Skepticism and Criticism of Eugene Kanin’s Study Of False Rape Reports
| April 15th, 2009[Shorter Amp: Eugene Kanin famously found that 41%, or perhaps 50%, of rapes reported to police are false. Kanin's study is both badly designed and unverifiable; more reliable studies have found that between 2% and 8% of rapes reported to police are false reports.]
In a new (sort of) post on on Ifeminists, Wendy McElroy1 suggests that false rape reports are common, relying heavily on Eugene Kanin’s famous study of false rape allegations. This study is commonly cited by MRAs and anti-feminists. McElroy writes:
How prevalent is the false reporting of sexual assault? Estimates vary widely.
According to much-cited feminist statistics, two percent of all reports are false. Susan Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will (1975), for example, claims that false accusations in New York City dropped to that level after police departments began using policewomen to interview alleged victims. Elsewhere, the two percent figure appears without citation or with a vague attribution to “FBI” sources.
According to a study conducted by Eugene Kanin of Purdue University, the correct figure may rise to the 40 percent range. Kanin examined 109 rape complaints registered in a Midwestern city from 1978 to 1987. Of these, 45 were ultimately classified by the police as “false.” Also based on police records, Kanin determined that 50 percent of the rapes reported at two major universities were “false.”
Studies and statistics often vary and for legitimate reasons. For example, they may examine different populations. But such a dramatic variance — two percent to 50 percent — raises the question of whether political interests are at work.
Tellingly, McElroy doesn’t go on to question whether Kanin — or the police whose records Kanin reported — might have “political interests” or biases. If McElroy applied her argument honestly, her “dramatic variance” logic would necessarily raise suspicions of both statistics. Instead, her skepticism (in this article, at least) is reserved solely for feminists.
I think the 2% statistic deserves skepticism and criticism; it’s popularity among feminists is an example of what I meant when I wrote “Within feminism, there’s sometimes too little skepticism regarding statistics and news stories which emphasize harms against women. We’ve created a culture which does a rotten job of self-correction.”
That said, the 2% statistic is not wildly out of line with some other reported statistics. Quoting an article in St. John’s Law Review:2
To illustrate, when the Portland, Oregon police department examined the 431 complaints of completed or attempted sexual assault in 1990, 1.6% were determined to be false. This was in comparison with a rate of 2.6% for false reports of stolen vehicles.
Similarly, Sgt. Joanne Archambault of the Sex Crimes Division of the San Diego Police Department routinely evaluated the rate of false reports over several years and found them to be around 4%.
More recently, the FBI reported an unfounded rate of 5.4% for forcible rapes (quoted in a newspaper article, via Abyss2Hope). However, because “unfounded” does not mean “false,” the actual “false” number would be lower than 5.4%. Quoting the Oregon sexual assault task force report (pdf link):
It is critical to bear in mind that a report determined to be unfounded is not synonymous with a false allegation or report. This distinction is important enough that it is worth repeating – a report that has been unfounded is not the same as a false report (or false allegation).
The FBI definition of unfounded specifically refers to cases that are found to be false or baseless. [...] Typically a baseless report is the result of a mistake of law – the reporter believed that they were the victim of a crime when based on the state criminal code they were not.
Even Eugene Kanin has written “unfounded rape can and does mean many things, with false allegation being only one of them, and sometimes the least of them.” (Pdf source.)
So how common are false rape reports? No one can say for certain. However, after conducting a review of the (extremely limited) available research, a recent report by The National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women concluded:3
When more methodologically rigorous research has been conducted, estimates for the percentage of false reports begin to converge around 2-8%.
So what about Kanin’s report, which found that over 40% of rapes reported to police are false? I wouldn’t suggest that Kanin has a political agenda — but I do think his methodology (which consists of tabulating police data from an unidentified small town) was overly credulous.
First of all, it’s important to realize that Kanin has kept secret what police force he was studying. This may have been necessary to gain access to police records, but it also means no other researcher has ever had the chance to verify Kanin’s findings and claims. There is no indication that Kanin attempted to interview any of the alleged false rape accusers to get their perspective, or in any way attempted to independently verify anything he was told by police. Kanin also implies that the recanters were told they’d be charged with filing false reports, but does not report the outcome of those charges.
