Rex Little is incredulous:
Most “rape” and “abuse” of women in the United States is completely fictitious.
MOST?? What do you base that on, Vox? Seems to me if false accusations were so common that they outnumbered real rapes, they wouldn’t make the news.
I like to start with an informative little document that the FBI likes to call the 2004 Uniform Crime Report.
Forcible Rapes Reported: 94,635
Forcible Rapes Cleared: 39,557 (it basically means arrested)
Murders Reported: 16,137
Murders Cleared: 10,101
So, percentage-wise, one-third more murderers were arrested despite the fact that there is, obviously, no victim around to help identify the murderer and the likelihood of DNA evidence is lower. Furthermore, excluded from the report counts are the “unfounded” reports, which for forcible rape was four times higher (8 percent) than the average for all Crime Index crimes (2 percent.) This means that the actual percentage arrested is only 38.7 percent, so already we’re dealing with a minority of the rapes reported resulting in arrest and we’re not even to the conviction rate yet.
According to the US Department of Justice, 48 percent of those arrested are convicted, so 18.6 percent of reported rapes are deemed genuine by the justice system. However, the USA conviction rate is extraordinarily high compared with every other country in the world, for example, in England, (which is also on the high side), only 5.6 percent of reported rapes result in convictions. That number has been plunging, down from 32 percent in 1977, possibly due to the introduction of DNA evidence making false accusations more difficult in countries where corroborative evidence is required, unlike in the United States where it is only necessary that a jury take a woman’s word for it.
Now, it is possible to simply assume that there are millions of rapes going unreported, but it is equally valid to assert that those millions of rapes are being committed by rainbow-tailed unicorns. For those who prefer logic and evidence to emotion and imagination, all of the available evidence around the world points the vast majority of rape reports being false.
Finally, note that all of this relates only to “forcible rape”. The FBI doesn’t track “statutory rape” or other sexual offenses, many of which your average rape hysterist likely considers to be rape, near-rape, unicorn rape, whatever. What little evidence I have seen suggests that the false report rates are higher and the arrest and conviction rates are lower than the forcible rape statistics.