How Many Rape Reports Are False? - Bloomberg View: "....How many women falsely accuse men of rape? A lot of statistics are floating around the Internet: Two percent,
say many feminists, the same as other crimes. Twenty-five percent, say other groups who quarrel with the feminists on many issues, or maybe 40 percent. Here’s the real answer:
We don’t know. Anyone who insists that we do know should be corrected or ignored. The number of false accusations is what statisticians call a “dark number” -- that is,
there is a true number, but it is unknown, and
perhaps unknowable. For a deep dive into the reasons it’s so hard to know, I commend you to Cathy Young’s new
piece at Slate, in which she details all the problems that confound investigations into false rape accusations. Here’s what we do know:
The 2 percent number is very bad and should never be cited. It apparently traces its lineage back to Susan Brownmiller’s legendary "Against Our Will," and her citation for this figure is a single speech by an appellate judge before a small group of lawyers. His source for this statistic was a single area of New York that started having policewomen conduct all rape interviews. This is not data. It is an anecdote about an anecdote...." (read more at link above)
No comments:
Post a Comment