In other words, Kanin’s study consists of Kanin uncritically reporting the claims of a single police force in a small, unidentified city, without those claims having been checked or verified in any way whatsoever.
Contrast that to this description of a genuinely rigorous study conducted by the British Government:3
The largest and most rigorous study that is currently available in this area is the third one commissioned by the British Home Office (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan, 2005). The analysis was based on the 2,643 sexual assault cases (where the outcome was known) that were reported to British police over a 15-year period of time. Of these, 8% were classified by the police department as false reports. Yet the researchers noted that some of these classifications were based simply on the personal judgments of the police investigators, based on the victim’s mental illness, inconsistent statements, drinking or drug use. These classifications were thus made in violation of the explicit policies of their own police agencies. The researchers therefore supplemented the information contained in the police files by collecting many different types of additional data, including: reports from forensic examiners, questionnaires completed by police investigators, interviews with victims and victim service providers, and content analyses of the statements made by victims and witnesses. They then proceeded to evaluate each case using the official criteria for establishing a false allegation, which was that there must be either “a clear and credible admission by the complainant”4 or “strong evidential grounds” (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan, 2005). On the basis of this analysis, the percentage of false reports dropped to 2.5%.
Kanin (quoted by Marcella Chester) describes how the police relied on by his study determined that a case was false:
In fact, agency policy forbids police officers to use their discretion in deciding whether to officially acknowledge a rape complaint, regardless how suspect that complaint may be. Second, the declaration of a false allegation follows a highly institutionalized procedure. The investigation of all rape complaints always involves a serious offer to polygraph the complainants and the suspects. Additionally, for a declaration of false charge to be made, the complainant must admit that no rape had occurred. She is the sole agent who can say that the rape charge is false. The police department will not declare a rape charge as false when the complainant, for whatever reason, fails to pursue the charge or cooperate on the case, regardless how much doubt the police may have regarding the validity of the charge. In short, these cases are declared false only because the complainant admitted they are false.
However, as the sexual assault task force for the State of Oregon (pdf link) wrote (emphasis theirs):
Victim Recantation is a retraction or withdrawal of a reported sexual assault. Recantations are routinely used by victims to disengage the criminal justice system and are therefore not, by themselves, indicative of a false report.
If over 40% of women reporting rape recant — even though multiple, more rigorous studies have found false rape reports are usually 2%-8% of all reports — that could indicate a police culture which gives rape victims an extremely strong reason to want to “disengage the criminal justice system,” even if they’re threatened with a fine or a short jail stay. And, as we will see, routinely pressuring all reported rape victims to take a lie detector test is a sign of a police department with a strong bias against taking rape reports seriously.
Jody Raphael, of the DePaul University College of Law, wrote:5
[Kanin's study] is frequently cited on web sites devoted to debunking the prevalence of rape. During this ten year period, the police department followed policy (now deemed unlawful by the U.S. Congress for police departments receiving federal funds) that required polygraphing complainants and suspects as a condition of investigating rape reports. Kanin’s department only declared a complaint false when the victim recanted and admitted it was.
In his published journal article, Kanin (1994) admitted that “A possible objection to these recantations concerns their validity….rather than proceed with the real charge of rape, the argument goes, these women withdrew their accusations to avoid the trauma of police investigation.”
And indeed, the Kanin study has been criticized for the department’s use of polygraph testing in every case, a process that has been rejected by many police departments because of its intimidating impact on victims. The International Association of Chiefs of Police disapproves of requiring polygraph tests during rape investigations because “victims often feel confused and ashamed, and experience a great deal of self-blame because of something they did or did not do in relation to the sexual assault. These feelings may compromise the reliability of the results of such interrogation techniques. The use of these interrogation techniques can also compound these feelings and prolong the trauma of a sexual assault” (Lisak, 2007, p.6).
