False accusation of rape

A false accusation of rape is an accusation, formal or informally made against another individual or individuals concerning a forcible sexual assault. Failure to consider a false accusation of sexual assault during a criminal proceeding is considered a due process violation. Pereptrators may be motivacted by a number of factors including profit, revenge, embarrassment, crime concealment, or some mental defect. Detailed investigations using differing samples and methodologies have found widely differing results ranging from as high as 41% to as low as 1.5%. As a scientific matter, the frequency of false rape complaints to police or other legal authorities remains unknown."

FBI statistics

FBI reports consistently put the number of "unfounded" rape accusations around 8%. The average rate of unfounded reports for Index crimes is 2%. However, “unfounded” is not synonymous with false allegation. Bruce Gross of the Forensic Examiner's says that:

This statistic is almost meaningless, as many of the jurisdictions from which the FBI collects data on crime use different definitions of, or criteria for, "unfounded." That is, a report of rape might be classified as unfounded (rather than as forcible rape) if the alleged victim did not try to fight off the suspect, if the alleged perpetrator did not use physical force or a weapon of some sort, if the alleged victim did not sustain any physical injuries, or if the alleged victim and the accused had a prior sexual relationship. Similarly, a report might be deemed unfounded if there is no physical evidence or too many inconsistencies between the accuser's statement and what evidence does exist. As such, although some unfounded cases of rape may be false or fabricated, not all unfounded cases are false.

FBI study criticism

In Warren Farrell's best selling book "The Myth of Male Power" he criticizes the "study" by the FBI:

"The FBI knows the number of women who reported they were raped, but not whether the rapist was found guilty or innocent. In 47 percent of the cases, the alleged rapist has not been identified or found, or if he has been found, there was insufficient evidence to arrest him. The remaining 53 percent were arrested, but the FBI doesn't receive data as to whether they were eventually found guilty or innocent. In brief, as far as the FBI knows, the percentage of false accusations overall could be anywhere from zero to 100 percent." (The Myth of Male Power: The Politics of Rape, pg 323)

British Home Office

The largest and most rigorous study was commissioned by the British Home Office and based on 2,643 sexual assault cases (Kelly, Lovett, and Regan, 2005). Of these, 8% were classified by the police department as false reports. Yet the researchers noted that some of these classifications were based simply on the personal judgments of the police investigators and were made in violation of official criteria for establishing a false allegation. Closer analysis of this category applying the Home Office counting rules for establishing a false allegation and excluding cases where the application of the cases where confirmation of the designation was uncertain reduced the percentage of false reports to 3%. The researchers concluded that "one cannot take all police designations at face value" and that "[t]here is an over-estimation of the scale of false allegations by both police officers and prosecutors." Moreover, they added:

The interviews with police officers and complainants’ responses show that despite the focus on victim care, a culture of suspicion remains within the police, even amongst some of those who are specialists in rape investigations. There is also a tendency to conflate false allegations with retractions and withdrawals, as if in all such cases no sexual assault occurred. This reproduces an investigative culture in which elements that might permit a designation of a false complaint are emphasised (later sections reveal how this also feeds into withdrawals and designation of ‘insufficient evidence’), at the expense of a careful investigation, in which the evidence collected is evaluated.

Police in Victoria (Australia)

Another large-scale study was conducted in Australia, with the 850 rapes reported to the Victoria police between 2000 and 2003 (Heenan & Murray, 2006). Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, the researchers examined 812 cases with sufficient information to make an appropriate determination, and found that 2.1% of these were classified by police as false reports. All of these complainants were then charged or threatened with charges for filing a false police report.

Kanin's report

In 1994, Dr. Eugene J. Kanin of Purdue University investigated the incidences of false rape allegations made to the police in one small urban community between 1978 and 1987. He states that unlike those in many larger jurisdictions, this police department had the resources to "seriously record and pursue to closure all rape complaints, regardless of their merits." He further states each investigation "always involves a serious offer to polygraph the complainants and the suspects" and "the complainant must admit that no rape had occurred. She is the sole agent who can say that the rape charge is false." The number of false rape allegations in the studied period was 45; this was 41% of the 109 total complaints filed in this period.

