.” To deny her sex, he said, would have been tantamount to rape.

Such arguments have stirred a storm here, not because he insists that his accuser wanted sex — he-said, she-said arguments are not unheard of in rape trials worldwide — but because he has clothed them in what he depicts as African mores about sex and male primacy.

If the corruption trial that he’s apparently headed for actually occurs, what effect will that have?