Given the popularity of Kanin’s study, especially in light of the collapse of the Duke University lacrosse players prosecution, David Lisak (2007), an associate professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, cautions that this particular police department employed a common procedure in which officers’ inherent suspicion of rape victims results in a confrontational approach towards the victim that would likely result in an extraordinarily high number of victim recantations. Lisak also points out that Kanin’s is not a research study, because it only puts forth the opinions of the police officers without any further investigation on his part.
Kanin (1994) himself cautioned against the generalizability of his findings…
Sally Baird, in a letter to the editor, also cites Lisak’s article, writing:
Prof. Kanin’s study was examined in the article “False Allegations of Rape: A Critique of Kanin” by Dr. David Lisak in the September/October 2007 issue of the Sexual Assault Report. Dr. Lisak is an associate professor of psychology and director of the Men’s Sexual Trauma Research Project at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Dr. Lisak says that “Kanin’s 1994 article on false allegations is a provocative opinion piece, but it is not a scientific study of the issue of false reporting of rape. It certainly should never be used to assert a scientific foundation for the frequency of false allegations.”
He makes the point that Kanin “simply reiterates the opinions of the police officers who concluded that the cases in question were ‘false allegations.’” After citing an International Association of Chiefs of Police manual (Investigating Sexual Assaults, www.theiacp.org/documents/pdfs/RCD/Inves… p. 13), which states that polygraph tests for sexual assault victims are contradicted in the investigation process and that their use is “based on the misperception that a significant percentage of sexual assault reports are false,” Lisak then observes that “It is noteworthy that the police department from which Kanin derived his data used or threatened to use the polygraph in every case… The fact that it was the standard procedure of this department provides a window on the biases of the officers who conducted the rape investigations, biases that were then echoed in Kanin’s unchallenged reporting of their findings.”
For more reading, I’d highly recommend:
Abyss2Hope is far and away the best blog on this subject: Here, here, here, here and here, for starters. And see as well, Date Rape Is Real Rape.
Successfully Investigating Acquaintance Sexual Assault: A National Training Manual for Law Enforcement includes an excellent chapter on the question of false rape allegations (pdf link).
False Reports: Moving Beyond the Issue to Successfully Investigate and Prosecute Non-Stranger Sexual Assault (pdf Link).
- If McElroy’s post feels a little stale, that’s probably because it’s a Kobe-related column she wrote six years ago, with paragraphs strategically deleted. (back)
- Hecht-Schafran, L. (1993). Writing and reading about rape: A primer. St. John’s Law Review, 66, 979-1045. Due to the age of those studies, I haven’t read the primary sources, or even the secondary source, which was quoted to me in an email from Kimberly A. Lonsway, co-editor of Sexual Assault Report. (back)
- Quoted from “False Reports: Moving Beyond the Issue to Successfully Investigate and Prosecute Non-Stranger Sexual Assault,” by Kimberly Lonsway, Joanne Archambault, David Lisak. (Pdf link.) (back) (back)
- I’m a bit skeptical of accepting an “admission by the complainant” as proof of a false rape report, for reasons described elsewhere in this post. In this case, it would depend on what their criteria for “clear and credible” are. (back)
- Violence Against Women, Vol. 14, No. 3, 370-375 (2008). Pdf link. (back)
April 16th, 2009 at 7:29 am
Geez.
Who has the temerity to cite guff like that? The landscape is littered with police departments that have been sanctioned for blowing off rape complaints. Is there any other crime for which complainants have routinely been subjected to polygraph tests?
This comment was written by paul.Report this comment to the moderators
April 16th, 2009 at 8:31 am
Much of this has to do with how you define the term “false accusation” as it is used to describe rape accusations. Just like the term “rape” can be fairly applied to a variety of situations, the term “false accusation” can also be applied to a variety of situations.
So as a result, a lot of the variance in statistics is related to how the authors define “false accusation,” combined in some circumstances with how the authors define “rape.” Since those definitions are apparent only if you read the papers in question (and only if each paper discloses them fairly), then the blogosphere “war of the summary quotes” tends to pit apples against oranges.
To illustrate with two common examples:
1) If you define FA as “an accuser knowingly lies to the police in order to attempt to wrongfully convict the defendant” you will get a fairly low %age of people doing that for rape. I have no idea how you would measure this, though i suspect it may be close to the 2-8%.
