Tropes: False Accusations, Ruined Lives, and I Do Not Recognize Your Fictional Reality

[Content Note: Sexual Assault, Law & Order, Murder, Pregnancy, Power Imbalance]

So let's talk about a touchy subject today: false accusations.

False accusations are bad. False accusations hurt innocent people by claiming that those innocent people have said or done wrong things that they haven't actually said or done in that given context.* False accusations hurt innocent people by giving their loved ones, their employers, and society in general a false reason to doubt their innocence. And false accusations hurt genuine victims by contributing to a social bias against victims in general. False accusations are bad.

* By which I mean that a false accusation of X doesn't mean that the falsely accused has never done X in general. They just haven't done X in that specific instance, ergo the falseness of the accusation.

False accusations also do in fact happen. They don't happen as often as you might think. And contrary to popular belief, they don't happen disproportionately for, say, certain types of crimes committed largely by certain types of people against certain types of other people. But they do happen very occasionally and they absolutely shouldn't.

So now that we've clarified that false accusations -- however rare -- do exist and are very seriously bad for the falsely accused, let's talk about three things that happened to me this week.

The first thing that happened to me was that I watched "Law & Order". I do that a lot, actually, and maybe I should stop, but I like hearing Sam Watterson lecture me as the audience. It's the voice, I think; even when I disagree with him (which is often), I just enjoy hearing him talk. One of these days, I want a talk-off against Jeremy Irons, James Earl Jones, Alan Rickman, Morgan Freeman, Bruce Willis, and Sam Watterson all reading from the same cue cards and letting the audience vote on the winner. Why can't someone do an American Idol show based around that? And Samuel L. Jackson should be in it, but he gets to add amusing swears to his cards. Anyway.

So this L&O episode featured a murdered college student who was also pregnant. And since pregnant-women-who-are-murdered are usually murdered by the sperm donor portion of the equation, the detectives gamely set out to figure out who was the sperm donor in this case. And they found a professor! Who was having an affair with the college student! Which raises all sorts of serious ethical questions! Because this professor was her professor, as in the guy on whom her grades and her thesis and her academic future hinged on! And that represents a serious imbalance of power in a relationship! So it's really not uncommon for schools to make rules against that sort of thing because it brings up all sorts of sexual harassment scenarios and favoritism issues and so on! And now it's all come out against Sort-of Innocent Professor Guy on L&O!

And the guy's life was ruined. I mean, that's what L&O told us. Because there were signs up around campus saying that he was having sex with a student (which was true), and people were talking about removing his tenure, if you can imagine. And since he wasn't the murderer after all (what a twist!) it was a tragedy.

And, I mean, it kind of was. The writers were careful to set everything up so that he was presented in the best possible light: the relationship was totally consensual (Well, I mean, according to him. She was dead and couldn't weigh in on the matter.), it was a one-time thing so he wasn't preying on college students in general (Unless this was just the first time.), and he was the one who broke it off because the ethics of the situation made him uncomfortable (Which is, I suppose, a 'better late than never' scenario, but there are others.). Anyway. Point being: a man's life was fundamentally changed because it came out that he had sex with one of his students and people took the situation seriously.

I was skeptical. Maybe in this case, this man's life was ruined because it was a high-profile murder case, but it felt like a stretch for the L&O writers. Maybe the university decided to actually follow their posted rules, and they yanked the guy's tenure and busted him down to associate prof or even fired him. Maybe. I'm not saying it's not possible. I'm not saying it's never happened before. I am saying that that's not how the situation usually goes in my personal anecdotal experience. I am saying that if we live in a culture that takes power imbalance in sexual relationships that seriously, then it's news to me.

But, eh, it's L&O. Whatever.

The second thing that happened to me was that I got the NetGalley "new title round-up" in my email, and the first book on the list caught my eye. I'm not going to identify the book because I haven't read it, and thus this would be Complaining About Things I Haven't Read, but here was the write-up designed to catch the reader's eye:
After a student's accusation of sexual assault destroyed his reputation, Noah left the teaching career he loved. The school system that should have protected him and an ex-lover who should have known better shattered his confidence, and it took Noah six years and another university degree to finally get his life back on track.
A false accusation of sexual assault destroyed a man's reputation.

And now we have to go WAY back up to the top of the post and reiterate: False accusations do happen and they are very seriously bad for the falsely accused.

Now having said that, here is an exact transcript of my thought process on reading this book synopsis: What.

I'm not saying this isn't possible. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm not saying those things. I am saying that I don't recognize this fictional reality being presented to me. I am saying that the only way this makes sense to me -- that a pure-as-the-driven-snow man is utterly and completely ruined by a false allegation -- is if the falsely accused is a member of a Marginalized Group and this false allegation was used as an excuse to discriminate against him. I'm saying that, again, not because this setup is impossible, but rather because it just sounds so very unlikely to me.

Why does it sound unlikely to me? Why is it so hard for me to believe that I live in a country where a false sexual assault allegation could conceivably ruin a man's life for six years?

Maybe because of the third thing that happened to me this week: I realized that I live in a country where a man can weather four sexual harassment and/or assault allegations and still be taken seriously as a candidate to run my country.
And now there are some signs that the scandal is taking a political toll on Cain. An Ipsos/Reuters poll conducted online at the end of last week showed Cain’s favorability rating among Republicans dropping 9 points, from 66% to 57%, and his rating among all voters dropping from 37% to 32%. Perhaps more worrisome for Cain was that a full 80% of respondents said they knew about the harassment allegations. One in three Republicans said the accusations made them view Cain less favorably.
That quote is from the L.A. Times, noting that the allegations are "taking a political toll" because the accused's favorability rating in his own party has dropped 9 measly points. More than half of the voters in his party still heavily favor him despite not one but four sexual assault allegations.

I don't know if these allegations are true. I frankly don't want to talk about whether they are true. The truthiness of the allegations is immaterial to this post. The point of this post is that if your synopsis for your book or your movie or your short story or your edgy screenplay is that 'false sexual assault allegation ruins man's life forever; man picks up pieces and lives again', then you might want to look out your window and see that that scenario isn't exactly reflected in the human experience outside.

Can a false sexual assault allegation ruin a life? Yes. Has is happened at least once in all of human history? Yes. Is that a tragedy? Yes.

Does that mean that this scenario is going to resonate with your readers in an oh, this is such a common human experience kind of way? No. Do we have a living, breathing, very current example of someone currently weathering sexual assault allegations with very little real-world repercussions, including his popularity with a large portion of his home country? Why yes, yes we do. Do we have people -- real people, actual people -- frequently and excessively insisting that sexual harassment and sexual assault at school and work just doesn't happen anymore? Sadly, depressingly, shockingly, yes. 

Does that mean you shouldn't write about false accusations ruining someone's life? I'm not going to say that. But I will say you might want to start with a fictional narrative that more closely resembles the reality that a fair number of your prospective readers live in. You might want to not add to the growing list of fictional anecdata that someone who claims sexual assault happened to them is a lying liar who lies. You might want to come up with another reason -- a better reason -- for why your protagonist has to put his life back together than because some lying liar-woman ruined his life in a society that totally takes sexual assault allegations super seriously because when you use that reason, I don't recognize your fictional reality. It's maybe not your fault, but I just don't. It's not the world I live in on a daily basis. I'm sorry.

That's just my opinion.

85 comments:

Will Wildman said...

My theory is that these books are being set in an actual parallel world that we connect to only through the internet. I got into an argument with a guy from that universe one time and he Explained that feminism was redundant because, although women are still drastically underrepresented in political and corporate power, y'all have so much societal power that it balances out. I'm guessing this was what he had in mind - the superpower to ruin people with a single accusation, and the freedom to complain about things you don't like.

I wonder if fish bark where he comes from.

chris the cynic said...

