False accusation of rape
A false accusation of rape happens when a person states that they or another person have been raped when no rape has occurred. Although there are widely varying estimates of the prevalence of false accusation of rape, according to a 2013 book on forensic victimology, very few reliable scientific studies have been conducted.
Rates of false accusation are sometimes inflated or misrepresented due to conflation of false with designations such as unfounded. Designations such as unfounded allow law enforcement to close cases without arriving at a conclusion and are used to describe cases without enough evidence, as opposed to false cases where the accuser is not credible or eventually admits that the accusation is untrue.
Causes
Causes of false accusations of rape fall into two categories: deliberate deception and non-deliberate deception.Deliberate deception
An accuser may have several motivations to falsely claim they have been raped. There is disagreement on how many different categories these may be put into. Kanin listed three: revenge, producing an alibi, and getting sympathy/attention. Newman listed four: revenge, producing an alibi, personal gain, and mental illness.According to De Zutter et al., Kanin's list is "valid but insufficient to explain all the different motives of complainants" and presents eight categories of motives: material gain, alibi, revenge, sympathy, attention, disturbed mental state, relabeling, or regret.
According to Hines and Douglas, 73% of men who've experienced partner-initiated violence reported that their partner threatened to make false accusations. This is compared to 3% for men in the general population.
Non-deliberate deception
False memories
There are several ways in which an alleged victim can accidentally come to believe that they have been raped by the person they accuse. These include:- Recovered-memory therapy: memories of sexual abuse "recovered" during therapy in the absence of any supporting evidence, based on the Freudian notion of "repression"
- The victim's confusion of the memory of the real rapist with the memory of someone else
- Memory conformity: memory can become contaminated when co-witnesses discuss their recollection of events
Facilitated communication
Facilitated communication is a scientifically discredited technique that attempts to aid communication by people with autism or other communication disabilities who are non-verbal. The facilitator guides the disabled person's arm or hand and attempts to help them type on a keyboard or other device. Research indicates that the facilitator is the source of the messages obtained through FC, not the disabled person. However, the facilitator may believe they are not the source of the messages due to the ideomotor effect, which is the same effect that guides a Ouija board. There have been a number of accusations of sexual abuse made through facilitated communication. As of 1995, there were sixty known cases, with an unknown numbers of others settled without reaching public visibility."Don't know"
According to De Zutter et al., 20% of complainants said that they did not know why they had filed a false allegation.Presumption of guilt
This type occurs mainly in South Korea.Estimates of prevalence
It is difficult to assess the prevalence of false accusations.Few jurisdictions have a distinct classification of false accusation, resulting in these cases being combined with other types of cases under headings such as "unfounded" or "unproved". There are many reasons other than falsity that can result in a rape case being closed as unfounded or unproven.
Another complicating factor is that data regarding false allegations generally do not come from studies designed to estimate the prevalence of false allegations; rather, they come from reviews of data regarding investigations and prosecutions within criminal justice systems. The goal of such investigations is to determine whether or not there is sufficient evidence to prosecute, not to evaluate the cases for which there is not sufficient evidence to prosecute and classify such cases as "false" or "true".
DiCanio states that while researchers and prosecutors do not agree on the exact percentage of cases in which there was sufficient evidence to conclude that allegations were false, they generally agree on a range of 2% to 10%. Due to varying definitions of a "false accusation", the true percentage remains unknown.
A 2009 study of rape cases across eleven countries in Europe found the proportion of cases designated as false ranged from 4% to 9%.
However, estimates of false allegations are in fact estimates of proven false allegations. These are not estimates of likely, or possible, false allegations. Accordingly, estimating a false allegation rate of 5% does not allow an inference that 95% of allegations are truthful.
Statistics Canada (2018)
According to Statistics Canada, 19% and 14% of sexual assault allegations were deemed unfounded in 2016 and 2017, respectively. It also declared, however, that more severe and violent cases of sexual assault were less likely to be declared unfounded than less severe ones. Cases declared to be unfounded are cases where police determined that the assault did not occur and was not attempted.According to the Globe and Mail, the statistics about unfounded cases are often kept secret, providing no incentive for police forces to analyze and account for them.
Archives of Sexual Behavior (2016)
Claire E. Ferguson and John M. Malouff conducted a meta-analysis of confirmed false rape reporting rates in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2016, and found the rate of false reports of sexual assault was 5.2%. The authors say that the "total false reporting rate, including both confirmed and equivocal cases, would be greater than the 5% rate found here".Los Angeles Police Department, USA (2014)
Researchers Cassia Spohn, Clair White and Katharine Tellis examined data provided by the Los Angeles Police Department in the US from 2008, and found that false reports among rape cases was about 4.5 percent. Upon review of Cassia Spohn's work, the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office, which initially collaborated in the report, concluded "the perspective, conclusions and policy recommendations are inconsistent with American constitutional principles of justice, due process protections and the ethical obligations of prosecutors." The LADO noted that Spohn et al. likely had ideological biases against the accused and "failed to develop an understanding of the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County."Crown Prosecution Service report, UK (2011–2012)
A report by the Crown Prosecution Service examined rape allegations in England and Wales over a 17-month period between January 2011 and May 2012. It showed that in 35 cases authorities prosecuted a person for making a false allegation, while they brought 5,651 prosecutions for rape. Keir Starmer, at the time head of the CPS, said that the "mere fact that someone did not pursue a complaint or retracted it, is not of itself evidence that it was false" and that it is a "misplaced belief" that false accusations of rape are commonplace. He added that the report also showed that a significant number of false allegations of rape "involved young, often vulnerable people. About half of the cases involved people aged 21 years old and under, and some involved people with mental health difficulties. In some cases, the person alleged to have made the false report had undoubtedly been the victim of some kind of offence, even if not the one that he or she had reported."Lisak, USA (2010)
's study, published in 2010 in Violence Against Women, classified as demonstrably false 8 out of the 136 reported rapes at an American university over a ten-year period. However, a much larger number of reports were classified by the authors as "Case Did Not Proceed", which includes reports that could ultimately be determined to be false allegations, though how many is unknown.Applying International Association of Chiefs of Police guidelines, a case was classified as a false report if there was evidence that a thorough investigation was pursued and that the investigation had yielded evidence that the reported sexual assault had in fact not occurred. A thorough investigation would involve, potentially, multiple interviews of the alleged perpetrator, the victim, and other witnesses, and where applicable, the collection of other forensic evidence. For example, if key elements of a victim's account of an assault were internally inconsistent and directly contradicted by multiple witnesses and if the victim then altered those key elements of his or her account, investigators might conclude that the report was false. That conclusion would have been based not on a single interview, or on intuitions about the credibility of the victim, but on a "preponderance of evidence gathered over the course of a thorough investigation."
Burman, Lovett & Kelly, Europe (2009)
In a study of the first 100 rape reports after April 1, 2004, in Scotland, researchers found that about 4% of reports were designated by police to be false.A separate report by the same researchers that year which studied primary data from several countries in Europe, including Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Scotland, Sweden, and Wales, found the average proportion of reports designated by police as false was about 4%, and wasn't higher than 9% in any country they studied. They noted that cases where the police doubt the allegation may be "hidden in the ‘no evidence of sexual assault' category" rather than listed in the "designated false" category and suggested more detailed research into explicating both categories.