Criticism

Critics of Dr. Kanin's report include Dr. David Lisak, an associate professor of psychology and director of the Men’s Sexual Trauma Research Project at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In an article in the September/October 2007 issue (vol. 11 no. 1) of the Sexual Assault Report, titled "False allegations of rape: a critique of Kanin," he states "Kanin’s 1994 article on false allegations is a provocative opinion piece, but it is not a scientific study of the issue of false reporting of rape. It certainly should never be used to assert a scientific foundation for the frequency of false allegations." Lisak cites page 13 of Investigating Sexual Assaults from the International Association of Chiefs of Police which says polygraph tests for sexual assault victims are contraindicated in the investigation process and that their use is "based on the misperception that a significant percentage of sexual assault reports are false." Lisak argues that "It is noteworthy that the police department from which Kanin derived his data used or threatened to use the polygraph in every case… The fact that it was the standard procedure of this department provides a window on the biases of the officers who conducted the rape investigations, biases that were then echoed in Kanin’s unchallenged reporting of their findings."

Rumney

A 2006 paper by N.S. Rumney in the Cambridge Law Journal provided an exhaustive account of studies of false reporting in the USA, New Zealand and the UK. A tabulated list of studies on false reporting published between 1968 and 2005 placed the percentage of false reports between a minimum on 1.5% (Theilade and Thomsen, 1986) and a maximum of 90% (Stewart, 1981).

Rumney notes that early researchers tended to accept uncritically Freudian theories which purported to explain the prevalence of false allegations, while in more recent literature there has been "a lack of critical analysis of those who claim a low false reporting rate and the uncritical adoption of unreliable research findings" (p. 157). Rumney concludes that "as a consequence of such deficiencies within legal scholarship, factual claims have been repeatedly made that have only limited empirical support. This suggests widespread analytical failure on the part of legal scholarship and requires an acknowledgment of the weakness of assumptions that have been constructed on unreliable research evidence."

Lisak

Dr. David Lisak's study, published in 2010 in Violence Against Women, classified 8 out of the 136 (5.9%) reported rapes at Northwestern University over a ten year period to be false.

Other

DiCanio (1993) states that while researchers and prosecutors do not agree on the exact percentage of false allegations, they generally agree on a range of 2% to 8%.

Taylor (1987) wrote that "suspicion and disbelief of women who charge men with rape have for centuries had a stranglehold on [...] laws nominally designed to protect women against rape. As a result, many women did not report or prosecute rapes because the process was so often humiliating."