I was going to write a lengthy post about my own experience with a false accusation, but getting into that took away from what I wanted to say because it was different in so many ways. (I would have been expelled from high school, not lost a job; what I was accused of was not at all sexual; the problem wasn't that the accusation once proven false would stay with me, it was that if two people had lied instead of one it would have been concluded true.)

The thing from that experience that I think applies has to do with this:

I am saying that the only way this makes sense to me -- that a pure-as-the-driven-snow man is utterly and completely ruined by a false allegation -- is if the falsely accused is a member of a Marginalized Group and this false allegation was used as an excuse to discriminate against him.

I don't know if social misfit counts as marginalized group (though it might be worth pointing out that people thought I was gay) but I'm pretty sure that if I had had power I wouldn't have been in danger in the first place. If I were popular, if my parents were prominent members of the community, if I were a key player on a sports team, if anything about me made me seem like something more than an ignorable inconsequential unperson everything would have been fine.

Instead of the plan being to suspend me for three days to investigate and then expel me (the assistant principle's actual stated plan) it would have either been to run an actual investigation and see where the results led or suspend me for three days and then let me back in because obviously I was innocent.

As it turned out the not-really-an-investigation was enough to clear me. It consisted of asking my accuser's best friend if my accuser was lying after giving them plenty of time to make sure their stories matched. Turns out that best friend told the truth, which saved me.*

I have difficulty believing that they would have limited their investigation to asking the best friend if it had been someone with power of some kind had been accused. If I accused an athlete there's no way they would have told me, "Well if you can get your best friend to back you up we'll leave it at that and expel him/her."

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tl;dr: My own experience, which only sort of vaguely applies, implies to me that false accusations are most likely to be damaging when the person being accused is already pretty low on the power scale.

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* But did not get me an apology for being called "lying scum" or being harassed to tears by the assistant principle. It also demonstrated that the people in charge didn't care about the rules because the false accusation itself was both in violation of school rules and actually illegal**. When they were sure I was guilty both the assistant principle and the school's resident cop told me that if it turned out I was innocent there would be repercussions for my anonymous accuser. Of course they sad that in such a way as to make it clear they considered it to be a counter-factual.

When it was proven I was innocent they swept the whole thing under the rug and never spoke of it again. I don't remember what the cop's exact reaction was, I do remember that the assistant principle's reaction seemed to be that, yeah, I was innocent this time but I was still scum of some kind. Though, thankfully, he didn't actually call me scum again after my innocence was established. I avoided him like the plague for the rest of my time in high school.

** It was made via the police in such a way that lying in the statement was illegal. When it turned out that every single claim made was false, that theoretically supposed to result in ... something happening as a consequence.

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I suddenly have the strangest urge for there to be a story where a false accusation of something (not sure what, definitely wouldn't be sexual assault) is used by evil statisticians as part of an attempt to de-tenure the last remaining pure math professor at a university.

Kit Whitfield said...

false accusations are most likely to be damaging when the person being accused is already pretty low on the power scale

True. In its ugliest form (TW, hate crimes), the lynchings of African American men who were accused of laying eyes or hands on a white woman come to mind. False accusations can become part of general prejudice: if the victim is considered the type of person who'd do that type of thing, evidence can become almost a moot point in the minds of the accusers.

Dav said...

False accusations can certainly have long-term consequences, and I think it can be interesting to explore that, but I think the most interesting parts are how other people view you and how that shapes you in ways that are largely invisible when you're privileged, and I think there are other ways to explore that.

Rikalous said...

A friend of a facebook friend responded to someone mentioning the gendered wage gap by claiming that it balances out because women can get free drinks. Apparently spending 23% of your money on booze is a normal thing in parallel world.
---
Ana, the voice-of-God-off is a brilliant idea and I wish it was a real thing.

Ana Mardoll said...

Bwuh? The drinks are FREE? So all that stuff I learned in psychology classes about emotional and social debt to people who "give" you things was just so much bunk then.

I realized later that I also want to add Kenneth Branagh, Christopher Lee, Ian McKellan, and Patrick Stewart to the show. Can someone come up with a list of 30 and then we can sell the idea to the networks. :D

Thomas Keyton said...

Tom Baker definitely needs to be added.

Darth Ember said...

Regarding the oppressed group thing, that version was used in a book I read not too long ago; a fantasy setting with some real-life historical resonances. Tamora Pierce's Tortall setting, the Copper Isles.

Spoiler warning for Trickster's Queen, sexual assault accusation mention, racism:



Basically, the white luarin conquerors are oppressing the indigenous raka people, and one luarin noblewoman, in this already-demonstrated in-story severely oppressive and blatantly corrupt setting, is noted to have taken a raka lover and then claimed he'd raped her. It had already been shown there was a stigma about luarin nobles having relationships with raka or part-raka, even from the few remaining raka noble families, and given the general stated trend of raka being used as scapegoats and killed for assorted 'crimes', it can be inferred that the man involved, and possibly his whole family plus acquaintances, would have died as a result. It fit into the setting, and became considerably more about 'this is how these luarin are seriously mistreating the people' than 'oh, false accusations must be so common' or any such assumption.

Blueink said...

I like this post. Writing about false rape accusations will read as if they are linked to that misogynistic meme that rape accusations in general are fake, whether or not that is the author's intent.

One fantasy-setting, example of a false rape accusation that impressed me as well-done went like this: Boy is suffering from a fantasy mental condition that involves an inclination to violence. He walks in on his sister making out with her boyfriend and misinterprets the situation as sexual assault; he then badly assaults the boyfriend while not being in control of his senses. His sister decides to report it as a sexual assault, knowing that her boyfriend will only be fired from his job whereas her brother would be heavily punished for the physical assault he inflicted. A reason for a false rape accusation that's not 'vengeful bitches' and three sympathetic characters involved.

Hannah's headmate, Pth... said...

I've actually thought up a good objection to trigger warnings. I see them a lot and most of the time the material isn't triggery for me (but might be to another person, hence the need for them), so I ignore them. And then I come across a post that is trigger warned and I could tell from the first few sentences of it that here be dragons and then I read it anyway. I guess it's because 99% of the time "trigger warning: sexual assault" isn't going to upset me. But really, I could've guessed from the title. Maybe I need to spend some time figuring out which topics are current active triggers for me and make a commitment to just not read stuff.

anyway trigger warning: abuse

Anyway, I panicked "my abuser uses the internet and what if he discovers my online nick despite how ridiculuosly careful i've been and what if he came to the places i hang out in and oh God he's self publishing books nowadays and what if Ana reviews one of his books" and went off to google what he's been up to online lately, and then visited the sites using an anonymous proxy. Anyway, his latest book is on how to live a healthier life dedicated to my sister and his upcoming book (a romantic comedy) sounds more failtastic than twilight.

Won't link to it or give more specifics for obvious reasons. The last time I googled him, I found the only mention of me he's ever made on his numerous blogs is where he writes about grieving the loss of one of his daughters. Which would be me.

Before we told anyone about the abuse, when we were still stonewalling all the therapists, and all that was known to the adults handling the situation was the fair amount others had witnessed and doctor's reports, but they didn't have enough proof that he was the one who had sexually abused us because we wasn't talking, he wrote a letter to our therapist, pre-emptively assuring her that any accusations we might make were false and that anyway, it was us who'd propositioned him for sex when we were two, not the other way around.

So if you've ever read a book where the bad guy is pulled over for speeding and greets the officer with "I didn't rob the bank and bury the money in my back yard" and your suspension of disbelief snapped, now you know that bad guys do say dumb stuff like that sometimes.

But that was hours ago and I'm okay now. Just, yeah.

