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Flow BeeDonna Zuckerberg
7/30/15 11:06am
Eh. This is one issue where I diverge greatly from feminists on, probably due to my ethnicity. As a black man in America, I just can’t be so dismissive of the the existence of false allegations of rape and the impact that they have when they occur. Many an African-American man in the early-mid 20th century ended up hung and possibly mutilated or burned due to false allegations of rape. To say they’re not real is to ignore a large slice of American history. It’s why I’m not, and never will be, on the allegation as fact train that modern progressives are. Historically, that has spelled doom for people like me.

That being said, yes, false allegations are nowhere near as pervasive as people like MRAs would have you believe. But again, that’s fact is not going to get me to jump on the allegation = fact bandwagon.

I compare it to the death penalty. Sure, most people on death row are guilty of the crimes that they have been convicted of. But, the chance that one person may not be is enough for me to not support the death penalty as an option for punishment. I think the same principle applies to rape allegations. Yes, the vast majority of rape allegations are not falsities made up by some vindictive woman. But the fact that it does happen is enough for me to reject allegation as fact and instead advocate for fair investigation of a claim where the accuser is taken seriously by the authorities, the evidence is collected and analyzed (no more rape kits sitting untested for decades), and arrests are made and prosecuted fully. I don’t understand why progressives don’t view their death penalty apprehensiveness and apprehensiveness over accusation = fact the same way. It’s the same principle to me.
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  andsmokeit is mrs tormund giantsbaneFlow Bee
  7/30/15 11:17am
  first of all, i agree with everything you said
  
  but, in my mind, the accusation = fact mindset could be considered a knee-jerk reaction to a history of women being discredited, disbelieved, shamed, shunned, jailed, or even killed for reporting a rape.
  
  i think there is a historical basis for the stance of many women and feminists have regarding rape accusations, just as there is an entirely valid historical basis for yours
  
  and i think this complex history is where a lot of our cultural problems with rape lies
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  Gruff McGruffFlow Bee
  7/30/15 11:18am
  
  GIF
  
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SpeckledRomanDonna Zuckerberg
7/30/15 11:08am
I’m gonna be perfectly honest here that a buddy of mine was accused of rape once and he did it, so I understand what’s the problem here. And I think theres a easy way to solve it.

Ok so today we have a lot of allegations about this kind of stuff and yeah yeah not all of it is true, but most of it is definitely true. That said, how do we handle what is false?

Well it sounds funny but a simple smartphone application with a sex consent button could easily solve it. You could even say how much beer you had to drink on it. This would clarify everything and make sure theres a understanding before two people get really intimate with each other. Does’nt have to be sex but even foreplay is rape sometimes.
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  quesoquesoquesoSpeckledRoman
  7/30/15 11:15am
  People can’t even bother to put on a condom at times... you think they’re going to use their phones?
  
  And who wants all their sexual encounters recorded?
  
  And how does this account for the fact you can say yes at one moment, no at another?
  
  And how would you prove someone pushed the sex consent button of their own free will?
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  MostlyKelp ( Now, you people get that oven, or die trying. You hear that, Stormy? DIE.)quesoquesoqueso
  7/30/15 11:18am
  Google glasses, ftw!
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GoodOlFashionedLoveSongDonna Zuckerberg
7/30/15 11:25am
We always seem to present things as “innocent until proven guilty” vs “believe the victim”, but that’s really a false dichotomy. I have no problem with our judicial system setting a high bar for conviction, even in cases of rape/sexual assault. What I have issue with is that so few reports are even taken seriously (rape kits left untested, officers brushing off or immediately disbelieving claims, etc.).

