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I don't know that there has ever been a time in which anyone's lies... not just women's lies... have been considered as serious as material crime.
Throwing the accusation, "You liar!" in someone's face used to be strong stuff indeed; people have been killed for such. These days it's nowhere near as strong. However, "You rapist!" has always been a more serious accusation.
Why? Probably there are a hundred reasons, but the two that stick out in my mind are the difficulty of deciding how much damage a lie caused, and the fact that lying is a more typically female crime, and we always punish feminine transgressions less harshly than masculine ones. When someone tells a lie, it's difficult to say how much damage it does. In this case, there was no definite accused, so who was damaged? Well, the next woman who really is raped has just suffered, as well as the general reputation of men, but by how much? Hard to say. It's not like a knife wound or a torn vagina, which are tangeable damage. This damage is no less real but much more poorly defined.
Although it doesn't come to bear on this particular case, we are still more horrified by men who shatter a woman's life by raping her than we are by women who shatter a man's life by falsely accusing him of rape. This has been so for hundreds of years, since we have always(?) considered women's actions, including their words and their crimes, to be trivial. We have traditionally punished masculine action because we have considered everything that men do to be of more consequence.
I don't know if this will change in my lifetime. Perhaps the only sensible option, given society's outlook, is to adopt the Scottish idea of protecting the identity of the accused until there is a conviction.
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Maybe you need to look back in history to a time not so long ago, when an accusation of rape or abuse was treated as trivial. And when rape was considered a crime against a man's property. It has not been too long since this was the norm in this country. Also, since when do women lie more than men, puhlease! I think this girl did a rotten thing, and it could have gotten way out of hand, to the point where she may have accused an innocent person. I think a misdemeanor in this case is plausible. But if she had went so far as to accuse a real person, that is a different story. That should have a harsher punishment. And you are right when you say that men have always treated womens actions and womens words as trivial, although I don't think you may have meant it the way I read it! That is the cause of many of the problems in our society today, and another reason to make equality more than just a feminist issue.
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"...rape was considered a crime against a man's property."
I think someone's taken a few too many women's studies courses. Have you even been breathing long enough to remember those times? I have been, and I can assure you that rape was not considered a "crime against a man's property." It was very serious stuff indeed.
The justice system had trouble dealing with rape and still does. At one time the adversarial model made testifying against a rapist a trip through hell. Attempts to compensate for this now make being accused of rape sheer hell, guilty or not.
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