And so anyway, I was reading earlier today an article about eyewitness testimony and how memory works and how unreliable eyewitness testimony is, especially cross racial identification of strangers. It was interesting and it ties into some of what's been said here: http://meloukhia.net/2011/11/eyewitnesses_are_not_reliable_so_why_are_we_still_relying_on_them.html

Hannah's headmate, pth... said...

(the bit about grieving the loss of me is only a part of a sentence. the protag loses someone too and is sad, so it's a comparison to that)

Ana Mardoll said...

Oh, I'm so sorry, though, that the post triggered you. *internet hugs*, if you want them. I keep thinking I need to do more "light" decons, but it hasn't been a light month in my head. *hugs*

(And if you ever want to email me a book NOT to review, I always appreciate good reading advice in general, and I won't share with anyone else. Putting that out there. :))

Ana Mardoll said...

Also, that was a very good article, thank you!

One of my L&O pet peeves is the *shows picture* "Is this the man you saw?"

Not in a picture six-pack, oh no. Just one picture. *headdesk* Congratulations, you have completely ruined your witness. Thank you so much, fellas.

Hannah's headmate, pth... said...

I'm okay, and you do everything right: you post trigger warnings, the titles of the posts are clear, you point out fail where you see it, i haven't come across random fail in your writings where you were blaming the victim or whatever. And I don't mind dark in general. *internet hugs back*

tw: racism

Yeah. I'm not a lawyer, but that's leading definitely leading the witness. Especially if it's cross-race and all the white person remembers is that the asian robber had "funny looking eyes."

I don't get that personally. My ex-girlfriend is teachinig English in Vietnam right now. She posted a picture of a classroom of small children she's teaching. There were a lot of children in the picture all wearing the same school uniform. Everyone one of them looked different to me -- noticably different. Different facial structures, different eyes. I could tell they were all Asian, but they were clearly different individuals. She teaches many different classes a day, so she has over a hundred students, and refers to them each by name in her blog (in locked posts). She never mentioned that this was difficult for her in anyway, I imagine I'd have some difficulty learning several hundred names at once and attaching them to the right faces, but I don't think I'd have anymore trouble with the batch of kids she's teaching than I would with a mixed race group or all white group (my own race, which is supposed to be the easiest, because people learn to better differentiate the faces they see most often)

Eye-witness accounts are better if the witness knows the defendant. Presumably you'd recognise your best friend in a line up. But then, if the witness knows the defendent, the witness may (or may not) have motives of their own against the defendant.

Ana Mardoll said...

I'm okay, and you do everything right: you post trigger warnings, the titles of the posts are clear, you point out fail where you see it, i haven't come across random fail in your writings where you were blaming the victim or whatever. And I don't mind dark in general. *internet hugs back*

Thank you, this brought tears to my eyes. My biggest fear is that eventually I will get complacent and say something full of Fail, and I hope that everyone will be able to point it out to me and then accept my deepest apologies when it happens. Thank you.

I don't get that personally. My ex-girlfriend is teachinig English in Vietnam right now. She posted a picture of a classroom of small children she's teaching. There were a lot of children in the picture all wearing the same school uniform. Everyone one of them looked different to me -- noticably different. Different facial structures, different eyes. I could tell they were all Asian, but they were clearly different individuals.

I have a great deal of trouble with facial recognition. I've learned not to say I can't tell, say, black actors apart or Asian actors apart because it sounds very bad for me to say so, but I also can't tell most white actors apart. Movie Night at our house has me going "Was that Jude Law? Was that Keanu Reeves?" every time a random background actor crosses the screen, and Husband patiently explaining that no, no, it was not.

When I was a child, if we couldn't find my dad in a store, my mom would say "let's think about what he looks like", meaning I was to think about the color of his shirt and we'd look for that color. Problem was, I couldn't spontaneously summon his face in my mind, and I panicked and Mom didn't understand why I started crying on the spot. Now that I'm older, I *can* summon faces to my head, but they slip down out of sight if I don't hold onto them. I think in words, and always have.

I would be a TERRIBLE eye witness. Fortunately, I realize this about myself, but convincing the police might be difficult.

Hannah's headmate, pth... said...

i'm terrible with actors too. my brain doesn't categorise them as important since i don't know them personally, and i can never tell if an actor i'm seeing was starring in something i've previously seen, even recently. and i know that people have varying levels of facial recognition. i think the way you said it is the best way to avoid fail: not "I have trouble telling asian actors apart" but "I have trouble telling actors faces apart, but i can tell their voices apart" which is also more honest -- since the problem is faces in general, not asian ones specifically and neatly avoids the "they all look the same!" trope.

i think my facial recognition is around average. i can recall the faces that are important to me easily. average stranger not so much. my memory is above average though. but i still wouldn't make a good eye witness because i'd be nervous, and i likely wouldn't have been paying much attention until it was too late. when i'm walking down the street i'm much more likely to be paying attention to trees and leaves (especially at this time of year) than people.

do you think you are hearing dominant in general? (learning material better when hearing it described rather than seeing pictures, focusing more on the sounds of things than the appearances?) I'm touch dominant myself -- I learn best if my hands are moving: it's easier to memorise something someone is saying if i type it, or if i'm doodling. I learned IPA for my phonology course by inventing a braille system for it (couldn't find any resources online for that, heh) and reviewing my notes with my fingers. it was more work, but when i had to take a test, i just had to call to mind the feeling of my fingers on the dots and all the information was there. I still read braille much faster with my eyes than my fingers (have had a lot more practice reading with my eyes), but i retain it better with my fingers.)

how to convince the police: "um, i didn't get a good look because i was some distance away"

Amarie said...

Ana, this is going to be random. but...


You made a point about a presidential candidate that is still in the running with four sexual harassment claims against him. And I thought it would be worth mentioning that there is another celebrity that just ended her marriage after seventy-two days, which has garnered an interent-wide petition that has since generated almost 100, 000 signatures (http://omg.yahoo.com/blogs/thefamous/boycott-kim-kardashian-petition-more-100-000-signatures-155349163.html).

A prominent political figure can push himself on women all he wants to. But it also appears that a woman is unable to get a divorce as soon as she wants to.

So, your latest Twilight post was right; women can't win. v.v

JenL said...

I have a great deal of trouble with facial recognition. I've learned not to say I can't tell, say, black actors apart or Asian actors apart because it sounds very bad for me to say so, but I also can't tell most white actors apart. Movie Night at our house has me going "Was that Jude Law? Was that Keanu Reeves?" every time a random background actor crosses the screen, and Husband patiently explaining that no, no, it was not.

I *hate* it when I'm watching some tv show, and there are two men of about the same age, about the same height, about the same hair color, and similar voices, and understanding what's going on in the show hinges on me being able to tell them apart - because, no, I can't... Same thing with two women who have the same hairstyle. It doesn't even have to be the same color - if I'm supposed to be able to identify the blond versus the brunette, they better both be on the screen. Once I've seen a few episodes, I've got a chance of telling them apart - assuming the show was good enough for me to care about the characters.

I'd make a LOUSY eyewitness.

Ana Mardoll said...

I seem to be a visual learner, but only for WORDS. I have a good memory, all things considered, for things that I read. I learn not at all by hearing -- if the words aren't in front of me, my mind drifts. (I can only listen to audiobooks for books I've already read, for instance.) I'm not sure why I can distinguish actors by ear, to be honest.

I learn by touching, though, in the case of board/card games -- I don't want to read the rules, I want to play a practice round. So maybe I learn by all three in different ways?

Ana Mardoll said...

ARRRRRGH. I've been following the Kardashian situation VERY loosely via Shakesville who has, I think, precisely the right idea, to wit, that it's their own business and no one else's. Thus, I'm astonished -- but shouldn't be! -- by this boycott. Apparently we don't trust women to know if a marriage is an unhealthy one for themselves. How surprising. :(

Amarie said...