Juries should be skeptical; it’s the foundation of our justice system. Officers do not need to have that same skepticism. Hospital workers do not need to have that same skepticism. Counselors do not need to have that same skepticism. Context is everything!
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  kalebsbackGoodOlFashionedLoveSong
  7/30/15 11:33am
  Thank you. We can support rape survivors while also not rushing to judgment and maintaining fair and balanced legal systems. One doesn’t nullify the other.
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  RandomHookupGoodOlFashionedLoveSong
  7/30/15 11:45am
  Our adversarial judicial system almost guarantees we will hear a great deal more in court about false claims of rape than we might otherwise. Lawyers have to plant a seed of doubt, understanding that each case stands on its own. They can’t be responsible if that creates a broader interpretation that these situations must be more common.
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Jia TolentinoDonna Zuckerberg
7/30/15 11:11am
Eagerly awaiting all the people with poor reading comprehension who will see that Jezebel posted an essay on false allegations and immediately assume we are arguing that they are unimportant/nonexistent (despite this entire essay being written to say the opposite)—but I mainly came down here to say that I thoroughly salute Donna for writing this from the resolute center; I think this is an almost impossible topic to write about without provoking ire from either direction, and this essay is as good on it as I’ve ever seen.
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  TheOldCapJia Tolentino
  7/30/15 11:13am
  It’s a difficult subject - if for no other reason than defining the term.
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  deerlady83Jia Tolentino
  7/30/15 11:14am
  I found it thoughtful and interesting. I like mythology and classical literature. I enjoy learning about how other culture viewed their literature because it is important to know their thinking. Too often people apply modern thinking and it doesn't work.
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GertrudeFrancesDonna Zuckerberg
7/30/15 11:04am
Wow, I wrote my BA thesis on Love, Fear, and Rape in Ovid’s Metamorphosis! It’s so cool to see someone’s take who’s spent so much more time on this! It can be SO hard to put Greek or Roman mythology into any kind of modern context, or to use it to exemplify historical trends, and this is done so expertly. Usually when people ask me about Roman culture in relation to anything in today’s world, I just give up because some of the ways they conceived of themselves in relation to others, or to the meaning of society itself, was so fundamentally different that I don’t want to have to explain it for 2 hours to be accurate, haha. Thank you for this! Now can you do Lucretia? :)
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  AndreaRulez6GertrudeFrances
  7/30/15 11:20am
  As an undergrad, I wrote a paper on how different translations of Ovid into English made the prose have different meanings. I miss college. Sigh.
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  uualternateGertrudeFrances
  7/30/15 11:30am
  Out of curiosity, did you compare different translations?
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previouslyprommieDonna Zuckerberg
7/30/15 11:15am
Seems to me that the more repressive, moralistic, slut-shaming and male-dominated a society is, the more likely for false rape allegations to occur. If a woman is considered a male's property, either father or husband, and she is considered a whore, damaged, and worthless for engaging in sex without sanction of marriage, and is even liable to be legally beaten or killed for extramarital sex, then the more reason to lie and claim to be a victim. If you criminalize female sexuality, then people will lie to avoid the sanctions associated with the crime.
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  Justadumbremarkpreviouslyprommie
  7/30/15 11:24am
  Eh? No. Nice try. In a male dominated society ( like western, eastern and african) women are not believed. Gop, gop, gop.
  
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  previouslyprommieJustadumbremark
  7/30/15 11:26am
  Of course, I forgot, there are no degrees of things, its black, or white, completely.
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CaptOtterDonna Zuckerberg
7/30/15 12:13pm
It (rape) is a crime that can and (I hesitate to say “often” without even looking up figures) does take a form that makes it literally impossible to investigate via forensics or otherwise disprove via material evidence. Many instances of rape are, from the outside looking in, identical to consensual sex—the criminal element potentially being the victim’s state of mind. What’s the difference between two people having boring/tame (I don’t even know what the best terminology to use here would be) sex, where the woman wants to do it, but is either shy or inexperienced and therefore doesn’t do much—and an instance where a man starts initiating foreplay, and the woman is into it for a while, but then when the encounter escalates, the woman feels like she can’t say no (which is something I’ve heard/seen women say: that they didn’t want to have sex, but felt like they couldn’t say ‘no’ because they’d gone too far already/the man already paid for dinner/whatever)—my understanding is that that’s rape; even if the man would have stopped if he thought the woman was distressed over it, and even if the woman gave no outward indication that she was not okay with what was going on. In that instance, the key element of the crime (a lack of consent) cannot be disproven by any means other than the victim’s recantation; from a forensic/physical evidence perspective, there’s nothing to do—that the physical act occurred isn’t being disputed.

I tend to think of human beings as being naturally suspicious of that which they cannot directly confirm for themselves via observation, and to that end, it’s not surprising to me that we it rouses our suspicions any time we are asked to take some serious course of action (such as jail a person for a long time and effectively ruin their life forever) based on allegations the truth of which, by their very nature, cannot be confirmed or disproven by outside observation, but instead rely solely on the victim’s ipse dixit—on their truthful account of their own state of mind—i.e., a matter they are solely and uniquely capable of attesting to.

In other words—you know how people sometimes say “trust but verify”? Well, sometimes an instance of rape is patterned in such a way that there is no way to effectively verify, and naturally these particular sorts of instances concern those individuals tasked with making life-altering determinations regarding the criminal prosecution and punishment of the accused (i.e., prosecutors, judges, and jurors).
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  lissargh: still grey on the slotCaptOtter
  7/30/15 12:28pm
  Which is why we’re so hard up these days on educating people from both sides of the coin on consent! I always tell my friends who have questions about consent one pretty simple rule: If they aren’t inebriated and they’re enthusiastic, go for it! If they seem hesitant/uninterested/uncomfortable, ask.
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  CaptOtterlissargh: still grey on the slot
  7/30/15 12:58pm
  Because there’s 30 years worth of sex education that put the onus on victims to speak up; specifically the “no means no” campaign created a false sense of there being a “safe harbor”—i.e., “if the person doesn’t say ‘No’, it can’t be rape!” And while I don’t think this is the sole cause/reason, I think it’s definitely a major contributing factor.
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Kenhe LoginDonna Zuckerberg
7/30/15 11:08am
I think there are probably more false false allegations (i.e. recanted accusations where there was a real event) than false allegations.
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  SqarrKenhe Login
  7/30/15 12:14pm
  http://jezebel.com/for-your-readi...
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  ad infinitumKenhe Login
  7/30/15 3:15pm
  Remember the woman in Washington state who reported being raped, and was tried and convicted of fing a false report, purely because the police didn’t believe her? And then, about a year later, the police caught a serial rapist who kept photographs of all his victims, and he had a photograph of her.
  
