Feminists say it's a myth, it occurs less than 2% of the time.

Fathers' Rights Activists say it is significant and point to studies indicating it occurs 25-40-50% of the time.

http://www.glennsacks.com/research_shows_false.htm

Linda Fairstein, former head of the New York County District Attorney's Sex Crimes Unit. Fairstein, the author of Sexual Violence: Our War Against Rape, says, "there are about 4,000 reports of rape each year in Manhattan. Of these, about half simply did not happen."

Craig Silverman, a former Colorado prosecutor known for his zealous prosecution of rapists during his 16-year career, says that false rape accusations occur with "scary frequency." As a regular commentator on the Bryant trial for Denver's ABC affiliate, Silverman noted that "any honest veteran sex assault investigator will tell you that rape is one of the most falsely reported crimes." According to Silverman, a Denver sex-assault unit commander estimates that nearly half of all reported rape claims are false.

There are of course hundreds of stories of false accusations. There is the Innocence Project that helps people get off of death row.

The New York Times, based on a single source printed a story last week containing a completely bogus accusation. A lesbian recently admitted to claiming a disabled man had raped her. A wife, cheating on her husband, was just sent to jail when she claimed her lover had raped her causing her husband to kill him.

I know it's easier to bloviate, but just why doesn't Salon get off its ass and look into this? Perhaps Matthew Hale and the Maryland legislator were right. It would be a pity to have to acknowledge that.

I know it's easier to bloviate, but just why doesn't Salon get off its ass and look into this? Is it better for women and progressive liberals to cede men to the angry right? Is systematic false imprisonment and court discrimination not a civil rights violation? Is encouraging false allegations and false imprisonment really a cause us liberals don't want to tackle?

Hi Librarian Grammarian,

Can you provide a link to your quote? I found it at RAINN, but there they do not provide any information as to the underlying study.

Also note that according to the RAINN site, sexual assault typically (not not always) means something different than rape.

The FBI "unfounded" category used to only include "recant" and "evidence contradicts" but "did not used to include "cases dissmissed for lack of evidence". RAINN now says that it does, but provides no link to anyone to support that.

Also, there have been other studies and anecdots as I indicated below that says the false accusation rate is 25-50%.

This is EXACTLY why Salon should investigate this, so that neither you or I have to depend on third party assessments of perhaps dubious studies.

Finally, why you feel badly for the 5.5% of falsely accused men, whatever happened to Ben Franklin, "Better 100 innocent men go free than one be wrongly convicted?"

More importantly, if the problem is that rape isn't being reported as it should, shouldn't we be taking steps to ensure that rape is more reported whenever it occurs? Why does the prevention of convicting the innocent take less priority over having rapes reported when it occurs?

In fact, if you make it easier to report rapes whenever they occur, isn't the number of incorrect allegations (made of whatever reason) bound to go up?

It's a question of Type I and Type II error. You want less false negatives, but if you don't take care to reduce false positives, generating less false negatives almost always increases the numbers of false positives.

I would think if you are genuinely concerned for the falsely accuses, you would think that part and parcel of getting more rapes reported is getting all rapes reported more accurately.

the author's of the original article discussed their articles and posts in the comments.

A lot of folks wrote in to Joan Walsh indicating they felt some of the attacks on women were in part because there really is no sense of conversation here in the comments.

If you folks continue to be aloof and not respect the time and effort and care that letters writers put into their letters, then don't be surprised if letter writers start to act as though their inputs aren't respected.

Come on Broadsheet....

Salon-approved Feminist website calls for judge to be castrated after he commits thought crime by trying to distinguish how and why he(we) differentiates between different crimes and punish them.

http://feministing.com/archives/006813.html#comment-71924

http://feministing.com/archives/006813.html#comment-71924

Nice one, JAJ!

What's the procedure for castrating a judge?

Posted by: Heraclitus [TypeKey Profile Page] | April 4, 2007 12:45 PM

What is abusive? Is it threats? Or is it:

dirty words?

overly long posts?

jokes about a protected class, women, minorities, republicans, veterans, blondes, the aged, foreigners, muslims, jews, queer, transgendered, catholics?

too many comments by the same person?

comments that disagree with the author?

comments that disagree with the editor?

comments that disagree with the advertiser?

comments that disagree with the government?

comments that might offend someone?

blogwhoring?

attention whoring?

links to relevant but NSFW material?

links to Slate?

What is abusive? At what point do we get to Fahrenheit 451, in which it was society, not government, that burned books, because "special-interest groups and other “minorities” objected to books that offended them. Soon, books all began to look the same, as writers tried to avoid offending anybody. This was not enough, however, and society as a whole decided to simply burn books rather than permit conflicting opinions."

Spam should be deleted and the usernames banned.

Threats should be documented and turned over to the FBI.

The rest should stay.