Exactly!! I mean, I’m like you; I don’t particularly care about the Kardashians anymore than I care about Herman Cain (outside of watching who I vote for). But I read your post and I realized what makes me feel a little…twinge at the boycott. Like you, I’m absolutely astonished at the reactions. Cain gets a little slap on the wrist and Kim K. gets an entire community wanting her to ‘burn in hell like the whore she is’, to quote one commenter.

I just…can’t wrap my mind around it. Shouldn’t the reactions be reversed…? I just…I don’t know…

hapax said...

Okay.

Let me state upfront that I hatehatehate the "false accusation" trope for all the reasons you mention. And in the fictional L & O scenario you outline (I don't watch the show), it may have been a false accusation of murder, but not of sexual misbehavior (I won't say "assault", because that's a legal term, and I don't think it applies here).

But I do know academic codes of ethics. And there is NO WAY (allcaps underlined bold) that there can be a consensual sexual relationship between a professor and one of zir students. The power imbalance is simply too great for there ever to be true consent. Not even if the student initiates it. Not even if the professor breaks it off "right away." Never, no how, NO WAY.

Does this mean it never happens? Of course not. I have personal knowledge of several cases, a few of which ended "happily", most of which does not. But in all of the institutions where spouse has worked, a credible accusation (whether or not it was true, although again in this fictional scenario it was) of the behavior such as you have described would indeed have "ruined [his] career". He would have been escorted off campus and not allowed back until an investigation took place. Even if the investigation cleared him, he would have been denied tenure (perhaps officially on other grounds) if he didn't already have it, which in a tight academic market, essentially finishes one's career. If he had tenure, and he was cleared, he wouldn't be fired; but he would be shunned, and find it very difficult to maintain the research contacts and funding necessary to further his career.

[At this point, I should note that mmy (who can certainly speak for herself) has witnessed cases of academic sexual harassment (and indeed, assault) that have been treated dismissively. I have no reason to disbelieve her. I can only state what I have seen for myself. It may be because spouse works in a female-dominated field. It may be because spouse has worked mostly for public universities. It may be that he has been fortunate enough to work only for institutions that take their codes for ethics seriously.]

As to false accusations: once again, let me state upfront that from my own personal knowledge, actual sexual assaults and harassment that are never reported are far more common than false accusations that are. But, in fact, I do know that they are made. Spouse was in fact threatened with one; the only reason he still has a career is because he, as a matter of policy, NEVER meets with a student alone or behind closed doors, and the threat was overheard. And just this past year, a false accusation of ethnic discrimination (I have to be careful here, and fuzz any possible identifiable details, but I assure you that the accusation was objectively, demonstrably, false) nonetheless led to the forced resignation of two faculty in his department, one of them the tenured head of the department.

Tl; dr: In the particular milieu of academics , with the circumstances described, I would find the particular accusation to be a) true; b) even if false, not entirely surprising; and c) very likely to have the results described.

If only politicians were held to the ethical standards of university professors. Or public librarians. Or gas station attendants. Or practically any professional, except celebratory athletes and preachers. :-(

hapax said...

I have no idea how "celebrity" in the wall-o-text up there morphed into "celebratory." But by way of apology, I would note that neither term shares an etymological origin with "celibate", although it might be nice if at least one of them did...

mmy said...

But I do know academic codes of ethics. And there is NO WAY (allcaps underlined bold) that there can be a consensual sexual relationship between a professor and one of zir students. The power imbalance is simply too great for there ever to be true consent. Not even if the student initiates it. Not even if the professor breaks it off "right away." Never, no how, NO WAY.

Basically, what hapax said.

In my own experience I saw a few professors who "got away with" definitely harassing behaviour. There are complicated reasons why.

BUT.....and this is a big but

at the same time I saw a professor walked off the campus by campus police because of a consensual relationship with a student. His tenure was revoked. And another professor was told to get off the campus so quickly that his stuff had to be sent after him and other people had to finish his courses/grade his papers.

There are a lot of reasons why some people get away with things -- having to do with whether the college is public or private and which department they are in.

hapax said...

Oh, and I thought this went without saying, but just in case, I will say it:

Any professor who is unethical and STUPID enough to have zir career ruined in the circumstances described in the L&O episode darn well deserves it. Zero sympathy here.

There cannot possibly be anyone working in any academic institution in the USA nowadays who doesn't know how proscribed, unethical, and likely catastrophic such a relationship would be.

Thisnamehasnospaces said...

Hello Ana-Blog community! I'm a long(ish)-time-first-time and I know it's very gauche to de-lurk to ask a favor, but I'm under some time constraints and have a somewhat particular request.

A very dear professor of mine is leaving our university and I'd like to get hir a gift. Zie doesn't have much use for things but has been on about getting a chalk-holder (because it always bugged hir to get rid of little nibs of chalk but zie found writing with them even worse).

Anyways, I thought that I could spruce up the rather plain chalk holder with an inscription. My professor is a native Hungarian speaker and I was hoping Pthalo could translate something into Hungarian for me because I don't trust online translators and I'd really like to get the inscription in Hungarian.

If it wouldn't be too much bother could you please translate "The truth is always epsilon away." into Hungarian for me Pthalo?

If you're set up for it I'd gladly paypal you some money for it (or really, I'd pay you however you wanted that didn't involve credit cards, as I don't have one), because I trust your translation skills and I do find them valuable.

I'd really like to make this gift special and I think you could be a big help in that regard, if you're willing. If not then I completely understand and I'm sorry to have interrupted.

mmy said...

There cannot possibly be anyone working in any academic institution in the USA nowadays who doesn't know how proscribed, unethical, and likely catastrophic such a relationship would be.

We had mandatory sessions every year or so at which we were reminded/informed/updated on the "rules." They actually took attendance.

Kit Whitfield said...

I have a great deal of trouble with facial recognition.

A friend of mine has that problem: she can't even recognise her husband in a crowd. Once I remarked that her two daughters looked alike, and she told me she'd just have to take my word for it. Turns out this is a recognised medical condition called prosopagnosia. There's an article about it here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-15302745

Of course, Net-diagnosing someone is a mug's game, and there's not much that can be done about it, but if it inconveniences you and you have genuine 'face blindness', it can help reduce the offence you give when you can't recognise someone to have a medical explanation....

Pthalo said...

If you mean episilon as a unit of distance (sorta), and that we can never quite reach it because no matter how close we get there remains an epsilon between us and it, I would render that as "Az igazság mindig epszilonnal arrébb van."

If you mean that it's only one episilon away (which is not far at all), and all we have to do to reach it is to travel that episilon, or solve for epsilon and there we shall be with truth in hand: "Az igazság mindig csak egy epszilonnal van távol"

If you mean something else, I'll gladly try again.

And you're right not to trust online translation with Hungarian. The results are rarely intelligible (but are usually hilarious) :) My paypal is the same as my e-mail address: pthalogreen@livejournal.com. You can send what you think is fair, doesn't have to be much, a few dollars goes a longer way in forints.

Kit Whitfield said...

Also: according to my friend who teaches secondary school, teachers at that age level also get swooped on very fast at the first sign of an allegation. A colleague of his had a false accusation made by - it sounds like a right-wing fantasy, but my friend vouches for it - a girl who was annoyed with him for telling her off or something along those lines. So she reported that he'd sexually assaulted her. Fortunately for him, he'd been in the staffroom at the time she alleged so he had a pretty solid alibi, but according to my friend, his career would have been pretty much trashed if he hadn't.

I would have thought teenagers might make more false accusations than adults because they have less empathy and perspective - but I also think that teenagers almost certainly get assaulted more, and may be less likely to report genuine assaults as well, so one shouldn't assume any particular teenager is probably lying.