2) If you define FA as “an accuser makes a police report believing she was raped; however, the accuser’s report of the conduct does not meet the criteria for legal rape” then you will obviously get a much higher percentage of people. Since rape laws are quite stringent and most people don’t really understand them, it is plausible that this may be close to the 50% which some folks cite.
Absent a definition of what “false” is (and, in some cases, what “rape” is) then the argument is pointless. It’s mostly a semantic issue.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
April 16th, 2009 at 9:57 am
SM, I certainly agree with you that definitions matter. Indeed, that’s discussed at length in some of the links I included.
The FBI’s “unfounded” number, 5.4%, includes all rape reports known to the FBI which were found to be “baseless,” which means an event which doesn’t meet the legal criteria for rape. If the FBI’s unfounded number is 5.4%, then it’s not plausible that the number of baseless rape reports is close to 50%.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
April 16th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Ampersand with all due respect, those who like to flaunt the 50% statistic of false accusations typically include those in which the alleged perp goes to trial and is found not guilty. Not guilty in their minds equates to FA.
Oh and keep up the good work. I therapy blog about the MRA’s using snarky humor, you tone it down and blog facts, statistics, and I truly enjoy reading what you write. It shows me that there are those who do “get it.”
This comment was written by Glenn's Cult.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2009 at 3:53 am
Amp, just knowing how hard it can be to do a huge research post and get few comments on it — this post is gorgeous and very, very well done.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2009 at 6:07 am
Just seconding Mandolin.
This comment was written by chingona.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2009 at 10:14 am
Thanks, everyone!
I’ve learned to expect that posts like this are often pretty dead in comments. Which is okay; my real goal with a post like this one, is to have the information and arguments be readily google-able for anyone stuck in an argument with an anti-feminist who cites Kanin’s study of false rape reports.
I’m pretty pleased with the outcome so far.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Nicely done! Even for the shorter search “kanin rape,” you’re second only to the Wikipedia article on Rape statistics. Unfortunately, several of the top 10 after that is “Kanin wuz right!” stuff, including a Cathy Young article for Salon.
This comment was written by PG.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2009 at 10:26 am
On second thought, I do have a question for Sailorman.
Amp already dealt with the statistical aspect of this, but you said something similar on another thread - that perhaps a lot of people make reports fully believing they have been raped (hence, most likely actually raped in the moral and ethical sense), but they haven’t been raped under the legal definition.
On a gut level, this strikes me as implausible. I would think there would be many more situations where a victim would believe she was raped and would NOT report it because she assumed (correctly or not) that it would not meet the legal definition, than the opposite occurrence. I don’t have any evidence either way (other than what Amp has just provided), but since I’ve seen you make this suggestion more than once, I’m wondering what you are basing it on. Are you just speculating or is there some reason or basis for your suggestion?
This comment was written by chingona.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2009 at 10:54 am
(BTW, after looking at the google results page, I changed the title of this post so that googlers could more easily see what it’s about.)
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
chingona,
I think Sailorman is wrong for a different reason (his claim of plausibility is not backed by any of the studies Amp cites, including Kanin, and he cites no studies in support of his claim), but the issue you raise here doesn’t effect the plausibility of what Sailorman suggests. It is well documented that you are correct that many more rapes that meet the legal definition go unreported than the number of rapes that get reported, but the unfounded report rate is based on comparing the number of rapes reported that meet the legal definition to the number of rapes reported that don’t meet the legal definition. The much larger number of rapes that don’t get reported are ignored in calculating the unfounded (and the false) rape report rates.
This comment was written by Charles S.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Chingona,
Sailorman has been arguing that feminists — and possibly women in general — are bad at defining rape ever since he had a series of major disagreements with Maia. He seems to comment about it on every thread that touches on rape.
I like Sailorman, but it is a dead horse, and not appealing when he beats it.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
I’d like to point that your criticism of Kanin’s study, while thorough, contains an error:
You assume that everyone who was convicted for rape actually committed it.