Examples

• Crystal Mangum in the Duke lacrosse case
• Tawana Brawley rape allegations
• The Scottsboro Boys
• Stefan Kiszko was falsely accused of stalking and exposing himself to three teenage girls. This was one of the miscarriages that caused him to be wrongly convicted of raping and killing Lesley Susan Molseed. Two detectives in the case were eventually charged with suppressing evidence. DNA evidence eventually proved he could not be guilty and, subsequently, the three teenagers who had accused him of stalking and indecently exposing himself recanted their testimony and admitted that they had "made up the claims for a laugh". After 16 years in jail Kinszko’s convictions were overturned and another man was eventually convicted.
• Nafissatou Diallo told a compelling and detailed story of being gang raped by soldiers in Guinea -- that was completely fabricated. She told this story to prosecutors two days after she alleged that she was sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Two weeks later she told them the story again. Both times with great emotion, precision, and conviction, including: tears; halting speech; the number and nature of her attackers; pointing out scars that were supposedly from the attack; and how her 2-year old daughter was present. When she finally admitted that the story was fabricated, she at first claimed that she made up the attack to be consistent with her asylum application. But that too turned out to be untrue --as her asylum application makes no mention of any rape.
• Gary Dotson was the second person to be exonerated of a criminal conviction by DNA evidence. In May 1979, he was found guilty and sentenced to 25 to 50 years' imprisonment for rape, and another 25 to 50 years for aggravatedkidnapping, the terms to be served concurrently. Sixteen-year-old Cathleen Crowell had made up the rape allegation to explain to her foster parents her pregnancy concerns after having had consensual sex with her boyfriend the previous day. After her 1985 recantation, she described herself as an "emotionally disturbed" foster child and revealed that she had been sexually active since the age of 12. Crowell later admitted her fabrication was based on a scene from a 1974 best-selling bodice ripperromance novel, Sweet Savage Love.
• Nora Wall a former Irish nun of the Sisters of Mercy who was wrongfully convicted of rape in June 1999, and served four days of a life sentence in July 1999, before her conviction was quashed. She was officially declared the victim of a miscarriage of justice in December 2005. The wrongful conviction was based on false allegations by two women in their 20s, Regina Walsh and Patricia Phelan.
• Rikki Rockett was arrested for rape. Rockett was eventually exonerated of all charges after it was determined that he was not even in the state during the time of the alleged crime. It is believed that someone was impersonating Rockett to get women to sleep with him.
• Temitope Adenugba, 24, was a student at Oxford Brookes University when she randomly chose a man to falsely accuse of raping her so that she could get an extension on her university coursework. Eventually the police determined that she was lying and that her claims were a complete fantasy. She eventually admitted to perverting the course of justice through her "malicious allegations" and was sentenced to 18 months in jail -- but not before the man was arrested and put through a "year of hell". Her barrister defended her by saying: "She was not seeking to directly attack the victim -- he was chosen rather arbitrarily." Ms. Adenugba had also made a previous fictitious rape complaint against a partner in October 2006. She ended up admitting that she was upset at him and wanted to get him in trouble. For filing this false report with police she was convicted of wasting police time and fined 80 pounds.
• David Carrington-Jones rape conviction was quashed and he was freed after spending nearly seven years in jail. One of his accusers admitted to police she made up allegations of sexual assault against others. She had falsely accused her step-father of sexual abuse because she "did not like him". For this she was given a caution for wasting police time. Also, she falsely accused three additional people of rape: her brother; a former boyfriend; and, a customer at work -- but the jury was not told of this, and Mr Carrington-Jones was sentenced to a ten-year jail term.
• On 10 August 2001,Neil and Christine Hamilton were arrested on rape charges. The investigation against them was dropped when it became apparent that the accusations were entirely false. In June 2003, the woman who had fabricated the accusation, Nadine Milroy-Sloan, was imprisoned for attempting to pervert the course of justice. In 2005, the publicist Max Clifford paid an undisclosed sum in libel damages to Neil Hamilton for having represented Nadine Milroy-Sloan concerning her allegations. Clifford did not face any criminal charges over the case. However, the judge in the case pointed out that Clifford had offered the woman £80,000 in connection with her false rape claims.
• Michael Flatley was falsely accused of rape by real estate agent and former stripper Tyna Marie Robertson. She threatened to sue him unless he paid a settlement of at least seven figures. Then she tried to extort $33 million from him. Ultimately, she was ordered to pay $11 million for making false allegations to extort money.
• In February 2006, a woman claimed to police that a man who resembledJean Charles de Menezes had attacked her in a hotel room on New Year's Eve 2002 in west London. Scotland Yardspent several weeks investigating the claim. After the claim was made public in March 2006, the Menezes family denied the allegation and claimed that the Metropolitan Police were trying to smearMenezes. Although the family initially denied the request, a blood sample was eventually taken with their permission from Menezes' autopsy. On 25 April 2006 Scotland Yard announced that forensic tests on the sample had cleared Menezes.
• Ron Williams and Dennis Fritz were wrongly convicted in 1988 in Oklahoma for the rape and murder of Debra Sue "Debbie". Both were released 11 years later when DNA evidence proved their innocence. Their story became the subject of bestselling author John Grisham's firstnonfiction book, The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town.
• James Calvin Tillman

See Also

• False allegation of child sexual abuse
• Recovered memory therapy
• Innocence Project
• Centurion Ministries