Teachers do seem to be held more responsible than most. Which is a good thing, as long as things are handled sensibly.

Pthalo said...

Most people learn all three ways. Many people seem to have one sense that works a little better for them, which they rely on a little more when stressed.

Darth Ember said...

Regarding telling faces apart; I think there was a study done that showed people really do have difficulty telling apart members of ethnic groups uncommon where they live.
So you could have a guy from some insular town somewhere in the Western world where only or mostly white people live, and he might well struggle with, say, Chinese faces. But if he proceeded to live in China for a year or so, that would change, and his ability to distinguish would increase a great deal.

Though I'm another one who has trouble telling anybody apart. I judge by skin-tone, hair colour, eye colour, build... I've had to look at a photo more than once to spot my own sister when she bleached her hair blonde.
Of course, part of it for me is I have trouble sustaining enough interest in people to tell them apart, and don't favour eye contact much. It sounds really nasty and arrogant, but it's just a fact; people in general simply do not make the same impression in my brain that, say, words in a book do.

Ana Mardoll said...

That's fascinating, Kit! Although now I'm in the position where I've said "I have a great deal of pain in my foot" because none of the OTHER people in my life have foot pain, and it turns out it's just an ingrown nail or something mild, because while I do struggle with distinguishing actors and summoning visual memories of people, I *can* recognize people in person, if I know them a little. (Certainly I can pick Husband from a crowd, although I tend to look for his height rather than his face.)

That was a really fascinating article, though, thank you.

Ana Mardoll said...

Also, I feel like I should say: I'm glad that so many in academia here have seen these "consensual" (which really aren't, as hapax well-stated) situations treated so seriously. For my own self, I've seen quite a few cases of "second wife, just finished grad school, wink" syndrome where a professor marries a student as soon as she stops being a student, and everyone in administration just glances the other way and assumes that their relationship started the day she got her diploma. (Shoot, I even read a book the other day that referenced the phenomena, and now I'm digging my memory to recall which book it was.)

Then again, the schools I attended were two in a sea of... thousands? So my own experience may not be typical.

Still, I have seen and heard many more tales of sexual harassment and assault being reported to administration and a complete failure to act -- or in some cases, deliberately shutting the victim down. Perhaps it says something that "consensual" relationships are taken more seriously than one-off assaults or a continued low-level harassment. (Hi there, rape culture!)

Izzy said...

Right. And it's quite possible for some of these to actually be consensual--sophomore year, a friend and I attended EL 352: Professor N's Package, I Mean "Photography and the Novel", Yeah, That's It, and I would totally have taken it beyond surreptitious ogling and post-game analysis if given half a chance--but when there's that kind of power imbalance, I think it's still good to have a rule.

If both parties do consent, after all, there are ways to get around rules. But it's good to have it there for the protection of the people who don't.

Rowen said...

I've seen the false accusation trope pop up in a lot of media. There's even a musical based on a real life situation, which jump started the Anti-Defamation League.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parade_%28musical%29
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tg7AuR4NUk

Plus, everyone has some story that they heard from someone, or they knew someone, or it happened to their best friend's brother, sort of a thing. Like the one above where the teacher was accused. Or situations I've heard where a 20 year old has a 17 year old girlfriend who gets him accused of statutory rape. I was recently in a conversation (I believe this might have been Slacktivist) where we were discussing Penn State and someone basically brought up how with our quick to judge society, innocent men CAN have their lives messed up from false accusations and someone responded, "If it stops children from being molested, I don't care if an innocent man falls on the wayside."

I'm not sure if that's the right attitude. I DO wonder how often the false accusation occurs. Kinda like how way too many people believe that malpractice suits are usually frivolous, without actually doing the research on the subject.

Kit Whitfield said...

someone basically brought up how with our quick to judge society, innocent men CAN have their lives messed up from false accusations and someone responded, "If it stops children from being molested, I don't care if an innocent man falls on the wayside."

I think it's a fair bet that someone who openly state they don't care about miscarriages of justice is probably not the best person to consult on policy. That's someone who doesn't actually see the law as an instrument of justice for everyone, but as a means to stop the things they don't like however they can.

False accusations can ruin lives. I think it happens less often than it happens that true accusations aren't believed, at least in cases of sexual offences, but it can happen, and it's a problem. The solution, though, is surely to be more careful rather than less.

I have to say, too, that I think that when false accusations ruin lives, the culprit is not the accuser, or even necessarily the laws. The culprit is our lamentable conviction rates when it comes to sex offenders. Everybody knows that most rapists walk free, and that therefore an acquittal is no guarantee that you didn't actually do it. The disastrous conviction rates have completely destroyed the credibility of a 'not guilty' verdict, because there are too many sex offenders on the street whose 'not guilty' was the wrong verdict.

If we want innocent men not to be ruined, we need to do an awful lot better at convicting the guilty ones.

Silver Adept said...

Agreed. In public service, and especially in my department, we have several rules and policies in place that demand that staff never be with users alone, especially at times or places where there won't be a handy group of witnesses to back up your innocence. Not only are there sexual assault charges possible, but for some , that would potentially make you a child sexual offender - that would mean you get fired, period, and good luck getting hired anywhere else once that's on your record.

I agree, though, with Kit that we need to get better at convicting the guilty if we want to avoid having innocent men be destroyed in the court of public opinion when there are accusations. Or at least have the appearance of taking all such things seriously and deliberately.

Ana Mardoll said...

I think there's also a disconnect between workplaces and legal systems that clouds this issue.

Most of the "I know someone who was falsely accused" stories are stories that never made it through a legal system, which means they contribute to the meme that false accusations happen a lot, but then we still have this 2% false reporting rate from the legal entities and there's a disconnect in people's minds. Why does the anecdata not match the statistics? Maybe it's because most (all?) of the stories in this thread were never taken so far as to get the police involved?

In my own past experience, my Ex-Husband was apparently accused of sexual assault by a co-worker while we were married. (I say apparently, because I only heard about this second-hand, and it's... complicated.) As I understood it, the accusation was brought to the attention of the employing company, but not by the accuser/co-worker, but rather by her parents. The company contacted the accuser and asked if she wanted to go to the police. She said she didn't want to, so since the incident did not occur on company time or property, no action was taken against Ex-Husband and -- I believe -- they weren't scheduled shifts together anymore, which was not an inconvenience on anyone's part in this case.

To talk about whether or not the accusation was "false" here would be beside the point (plus rampant speculation on my part, because I really just plain do not know. He was in her physical presence when the incident was said to occur, and they were alone, and that is all anyone knows). In the absence of evidence or any kind of police investigation, the whole thing was treated as a sort of black box incident where Ex-Husband wasn't in any way whatsoever castigated by the company or his co-workers, but neither -- I think, I hope -- was the accuser treated badly. This is really probably the best that the company could have done under the circumstances.

So I would say that I think a company AND a legal system can certain take all accusations very seriously, without ruining lives.

The other problem with the false accusation meme is that it eventually becomes self-perpetuating. If we pretend as a society, that false accusations are taken 100% gospel and totally ruin lives, then yeah, a few people are going to suggest in anger Well, what if I falsely accuse you then, huh, what then? and now we've just added to the "evidence" that false accusations are taken 100% gospel and totally ruin lives! Without, you know, a false accusation actually occurring and being taken 100% gospel and ruining a life.

Rowen said...

I wouldn't be surprised to find it also stems from a willingness to believe that the cops are NOT looking out for our best interest, and instead are more interested in beating down anyone they think might be guilty.

see: OWS.

Will Wildman said...

Parenthetically: the Current Comments box truncates the name of this thread, removing the "ns ruined" part of the html title. The remainder has stuck in my head, such that the next time I hear someone talking about pervasive false accusations of sexual harassment and assault, I shall likely be unable to keep from imagining a world in which slighted women whip out a wand at anyone they don't like, bellow "Accusatio!" and watch in malevolent glee as society is mind-controlled into setting upon the innocent man like dogs on ham.