When a PD says that ~2% of rape accusations were false, it means that 2% were both false and found to be false in court. The main contention of MRAs is not that false rape accusations sometimes happen, but is that there is a number (unknown?) of false rapes that are reported and lead to conviction, which the PD would obviously not count in its assessment of false rape rates.
Anyway, I love the facts and keep ‘em coming.
This comment was written by C.Zero.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
Sure, but similarly, there are bound to be a percentage of cases in which an accusation is counted as false despite being true. Without evidence, it seems silly to count either of them much.
—Myca
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April 17th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
I don’t think that’s true. It certainly assumes that everyone who was convicted of rape was convicted for a crime that was committed by somebody, even if not the person convicted. That is to say that there is no evidence that it was a false charge of rape regardless of whether the person convicted committed the rape or not.
What Myca said about the silliness of trying to calculate without the least bit of evidence is very true. I’m sure that there have been false reports of battery in which somebody was convicted. Nobody seems too worried about that & we have no evidence that such a thing occurs with any significant frequency. If we have no evidence, it becomes akin to arguing about dancing camels in the needle’s eye. Or some other tortured analogy.
This comment was written by Jake Squid.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2009 at 2:02 am
I don’t think I assume that. I’m sorry if my poor writing gave you that mistaken impression.
That’s simply not true. If police think a rape report is either false or baseless, they count it as “unfounded.” It doesn’t require a trial at all.
And, what Myca and Jake said. :-)
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2009 at 9:29 am
Kelly, Lovett, & Regan (2005) is not a study of the frequency of false rape reports. The study was never designed to count the number of false rape reports, they don’t attempt to count the number of false rape reports, and never claim to have counted the number of false rape reports. I don’t understand why anyone would cite it in that context. It’s hard to find a worse study for that purpose than Kanin’s, but this is it.
This comment was written by james.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Want to support your assertion, james?
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2009 at 11:06 am
What do you want me to say? Just go and read Kelly, Lovett, & Regan (2005), you’ll see my claims are correct.
This comment was written by james.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2009 at 11:12 am
OK, I’m supposed to take your word for it over that of the British government? Yeah, right. Make an argument.
If you have an actual beef with the study or its purposes, quote things. If you are, in fact, just rambling, get out of the thread.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
For you to take my word over that of the British government would require you to have actually read the study. I am fairly sure you haven’t - or you wouldn’t be suffering from any misunderstandings about the study’s contents. I am only asking that, unless you read the study, you take my first-hand account of its contents over whatever fifth- or sixth-hand accounts you have picked up through hearsay.
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April 18th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
(Cross-posted with James).
With all due respect, Mandolin, I don’t think James’ criticism is necessarily unreasonable. He’s not asking us to take his word for it, as I see it; he’s asking us to check the primary source, rather than trusting the secondary source I quoted.
I’ll see if I can get my hands on the primary source. If I can, I’ll post again letting folks know what I find.
ETA: Primary source is here. Checking it out.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
It’s here: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs05/hors293.pdf
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April 18th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
I haven’t yet read all 136 pages of Kelly, Lovett, & Regan (2005), but I’ve read enough to convince me that I can stand by my post as written, for the most part. Kelly, Lovett, & Regan (2005) covers a lot of things about how rapes are processed in the British justice system, but contrary to what James is implying, there is a substantial discussion of rapes reports that the police classified as false.
In particular, James, you should read pages 63-69 of the pdf file (47-53 according to the page numbers). From the summary on the last two pages of that section:
Admittedly, there is a difference between 2.5% (in the source I quoted) and 3%, but that’s a small difference. Overall, I’d say that passage clearly supports the claims I quoted in my post.
I’m curious to know what your argument here is, James, because you seem very off base.
[Edited to de-snark a little.]
UPDATE: On page 50 of the study (page 66 as Adobe Acrobat counts it), the number is given as 67 false complaints out of 2,643 reported cases, which is 2.5%.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
C.Zero,
With regard to false rape convictions, I’ve worked for an innocence project in the past, and most false convictions that we have found involved stranger rape and mistaken identification, which was often cross-racial. Many times, the actual rapist was located and convicted through the same DNA testing that exonerated the falsely accused and convicted man.
