Crying Rape

Article here. Excerpt:

'False rape accusations are a lightning rod for a variety of reasons. Rape is a repugnant crime—and one for which the evidence often relies on one person’s word against another’s. Moreover, in the not-so-distant past, the belief that women routinely make up rape charges often led to appalling treatment of victims. However, in challenging what author and law professor Susan Estrichhas called “the myth of the lying woman,” feminists have been creating their own counter-myth: that of the woman who never lies.

More than a quarter-century ago, feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon wrote that “feminism is built on believing women’s accounts of sexual use and abuse by men”; today, Jessica Valenti urges us to “believe victims en masse,” because only then will we recognize the true prevalence of sexual assault. But a de facto presumption of guilt in alleged sexual offenses is as dangerous as a presumption of guilt in any crime, and for the same reasons: It upends the foundations on which our system of justice rests and creates a risk of ruining innocent lives.

How frequent are false accusations? A commonly cited estimate, which may have originated with feminist author Susan Brownmiller in the 1970s, is that they account for only about 2 percent of rape reports. After the Oberst fiasco, feminist blogger Rebecca Watson posteda video asserting that, statistically, you will be wrong two out of 100 times if you presume a rape accusation to be true and 98 out of 100 times if you presume it to be false.'