Accusatius, the fourth Unforgivable Curse.

Jillheather said...

I have a great deal of trouble with facial recognition.

So do I. I recognise people by their hair colour and style, which worked fine in elementary school with a class of 20, but not well ever again. It took me four years to get a more than 50% hit rate in telling apart two girls in my high school (both had long blonde hair), and two years to figure out even one of the four blondes. I once couldn't find one of my closest friends in a restaurant where we were meeting because she had cut her hair. I do have a lot more trouble with people from most Asian cultures because, as a first pass, they all have hair that is too similar. As a general rule, I do better with women because hair length is useful, and they have a wider range of lengths.

I do very badly with tv shows. (Another reason to cast minorities more, because telling apart the eleventy zillion white people with similar hair styles is not that easy. Though The Wire didn't do much better, either, for me.)

Anyways, it's common, and you get used to saying bland stuff to your grandparents' friends when you have no idea who any of them are.

Makabit said...

I think that you could actually do something rather interesting with this concept, if the person whose Life is Being Ruined is aware enough to know how bizarre it is that something's actually being done, let alone done to HIM, who hasn't done anything, when he's aware that others have actually done horrible stuff and gotten away with it.

Then, of course, it would all turn out to be conspiracy against him, to protect someone else who was actually guilty.

Maybe I should write for L&O.

DaisyDeadhead said...

The first week after the accusations, Cain made $350,000 **more** from Republican donors to his campaign. What does that tell you?

Sailorsaturumon132000 said...

The problem with false accuations is that we DON'T actually know how often they occur. The False Rape Society (http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/) estimates that about 40% of primary cases (e. g. woman reports accusation to campus / workplace / police) are false:

http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/p/prevalence-of-false-rape-claims.html
llr.lls.edu/volumes/v33-issue3/greer.pdf
http://legallykidnapped.blogspot.com/2011/06/think-before-reporting-to-cyfd.html

Most of those never make it into witness stand, but the damage usually is done way before. For example this story (http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/2011/10/is-it-really-necessary-to-destroy-name.html) underscores the problem: messages of accusations hang in net forever, free to search for any prospective partner /employer / lender. Messages of acquittal? Few and far between, and most people don't care about those anyway.
Teaxchers are particularly vulnerable to this: (http://abcnews.go.com/US/falsely-accused-virginia-teacher-sean-lanigan-attempts-reclaim/story?id=13615934 ).
And politicans/persons in power are in no way resistant to this, case in Point Strauss-Kahn, whose life is ruined by the rape accusation, or the 2006 Duke University lacrosse case. The "resistant" politicians are usually of one particular type, and have much bigger issues, like admitting they don't care for free speech. Regular,, upstanding politicians are just as vulnerable.

Sailorsaturumon132000 said...

2% represents the number of all rape reports in the law agencies where the accuser PROVABLY LIED. If an accusation is simply taken away, or if the court simply acquits the accused, it does't count. For all we know, 90% of all cases where the court aquits the accused could be false accusations (the juries deemed so!), and we just never know. It may be 2% or it may be 32% And note that false accusations are TYPICALLY a date rape variety, which also comprise the majority of rape cases.
The main problem with false accusations, however, is NOT in the law courts - it is at universities and on workplace. Those institutions usually have disciplinary courts dealing with the issue, which use a much lower proof standard than legal courts (universities were recently forced to use "prepondence of evidence" standard, meaning you are deemed guilty just if there is 50%+ chance you are guilty) - and an exclusion there effectively means being considered a rapist.
As for how "a claimant might "think" a rape occurred" - well bullyling into sex with non-life-threatening threats is not rape - but often is perceived as such. But most important is this. Women, just like men, like to shirk reponsibility. And memory is often malleable to the current emotions. Thus a woman, who now REGRETS saying "yes", may easily "remember" that she didn't say "yes" in the first place, at least not really.
This is most typical by drunk sex. It's only rape if you are intoxicated to incapacitation, i. e. actually cannot resist. If alcohol merely blurred your judgment, you are responsible for any "yes" you said. Consent cannot be removed retroactively in such situation - you may and should back down from any long - standing commitments (like "sex every sunday for the next year!") but what happened is off-limits. Yet cases with "He got me drunk, it was rape!" are surprisingly common.

Ana Mardoll said...

For all we know, 90% of all cases where the court aquits the accused could be false accusations (the juries deemed so!)

"Not guilty" does not mean the jury thought the accused was innocent.

As for how "a claimant might "think" a rape occurred" - well bullyling into sex with non-life-threatening threats is not rape -

This is most typical by drunk sex. It's only rape if you are intoxicated to incapacitation, i. e. actually cannot resist.

Although the legality of these things being rape varies by jurisdiction, the fact of the matter is that they are rape, regardless of whether the jurisdiction in question acknowledges them as such. I do not intend to engage with you further on this subject; I apologize, but I find your views on what is and isn't rape to be very personally distressing.

Pthalo said...

bullyling into sex with non-life-threatening threats is not rape - but often is perceived as such.

Not in all countries. Some countries, like the one I live in in eastern europe, have this law. But many modern countries do consider bullying into sex to be rape and has legal reprecussions.

Ana Mardoll said...

My favorite L&O summation:

Give me the keys to your house, or I'll have you arrested. I'm the District Attorney. I can do it.

Give me 10K or I'll tell the fed about that shipment of heroin I saw you pick up at JFK. I'm the DA. They'll listen.

Sleep with me, or I'll tell your boss that you're under indictment for fraud. It's not true, but do you really think you'll be working next week?


Of course, he was after the guy in question for extortion, quite simply because the law in New York at that time supposedly didn't recognize the existence of rape-by-non-lethal threat.

However, there is something essentially wrong with the discussion when someone is using examples of rape-by-non-lethal threat as "evidence" of FALSE accusations. At 'best' -- the best possible way they can support the argument -- they are accusations that were worded incorrectly.

This is not what I would consider arguing in good faith.

ZMiles said...

I always liked the next two lines of that summation myself.

"I'll tell you what I'll be doing for the next ten to twenty years. I'll be in jail. Because extortion is against the law."

Although it's amusing to me also because McCoy never goes to jail for the illegal stuff he pulls. In either the very next episode or the one after that, he basically suborns perjury in order to nail an evil guy for a murder he probably didn't commit, and he let the perjurer get off with manslaughter one for the murder. But he's the hero! He can't go to jail!

ZMiles said...

ALthough my favorite Jack McCoy speeches tended to come in later seasons. There was the episode where a celebrity mom adopted a child from Africa (breaking local laws to do so), accidentally killed the child, and then hurriedly found another child who looked vaguely similar to stand in. She defended herself by saying that it was an accident. McCoy didn't buy it.

"You might have been able to sell the adoption as simple goodwill, and Christopher's death as maternal incompetence, but you replaced him with another child!"

Nor did he accept her claim that she'd brought loads of aid to the impoverished nation of Mumoono, so it all balanced out.

"Do you know how many other children will live years past their life expectancies because of me?"
"We're only concerned with the one who won't."



And then the one where he goes after the Girls Gone Wild CEO (the CEO, Drake, got a girl, Nicole, to strip and have sex while drunk for his show. When she demanded the tape later, he offered it to her if she slept with him. She showed up but refused to have sex, but he raped her anyway. He then ordered her to let his friend Hudson rape her too. She killed Hudson, and was allowed to plead out to a lesser charge so that McCoy could go after the GGW guy for felony murder). Drake demands to know why McCoy is 'persecuting' him; he honestly can't understand why McCoy thinks the case is worth it (since Drake himself didn't actually kill anyone), and wants to know if McCoy just enjoys putting someone so rich, successful, and young in jail. McCoy's response:

"You've had quite a run for someone so long. Exploiting unsuspecting college kids. Taking advantage of their youth, their innocence, their vulnerability. And if they change their minds, to Hell with them! A release is a release! Like it or not, the world is going to see you naked! Unless you pay me. Or screw me. That's a lot of heartache. A lot of ruined lives. And no one could touch you. But now, you are directly responsible for a death. And I intend to make you pay for that. Am I happy? Yes. But it's a side benefit."