  That’s a dramatic case because there was, eventually, proof of just how evil and prejudiced the police were, and how they were so eager to push the “lying slut” narrative that they punished a victim and enabled a serial rapist to keep raping. But it’s also a terrifying window into how rape is routinely treated. Police and prosecutors actively look for reasons to disbelieve victims. They actively threaten women with prosecution, and sometimes go through with it, if women don’t recant. They go out of their way, as a matter of policy, to make sure rape victims never receive justice and rapists are never punished for their crimes. And yet the standard discussion about rape is that all a woman has to do is say, “He raped me” and a man’s whole life is ruined, and men still whine endlessly about how unfair it is that on rare occasions, rapists are punished for raping people despite how hard the system routinely works to make sure that never happens.
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recidiviciousDonna Zuckerberg
7/30/15 11:34am
To me, it’s a bit funny to note, though, that the allegation used as the cornerstone example of the essay is a fictional one. Phaedra’s false rape accusation quite literally is a myth. It’s frankly bizarre to me that there are actually people who point to it as some kind of proof of a history of women as liars.
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  Denziloerecidivicious
  7/30/15 1:40pm
  Of course women lied historically; some about serious crimes. Most of them didn’t, of course. Same goes for men.
  
  This is all incredibly obvious. Not sure what or who you’re arguing with. If somebody suggests that all women are pathological liars, they’re a crazy person. Same if somebody suggests that no women are pathological liars. They’re crazy and nobody takes them seriously.
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  previouslyprommierecidivicious
  7/30/15 1:52pm
  I did not point to the fictional incident as proof that such incidents occurred. I was pointing out that the scenario does explain what could possibly be the motivation for a woman to make a false rape allegation, in that case to avoid the extreme social status implications of having it known that she voluntarily had sex with a black man. As I mentioned elsewhere, I find it hard to believe that there have ever been many instances of women who just make up allegations for shits and giggles.
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Taking back meDonna Zuckerberg
7/30/15 11:33am
So, how do we, as feminists, handle it when we are aware of false allegations? I’ve had 2 separate events in my life where false accusations were made. 1) In college, 2 friends were in a relationship and broke up. The girl later accused the guy of rape. She admitted to several people she made it up to hurt him. 2) A former hook up accused my SO of rape. I didn’t know either of them when it occurred. It just came out recently. She’s been saying this for 3 years and no one said anything to us about it. Her friends have even told me she’s making it up.

I don’t usually like talking about these events, because I don’t want to add to the false allegation front of the MRAs. But, both of these instances have convinced me that the accused need to have certain rights as well. In the first situation, she dropped it after she got over the break up and it only got around to our friends. In the second, it’s really affecting his and my life. He’s wanted to confront her, but I’ve talked him out of it. He feels his reputation has been ruined, although no one involved that knows believes it. One person was even there at the time and said that it didn’t happen. I’m fearful because he has a child and I don’t want anything to get beyond where it has so it doesn’t affect the kid.

He was even afraid to tell me of the accusation because he's heard me go on rants regarding rape culture before. I have to just go with my gut and the info from people involved that she did simply regret her actions. And I hate it. I feel like I'm betraying some of my beliefs. I'm trying to come to grips with the fact that, as always, beliefs grow and change.
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  VulcansAreHeartbreakersTaking back me
  7/30/15 1:59pm
  Sounds like you’re handling it just fine. You didn’t mention either of these women actually trying to get these guys arrested, so what’s the problem? Some whining about the opinions among their circle of friends? Real rapists still have close groups of friends despite rumors. If these guys aren’t guilty then it’ll eventually blow over. And it sounds like people don’t believe the woman who has been saying it for 3 years, so...? I’m confused how these guys haven’t managed to cut these women (who keep calling them rapists) out of their lives? When I discover someone has started a nasty rumor about me the first thing I do is ditch them and anyone in their circle. If you really feel involved the best you can do is say ‘no he didn’t do it’ if anyone ever asks you. Also, I think you did a good thing talking him out of confronting her.
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  ad infinitumVulcansAreHeartbreakers
  7/30/15 4:04pm
  I’m also really leery of “Her friends don’t believe her, so that’s hard and fast proof she wasn’t raped!” No, it isn’t. Neither is believing that your SO would never do anything like that.
  
  I don’t know the circumstances here, obviously. Maybe both women are lying. But at least in the second case, the basis for labeling the woman a false accuser seems pretty damned thin. It’s not unusual for rape victims to be disbelieved by everyone, even people you would expect to be on their side. That really isn’t proof that they weren’t raped.
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