Skip to main content

False rape accusations are very rare

Only 0.0003 percent of rapes are false accusations that result in jail time, according to research done by Mona Chalabi, a journalist who writes for The Guardian newspaper. Read her narrative below and check out her graphic.

Tim
Central Minnesota Political

Have you been thinking about false accusations lately? If so, here are some important facts:

1. Since 1989 (when US records on this topic began) there are only 319 cases where men convicted of sexual assault were exonerated because it turned out they were falsely accused.

2. False rape accusations are rare. There are three decent studies on this topic (see below) - estimates range from 2.1% to 7.1% of the accusations that are reported being false (don’t forget, most rapes are never reported). For this graphic, I took the midpoint then followed the statistics through to make an estimate about whether individuals faced criminal consequences as a result of these allegations.

By Mona Chalabi


Sources: Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, 2010-2014 (2015); National Incident-Based Reporting System, 2012-2014 (2015); Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties, 2009 (2013). Heenan, M., & Murray, S. (2006). Study of reported rapes in Victoria 2000-2003: Summary research report. Retrieved from the State of Victoria (Australia), Department of Human Services: Lonsway, K. A., Archambault, J., & Lisak, D. (2009). False reports: Moving beyond the issue to successfully investigate and prosecute non-stranger sexual assault. The Voice, 3(1), 1-11. National Registry of Exonerations

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Senator Gazelka: Prepare for End Times

Review by John King “Marketplace Ministers are part of how the Lord will reach the peoples of the earth in these last days.” Author Paul Gazelka wrote this astonishing sentence near the conclusion of his 2003 book, Marketplace Ministers , but it is a good place to start here because it so neatly encapsulates the message of the book which is that business people, by spreading the Gospel, are in a unique position to prepare us, for the end of the world.   Gazelka, an insurance salesman in Baxter, Minnesota, devotes chapters one through four to the story of his religious calling and how he came to adopt the “marketplace” as his personal ministry.  He goes to some length, relying in part on the “Fivefold Path” from Ephesians to convince the reader that the marketplace is a legitimate pulpit to spread the Word.  The remainder of the book, using personal anecdotes and biblical passages, he explains how a marketplace ministry would function and what its usefulness w...
3 comments
Read more

Super-emitting frequent fliers responsible for 50% of aviation CO2

U.S. airlines received a $15 billion subsidy in December’s COVID relief package. The subsidy was for the companies to re-employ thousands of their furloughed employees and keep them on the payroll until at least the end of the first quarter of this year. Congress, and the President, attached no other strings to the huge subsidy, even though airlines social costs, in terms of climate disruption, are huge. In 2018 airlines produced a billion tons of CO2 and benefited from a $100 billion subsidy by not paying for the climate damage they caused, a report published in the November 2020 journal Global Environmental Change, pointed out. The report, summarized in The Guardian on November 17th, drew together data to provide a global picture of the impact of frequent fliers. The conclusion reached by the study’s authors, led by Stefan Gössling at Linnaeus University in Sweden, is that a tiny fraction of the global population benefits from the highly subsidized airline industry while the rest...
4 comments
Read more

Step aside Republicans; Minnesotans want electric vehicles

Late last month Senator Paul Gazelka, the Republican leader of the Senate, told the Minnesota Reformer that the Republican controlled Senate would likely fire the acting Commissioner of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, Laura Bishop, if the Agency, at the behest of the Governor, went ahead with the Clean Car Rule. The rule would require automakers to increase the number of electric vehicles they deliver to Minnesota auto dealers. Gazelka told The Reformer that he’d had “a conversation” with Bishop about the rule. Bishop has not been confirmed by the Senate. Gazelka, and his Republican colleagues, claim that electric vehicles are too expensive and that the rule would be a burden to Minnesotans. Gazelka, and the rest of his Party are wrong. They aren’t paying attention to the economics of EV ownership and they are not paying attention to consumer preferences. Way back in September 2019, Consumer Reports reported on a study of Minnesotans they had done in collaboration with the...
2 comments
Read more