(And am I the only one who wishes that Horace McCoy, the lawyer played by James Earl Jones in Season 4, returned to go up against Jack McCoy? Horace trounced Stone in court, but I wish he'd gone up against Jack.)

BrokenBell said...

I spent half an hour trying to write some kind of response to what you've been saying, but I found it increasingly difficult to make my point without a significant amount of angry swearing and numerous variations of "this was a terrible thing to say and you should feel bad for saying it". Eventually, I realised that I just don't have the energy to have this conversation. Even so, I felt that it was important that I didn't just say nothing and move on, so in lieu of something more constructive, I will say that basically every single thing you've said about this subject has been an atrocious mess of victim blaming and rape apologia, and I hope that you will someday feel incredibly guilty about having ever having held such poisonous and harmful opinions.

I mean, seriously? Threatening someone into sex isn't rape? I don't even have words for how disgusted I am.

Kish said...

You know, I wasn't going to post anything because I thought it'd already been covered, but then I remembered some of the things Kit's said previously about how men should weigh in when a man's being sexist even if they think women have it covered, so:

Sailorsaturumon132000, for redefining some kinds of rape as "not rape," for blurring "a Not Guilty verdict" into "the jury thought the accuser lied...and we should too," for filling in the bits where you can't twist words with pure [swear elided because of venue] garbage, you ought to be deeply ashamed of yourself.

BaseDeltaZero said...

"Bwuh? The drinks are FREE? So all that stuff I learned in psychology classes about emotional and social debt to people who "give" you things was just so much bunk then."

A lot of *bars* also offer free drinks. Of course, they do this so they'll be a ready supply of women for the men to hit on, but technically, the *bar* doesn't want anything from you...


"As for how "a claimant might "think" a rape occurred" - well bullyling into sex with non-life-threatening threats is not rape -"

Um... yeah. Yeah it is.


"Although it's amusing to me also because McCoy never goes to jail for the illegal stuff he pulls. In either the very next episode or the one after that, he basically suborns perjury in order to nail an evil guy for a murder he probably didn't commit, and he let the perjurer get off with manslaughter one for the murder. But he's the hero! He can't go to jail!"

Yeah, the first two sentences sound rather like something Jack McCoy would do. Not exactly a shining beacon of jurisprudence, that one...

Thomas Keyton said...

As for how "a claimant might "think" a rape occurred" - well bullyling into sex with non-life-threatening threats is not rape - but often is perceived as such

Yes it is. Yes it frelling well is.

Women, just like men, like to shirk reponsibility. And memory is often malleable to the current emotions. Thus a woman, who now REGRETS saying "yes", may easily "remember" that she didn't say "yes" in the first place, at least not really.

I see. It's all down to women being irrational.

Even assuming, for the sake of the argument, that you're saying these things in all innocence*, how can you genuinely be unaware of the context these things are said it?

*I know, I know

Sailorsaturumon132000 said...

Well, this is the problem here - with ANY OTHER CRIME, it is generally assumed that acquitted are MOSTLY innocent. Surely some of them are guilty, and some convicted are innocent (errare humanum est) , but this is perceived as roughly balanced and MOSTLY correct.

Yet with rape we get "Of course they are all guilty, it's just this damned "beyond the reasonable doubt" standard that makes them acquitted! Hang them all! "

I'd assume, by contrast, that the reasons for aquittal range from "probably guilty, but reasonable doubt remains" to "most likely innocemt" - just with any other crime. Ultimately, we don't know whether a concrete acquitted person is guilty or innocent, but citing 2% of cases in which false accusation can be
PROVED (which is notoriously difficult to do) as a number of ALL false accusation is absolutely wrong.

Note that general aquittal rate is above 22%. If only 2% of all accusations are false, 9/10 of all acquitted (in all prosecutions) are actually guilty - highly improbable.

As for drunk sex, the issue is not sexism, but balance. If Bob rapes Alice under influence (drugs/alcohol) he is obviously fully responsible for this and the the fact his mind was blurred is not in any way a punishment lessener. If Alice consents to sex with Bob under influence, then she is in no way responsible for her consent because of said influence and was actually raped. Sorry, I'm not buying this. "No" means "No", but then "Yes" means "Yes".

As for extorted sex, I concede the point that this is almost as terrible (this was just an example of how a rape can be "thought" without happening) , but that's not the main point here!

The point is false accusation HAPPEN, and not in some insignificant number (say, 100 per year) , and thus they have their own reality. The fact that there are likely less false claims that true claims is irrelevant. That the system generally works is a little consolation for those steamrolled by it. This is NOT a fictional reality, but rather just as real as actual rape. And the fact that everybody accused of rape is automatically deemed guilty by society, even if acquitted (and often even if the false claimant is convicted for false claim), certainly makes the situation worse.

Sailorsaturumon132000 said...

Did I claim it was not a crime, or not abhorrent? That's just a DIFFERENT crime. I admit this is also a horrible crime, and I am sorry for offnrding anybody if my words were perceived otherwise.
As for blurring the lines, do you know why we have "presumption of innocence" in the first place? Because PROVING INNOCENCE is virtually impossible in most cases. That only 2% of all rape claims are PROVEN false in no way means only 2% ARE actually false.

Ana Mardoll said...

Yet with rape we get "Of course they are all guilty, it's just this damned "beyond the reasonable doubt" standard that makes them acquitted! Hang them all! "

No one here has said that. With the greatest politeness, you need to back away from this discussion and go do some serious thinking about why so many people in this thread are saying that your statements are a very bad combination of victim blaming, misogyny, and rape apologia.

Silver Adept said...

@Sailorsaturumon132000

Re: Court of public opinion, please read up-thread, where we point out the problem on both ends - a society that encourages behavior that is rape but doesn't call it such makes problems when it comes to false accusations, but so does a society that chooses to pillory the accused before their guilt is established, because it generates the possibility of a false accusation being used to engage that steamroller. We need both to be able to take accusers seriously and investigate and to exercise the same ability to not jump to conclusions that you are suggesting happens on other crimes (excepting, of course, if the accused is a celebrity. Everyone had their verdict on the O.J. Simpson murder case long before the jury delivered theirs.). The fact that it's easier to dismiss someone accused of rape rather than stick with them through the investigation is a symptom of the culture.

As for "under the influence", the standard, as I understand it, is that consent can only happen between two adults that are mentally competent and free of influences that might bias their decisions. If Alice is drunk, she's not free of influences, and thus, she can't really give consent, no matter how much Bob might protest, or how much Alice might give him come-ons. It's the same as if Alice is in a dark alleyway and Bob is blocking her exit - she's not free of influences and can't really give consent.

So the difference is that Bob did not ask consent in his actions, drunk or sober, while drunk Alice is in no condition to give consent. And that's true whether or not she's had one drink or one too many. So if Bob has sex with her while she's under the influence of alcohol, or takes her drunk yes over her sober no, he's having sex without her freely-given, sober, consent.

Which is rape.

The legal system may not be able to prove that, but it is.

EllieMurasaki said...

I am not weighing in on the Sailorsaturomon thing.