Ismone
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April 18th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
You have to read that section in context. The study is a very focused analysis of rape attrition in the criminal justice process. False rape reports are only looked at to the extent that it impacts on attrition, they’re not looked at in and of themselves.
They don’t look at a classification of false in the sense we’ve been talking about above (i.e. Kanin’s sense, the total number of reports that are false), they look at formal reasons for rape reports being dropped from the justice process, in this case due to being classified as meeting the official criteria for being designated false. Reports that are false in our sense are going to formally suffer attrition due to other reasons (withdrawal, insuffient evidence, no prospect of conviction, no evidence of assault). That’s perfectly appropriate given their aims, but it’s not much use for our purposes.
That’s what I mean when I said: “The study was never designed to count the number of false rape reports, they don’t attempt to count the number of false rape reports, and never claim to have counted the number of false rape reports.” They don’t. All their numbers are couched in terms of attrition. When they use the term false allegation it’s a technical reason for withdrawal from the criminal justice process. Not a generical claim about whether an allegation is true or not. They accept plenty of objectively false reports are withdrawn for other reasons.
This comment was written by james.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Ok, so to clarify my earlier statement:
When a rape case is viewed as “unfounded” it means that the PD (or FBI) determined it to be unfounded, thus the case would not have resulted in a conviction.
And I do fully realize that there are rapes that are not reported. This is a huge problem, not only with justice but with regards to data collection.
The problem is that there are going to be a number of cases that are NOT considered baseless by the police or the jury, but actually were. Saying that, just because there are a number of unreported rapes that these two numbers are equal is fallacious and has no basis in fact or logic.
I’m not suggesting that this number is nearly as large as the 50% cited, but could be larger than the ~2% that you determined. I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. That was my point.
This comment was written by C.Zero.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
I don’t have any handy cites, but I believe the best independent estimates, based on extrapolations from convictions that are overturned, put the wrongful conviction rate at around 3 percent. That’s for all crimes. And my understanding matches Ismone’s - that in rape cases, wrongful convictions usually occur when the suspect is incorrectly identified in the case of a stranger rape. That is, even in those cases, there is no false report. A rape did occur, but the wrong person was arrested for it. So even if you look at wrongful convictions for rape, it’s not going to give you a number that you can add to the percentage of false reports.
This comment was written by chingona.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
James, I don’t have the time to examine the Home Office report in detail this weekend, but I’ll try to respond to you sometime in the coming week.
C.Zero wrote:
It could be larger, it could be smaller. No one knows. That’s true, and I don’t think anyone here has said otherwise.
And likewise, there are going to be a number of cases that are considered baseless, but were actual rapes. There is no way of knowing either number.
However, I don’t think anyone — not even Kanin — is claiming to be able to say how many false rape reports occur as a matter of absolute truth. The claims are all about how many false rape reports we can be reasonably certain have occurred based on existing evidence.
Did anyone say that?
Incidentally, rape prevalence studies consistently show that there are many more rapes never reported to police, than the total number reported to police. From this, we can safely conclude that the total number of rapes is larger than the total number of false rape reports made to police.
However, I’m not sure why this comparison came up, and it’s not really relevant to anything.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
April 19th, 2009 at 7:10 am
That’s not it at all.
The people who are worst at defining rape are the legislators, who are in charge of making the rape laws. The legal definition of rape is in their hands, and they generally do a fairly shitty job of it.
Other folks–both male and female, BTW–tend to have a different problem, which can be summarized as “talking about rape in a manner that implicates rape laws, without really knowing what the rape laws say.” There are huge social issues, but frequently the social issues are based on a foundation of legal principles and the foundation gets ignored.
Feminists do a good job defining moral rape, but they don’t get to define legal rape (the legislature does that) and feminists tend to do a very bad job distinguishing between the two. that leads to sloppy writing.
Whenever you get someone writing about conviction rates (law!) or false reports (law!) or police response to rapes (law!) or that type of thing, the law matters. Arguably it should be one of the first things that gets looked at, but frequently the legal aspects get pushed aside.
