Arctish said:
You've seen the links to data on false accusations of rape. You know the rate of 'false and unfounded' claims is less than 10%, and when unfounded claims (aka claims lacking evidence) are separated out, the false claims amount to somewhere around 2%.
That is being pushed by radical feminists but is highly misleading. The ~10% unfounded rate is the claims that can be dismissed outright. IT IS NOT A CEILING FOR FALSE ACCUSATION. False accusation that seem credible enough to lead to a prosecution, trial and possibly even a conviction (see for example the Brian Banks case) are not counted as "unfounded" but are nevertheless false. The 2% number is just a myth anyway, the only source being radfem publications that keep quoting each other.
We've been over this before.
Unfounded claims are claims for which there is insufficient supporting evidence or no supporting evidence, either because the evidence has been obscured, lost, never existed, or was never collected.
For example, suppose a man said a woman pulled a knife on him and she says she didn't. No one else saw what happened, there was no record of events, and no knife was found. His claim is unfounded. That doesn't mean he's lying or mistaken or that a crime wasn't committed. It means there's no evidence other than his say-so which is disputed, therefore the evidence of a crime is insufficient to support the claim.
Also, it should be noted that not all false claims are deliberately, knowingly false. A victim might be genuinely mistaken about the identity of his/her attacker, or have only a hazy recollection of an incident due to alcohol or drug use, or having been slipped a roofie.
Anyway, the numbers I'm citing come from the FBI and published research on the rates of false reporting like this:
Drawing from the last published Uniform Crime Reporting data on "unfounded" reports in 1996, the FBI says the unfounded rate for "forcible rape," at 8 percent, is higher than the average for all other crimes measured, at 2 percent. However, the agency has since modified its guidelines to narrow this definition. Criminal justice professor Philip Rumney, writing in the Cambridge Law Journal in 2006, questions these numbers, which come from law enforcement agencies across the United States: "Among such a large number of agencies there is likely to be a significant variation in recording practice," he writes, citing the Philadelphia Police Department, which "dumped cases," labeling them "unfounded," in order to "reduce workload" for nearly two decades
<link.>
Where are you getting your data?
You need evidence to support an accusation, not evidence to doubt an accusation. You are turning the burden of proof ass-backwards!
Are we talking about proof beyond a reasonable doubt at a criminal trial, or are we talking about a man believing his own daughter is reporting the truth as she knows it? Because if you think men should only believe their daughters if they can mount an effective prosecution complete with DNA evidence, eyewitness testimony, and a compelling argument for conviction, I think you're being ridiculous. But if you're just substituting one for the other in order to score a rhetorical point, I think you're being disingenuous.
As for demanding a rape victim preserve DNA evidence before showering off the residue of a rapist's attack, otherwise you won't believe him/her, that's not only unreasonable, it's cruel.
It is not unreasonable, much less cruel, to demand evidence before believing such as accusation. It is neither unreasonable nor cruel to expect that the accuser not destroy evidence before evidence from her person is collected.
So, just to be clear: if your own kid said she'd been raped, you would demand that she preserve the evidence before you believed her. But you don't believe a woman who said she was raped and preserved the evidence, and you oppose her attempt to secure DNA in order to support her claims.
Sounds like you just prefer to disbelieve rape claims, period. .
It IS unreasonable, and cruel toward the accused, to demand that rape accusers much be believed without evidence and that it is up to the accused to prove his innocence.
We've been over this before, too.
No one is suggesting that all claims must be automatically believed to be 100% true, accurate, and complete or that trials are unnecessary. No one, that is, except for hysterical extremists who either don't understand or don't want others to understand that believing someone is telling you the truth as they know it is
not the same as believing they couldn't possibly be mistaken in whole or in part, or that they couldn't possibly be one of those rare two-percenters who tell lies.
