Feminists pick up studies that say it's anywhere from 1-5% (this number is so low that it strains logic something fierce to believe) and MRAs throw around numbers like ~40% which of course they would because that just benefits the "bitches be crazy" narratives of creepy MRAs.
Really? I honestly have a hard time believing that it could be as
high as 5 percent. It seems that the reputable studies floating out there seem to float somewhere in the range of 8 percent, but as I pointed out to Nix even they are riddled with false negatives such that the
true incidence of false allegations is most certainly lower than that, and more or less perfectly in line with feminist claims. If outright fabrications (as opposed to legit cases being dropped for personal reasons, or "ambiguous" situations) were even
one percent I'd be surprised.
I don't even know if I agree with the blanket statement of "society is tilted toward being harsh to rape victims." What does that mean?
Well, man, if you don't agree with that statement than we are sufficiently far apart on points of basic reality that I'm not sure that engaging will do much good. But I'll try anyway.
extra-legal sexual assault squads formed by colleges and universities that are ran by young showboaters; the types who will simply dole out punishments before serious investigations have even taken place and maintain them even if the subjects have been cleared
Uh? Really? Pretty sure that handling these sorts of cases in-house generally leads to perpetrators getting away with it, on the grounds that the college wants to sweep bad publicity under the rug, rather than it being some sort of hangin' judge kangaroo court scenario? Kinda was under the impression they had the exact
opposite problem?
but I don't think the average person seriously treats alleged rape victims with some sort of disdain.
Dude, do you have
any recollection of Steubenville? Basically the whole town was up in arms that "how could you besmirch the honor of our sainted football players!" And that's not an isolated incident, that's basically
de rigeur in our culture even when they're not on the team. If you make a rape accusation, be prepared to have people think you're a monster for accusing their friends, who "could never have done it!". Be prepared for opposing counsel to try and dig through your sex life to prove that you were a dirty slut "asking for it". Be prepared to have to re-live your trauma, under the klieg lights of the press and disapproving social circles and the witness stand. Be prepared, even if you do everything right
by the book to end up in situations like these:
When I was in Canada a couple weeks ago I was watching CBC Montreal just for funsies and there was a segment about a local woman who was allegedly sexually assaulted, she went straight to the police, they conducted a rape kit, asked questions, did all the proper procedure. But then weeks went by, then months. It turned out the police took (from memory) like three months to get the rape kit analyzed and sent back. That's f**king outrageous, and thankfully, is one of the aspects of this problem we can directly address, and should be directly addressing. We definitely need more people specifically to deal with sexual assault cases.
...and then, if you don't go
by the book because you're stunned by the trauma or you were assaulted while unconscious or whatever, be prepared for people to second-guess and victim-blame til the cows come home and have it even worse. That's what "tilted towards being harsh towards rape victims" means.
Imagine you're a judge for a moment and you're presented with a case that involves a man and a woman both in their early twenties, clean cut, otherwise totally unremarkable individuals. The man is accused of rape. The incident allegedly happened when they were alone, there are no direct witnesses, each individual has their friends there as character witnesses backing up what swell people they are. There's no physical evidence either way. Statute says the accused could face up to a decade in prison. What do you do?
Of course, it makes so much difference that the man is "clean cut", and has character witnesses (as if well-liked people can't do horrible things)! And it's not like the only options are "decade in jail" and "get off scot free"– the law distinguishes between various degrees of offenses.
I mean, I get why convictions are hard. That is not something we can wish away. And I don't think that the affirmative consent law will or even could change that– it's not actually removing "innocent until proven guilty" from the legal system. What it
is doing, however, is removing some of the most transparent and disingenuous defenses that assaulters use, e.g. "she was blackout drunk and couldn't say no, so I didn't do anything wrong!" I think that's obviously a good thing.
And, no, of
course it isn't going to incentivize people to start making false accusations that they otherwise wouldn't; as mentioned above going through these trials is basically always a traumatic experience and, come on, virtually nobody's going to put themselves through that
voluntarily.
Poll