That makes no sense, at least to me. You can write on rape and just talk about what is right and wrong in a moral sense, and you then don’t need to go into legality at all. But as soon as you start talking about convictions and legal falsity and police and jail and such, how on earth can you have the conversation without a knowledge of what you speak?
So, Chingona:
First of all, i hope you noticed that I qualified the heck out of that statement you quoted; “it is plausible that this may be close to the 50% which some folks cite.”
But as for the reason: Personal experience, mostly. I have had a lot of people complain about something being rape and not leading to a conviction. But when I have checked the statutes in question, the described behavior was not legally covered as rape in that state.
The most common example is alcohol-induced rape. Many people believe that if a woman is drunk, she cannot consent to sex and therefore even if she consents to sex the encounter is automatically classified as rape. This is 100% correct morally speaking–duh, don’t have sex with people who don’t know what they’re doing–but many statutes specifically address the issue. And you know what? It often isn’t automatically rape, if the woman in question got drunk of her own free will and then “consented.”
So, to take that as an example and apply it to this conversation: The classification of such an encounter as “usually,” “sometimes,” or “rarely” legal rape is obviously going to affect whether a report of such rape is classified as false or not. Do you see what I mean?
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
April 19th, 2009 at 7:37 am
In these cases, did the person file a report and it went to trial and did not result in a conviction? If it went to trial, presumably the prosecutor thought it did fit the legal definition. If it didn’t go to trial, then it probably fits in that category you’re describing.
And yes, I did note the qualifications you placed on your statement. I noted them last time, as well. I’m not playing gotcha here.
I would note, though, that in most feminist discussions of rape that I’ve seen, there is an awareness that not everything we consider rape is covered in the law, some of the things that are rape may never be adequately covered in law, and there still is value in talking about why and how those acts are rape and why they’re wrong and what to do about it. So just because you see some feminists describing X or Y as rape, doesn’t mean we’re totally ignorant about the law and are filing police reports for all these things.
This comment was written by chingona.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2009 at 8:21 am
well, yes–as I said, discussions about the morality of sexual interaction and the scale between consent and rape certainly don’t need to include legal issues. I don’t think we have any disagreement there.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2009 at 9:21 am
[...] contemplating a response to this post on Alas criticising Kanin’s study into false rape accusations, my reading took me to this [...]
This comment was written by Claims about McDowell’s research into False Rape Allegations are Not Credible (RP) | Feminist Critics.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
[...] contemplating a response to this post on Alas criticising Kanin’s study into false rape accusations, my reading took me to this [...]
This comment was written by Claims about McDowell’s research into False Rape Allegations are Not Credible (NoH) | Feminist Critics.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2009 at 6:33 am
What would be an interesting next step is to see if rape reports could be characterized in such a way that certain contexts would be deemed “warning areas”, and others could have their numbers reduced below 2% (or whatever the real number is.)
When a close relative was going through a divorce, he filed a motion to have joint physical custody of the kids (having the kids at his house half the time, rather than just the every-other-weekend thing). This was immediately followed by a report that he was sexually abusing the kids. (I am assuming that this was a “false report,” as it was duly investigated by Youth Services and found to be unfounded.) But during the several weeks of the investigation, he was denied all visitation rights with the children. This seems like a sensible precaution, but I think that the various backgrounds in which rape reports happen make it worthwhile to tease out the contexts in doing this sort of analysis.
My point is that I wonder how many of the false rape reports involve some extrinsic fact — such as custody of children — where there is more at stake that “just” the alleged perpetrator going to jail. If that is the case, then it should help demonstrate that in other cases of alleged rape, the false reports are significantly lower.
This comment was written by Rich B..Report this comment to the moderators
April 27th, 2009 at 10:47 am
[...] Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » Skepticism and Criticism of Eugene Kanin’s Study Of False Rape Rep… [Shorter Amp: Eugene Kanin famously found that 41%, or perhaps 50%, of rapes reported to police are false. Kanin's study is both badly designed and unverifiable; more reliable studies have found that between 2% and 8% of rapes reported to police are false reports.] (tags: rapeapology statistics sexualviolence) [...]
This comment was written by links for 2009-04-27 « Embololalia.Report this comment to the moderators