Letters to the Editor
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Check your facts too!
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.
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Family court is not a court of law
"Thankfully, we are subject to the modern judicial system, which holds a man innocent until proven guilty. But Vallario seems to have an underlying distrust of that judicial process. That's a serious issue to take up with the criminal justice system -- not during a hearing on what seems a totally reasonable bill."
It's not at all a reasonable bill if it allows for abuse in Family Court. Family Court is a court of equity (or chancery), and not a court of law. Hearsay is admissible as evidence in family court, men can be imprisoned in the absence of evidence in family court hearings, there are no requirements for evidentiary due process in family court, and constitutional protections of unreasonable search and seizure are not available in family court either.
Given the laxity of protections and the almost limitless powers of discretion judges have in family court, it its entirely reasonable to express concerns about its abuse in family court.
Perhaps Ms. Clark-Flory, as a woman, and hence a member of a legally privileged population under family law, does not appreciate men's concerns about the potential for abuse in family court. The "judicial process" as she describes it is an alien process rarely encountered in family court which is a venue where parties are not subject to Constitutional protections but instead are at the mercy of judges who often have been trained by bigoted feminist groups whose main goal is to vilify men under the guise of protecting women. Men are human beings, too, Ms. Clark-Flory, human beings with civil rights in our country. That is a fact that often seems to escape many feminists.
A man accused of rape faces a potential sentence of decades in prison. A woman who falsely accuses a man of rape faces very little punishment, if any at all.
No wonder legislators are concerned by the potential for abuse of such a law.
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Your quote
"While Hale's notion that it is "easy" for a woman to criminally accuse a man of rape has thankfully gone pretty much the way of the dinosaur,..."
I think the folks at Duke University might disagree with your statement...
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In this era of new registration at Salon, it would also benefit everyone if
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....
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Uh . . .
I don't understand what's wrong with the statement that "Rape is an accusation easily to be made, hard to be proved, and harder yet to be defended by the party accused."
I'm a feminist, and an attorney, and I don't find the quote, or this attorney's particular use of it, objectionable.
Sometimes there are contradictions and dilemmas that come with respecting women's rights and the rights of the accused. Although I've never been a victim of sexual abuse, I do feel a personal connection to this issue because of the experiences of somebody very close to me. On balance, though, few things terrify me more than the thought of an innocent person serving prison time. (It's politically incorrect, and unpopular, for instance, to require children to testify in court in molestation cases, but I strongly favor that requirement, even if it means that more crimes against children will go unpunished. The fact that a crime is especially heinous does not mean that the standards of proof should be relaxed; if anything, the opposite is true.)
Is it the "easily to be made" part of this quotation that you object to? If so, you may be interpreting the quote too broadly. I don't think this attorney was necessarily suggesting that rape doesn't affect its victims powerfully, or that women who bravely choose to report rapes don't face a number of negative consequences (harassment, intimidation, etc.). The point, rather, is that there are very few criminal charges that can be proven solely on the word of a witness; in a rape case, a single person's false testimony is enough to destroy a life.
Rape cases are also unique in that acquittal doesn't ever really result in exoneration. Knowing that someone was once accused, and acquitted (or even convicted!) of burglary, or cocaine possession, or insider trading, or drunk driving, wouldn't destroy a person's reputation in most people's eyes -- certainly not in the way that a past accusation of a sex crime would.
I agree that false rape claims are probably rare (although that 5.5% figure, if correct, seems alarmingly high to me). On the other hand, there are plenty of crazy and dishonest women out there, just as there are plenty of crazy and dishonest men.
I guess what I'm saying, to Ms. Clark Flory, is: you shouldn't be so quick to simply sniff at people who are advocating for strong protections for the criminal accused. If you're going to argue against a proposition like the one in this quotation, you have an obligation to be very explicit about your thesis.