I did, however, explain this very thing to a friend, let's call her Elena, when she told me that a plotline of the sequel to the quartet of novels she's working on involves one of Our Heroes being blackmailed by an ex on the grounds that if he didn't pay the blackmail money she'd charge him with rape for a scenario that even many feminists would call consensual sex. (Established-relationship sex that he neglected to wake her up before beginning and that, once she was awake, she cheerfully participated in.) Elena, dear, rape culture exists.

Found out later that Our Hero is mixed-race, so there might be an element of using rape charges as grounds for racial discrimination, but I don't know and I am not reopening that can of worms.

Bethany said...

*I *hate* it when I'm watching some tv show, and there are two men of about the same age, about the same height, about the same hair color, and similar voices, and understanding what's going on in the show hinges on me being able to tell them apart - because, no, I can't...*

This is the reason I don't watch war movies. Not only are most of the characters the same gender, roughly the same age, but they're even wearing the same clothes! I can't tell any of them apart. I also can't tell one young, female pop star from another when I see them on the tabloid covers in the grocery store. As far as I can tell, they are all one person who owns a few different wigs.

You would think that the TV and movie industry would have figured this out: if there are major characters who look sort of alike, they should have different haircuts, or one should be wearing glasses.

Sailorsaturumon132000 said...

Funny how you harp on what for me was just an afterthought about why a rape may be perceived. That's why I chose an admittedly unlucky construct of "non-lethal-threat".Threats to one's health or hits, wrong arrest do count as "lethal"(potentially) for me What I meant was "a threat not serious enough to trigger the rape threhold " - like for example, "you won't get this role unless you sleep with me".
As far as I know bullying your underling into sex and such is usually considered sexual harassment, not rape, and this is correct - otherwise we would take a very horrible crime of rape (which is charachterised by the horrble experience of one's body being used againt one's will) and dilute it with all kinds of other wrongdoings. That's what sexual harassment charge is FOR - sexual bullying which falls short of rape, yet is still illegal.
However, YOU dance around the main issue. My vagueness isn't a bug, it's a feature. I was vague because the numbers are vague. We get about 60% convictions of rape cases prosecuted, and about 2% of cases where the claim is proven false, which is cited as false rape accusation here. Between that there lies a huge gap of abut 38% cases where the accused is aquitted, but the accuser is NOT prosecuted for false witness. We ACTUALLY DON'T KNOW for sure about those cases. they could be almost all innnocent - or almost all guilty. Both, however, is highly improbable.
It was mentioned before that all too many aquitted are actually guilty. This may be, but can you PROVE those acquitted are (almost) all actually guilty?? Barring this proof I'd go with statistics from other crimes, which features aquittal rates of about 23% in all juri-tried cases, and say that almost surely, AT LEAST HALF(and realistically, over 2/3) of those acuitted of rape (or about 20%) is actually innocent. Which means that:
- Citing tbose 2% as a proof false accusation almost never occur is a blatant intellectual dishonesty;
- False accusation ARE A REALITY. We get over 200000 rape reports per year - which translates into over 80000 trials every year (this I got from RAINN). If 20% of those are on innocent, we get 16000 falsely tried per year - more than enough to warrant an "own reality" and a couple of SVU episodes. This doesn't count cases which are never brought to police, but to disciplinary courts (which are far more likely to wrongly convict) or when the charges are dropped before trial, but the alleged culprit's name becomes known and they are outracised. And it would surprise me if the effective conviction rate of false accusers would be higher than that of rapists.

Ana Mardoll said...

Sailorsaturumon132000, you are seriously starting to try my nerves.

You are making a false correlation to "innocent" with "false accusation". Not everyone who is innocent is falsely accused; witnesses can and do make mistakes, police can lead witnesses into incorrect identification, etc. I shouldn't have to explain the obviousness that a maliciously-and-knowingly false accusation is NOT the same as being genuinely mistaken regarding identity, circumstances, and other such things that trials hinge on, and yet here I am having to do so.

By equating "not guilty = innocent = false accusation", you are either arguing in bad faith or out of an absolutely astonishing place of ignorance. Considering the EXTREME amount of victim blaming and misogyny present in several of your posts thus far, I'm not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt.

You need to step away from this discussion, and you need to do so now. You are seriously upsetting several people in this thread, including myself.

Sailorsaturumon132000 said...

Please provide examples where I BLAMED actual victims.
It doesn't matter why a innocent is accused. Lives are destroyed anyway by an incorrect accusation, whether malicious or not. "not guilty = innocent" is right by definition and a false accusation doesn't have to be malicious to have disastrous consequences. Note that I am not native english speaker and to me "false" and "incorrect" are exact synonyms.
Same for the below. NO ONE keeps the numbers low. They are correct - then just don't mean what you think they mean. Those numbers are the numbers where the accused is PROVEN INNOCENT AND THE ACCUSER IS PROVEN GUILTY - beyond the reasonable doubt. Which is very hard to do, and therefore the whole presumpltion of innocence is there. The numbers of innocently accused (for all crimes) are way higher - and yes in many cases the accuser is innocent as well, just misguided. It's just that those accused (and acquitted) of rape suffer more than those accused (and acquitted) of burglary or even murder - precisely because they are mostly perceived guilty.
And please remember that anger comes when rational arguments are thin. You argued that being accused of rape innocently happens too rarely to warrant this a reality. This is NOT CORRECT. The rest is semantics. Blackmail is rape? if you insist, but date rapes don't involve blackmail. Sex with drunk people is rape? Then please apply this to males too.

Kish said...

Your word games aren't impressive. And you don't get to define words with one hand and wave off the specific false claims you've been called on with the other. It would wreck your credibility--if you had any credibility left to wreck.

Ana Mardoll said...

Please provide examples where I BLAMED actual victims.

You started when you linked to a blog that seems to be arguing that if a woman's skirt is too short, she can't be believed if she says her date raped her. It's not my fault you don't know what victim blaming is and have chosen not to educate yourself despite repeated urgings to do so.

It doesn't matter why a innocent is accused. Lives are destroyed anyway by an incorrect accusation, whether malicious or not.

It *does* matter when you use the wrong term. The term "false accusation" implies that the accuser is knowingly accusing an innocent person. By conflating all "incorrect" accusations with "false" accusations, you are calling victims who were incorrect for various valid reasons liars.

You are actually falsely accusing innocent people of being false accusers. Do you see the irony that is staring you in your face?

Sex with drunk people is rape? Then please apply this to males too.

Hi. Welcome to my feminist blog. This may utterly surprise you to learn, but just because I'm a feminist doesn't mean I'm a hypocrite. (I assume this surprises you because you can't be arsed to look up what words mean. Like "false". And "victim blaming". And -- I'm predicting -- "irony".) I absolutely take the rape of males very seriously -- probably MORE seriously than you do, because I'm not running around the internet linking to blogs that claim that rape victims (male or female) can't be taken seriously if they looked like they wanted sex at some point in the evening.

If you want to accuse me of not taking male rape seriously, then you can get off my blog. I don't see why you'd want to stay if you really thought that, because I certainly wouldn't.

You are about one fraying nerve away from having me invoke my "no sexism, no hate speech" rule and disemvoweling your last comment. Do NOT respond further in this thread. I am now speaking to you as site moderator -- I've warned you several times now in a polite fashion that you need to walk away from this discussion; I am now telling you to step out of this thread and not come back. I'm not going to turn this entire blog into your misogyny-fest-2012 just because I like to maintain an open thread policy.

I'm going to hang a little sign on this:

Sailorsaturumon132000, do not respond further in this thread, or you will be disemvoweled. Victim blaming, arguing from bad faith, and misogyny are not allowed per the blog comment policy.

Gelliebean said...

Eee-hee-hee.... Going off on a different tangent....

I wonder how influential the story of Joseph from the Bible is in creating an archetype of Falsely Accused of Rape? Here you have a guy who's the Chosen One, so obviously blameless; he's put through all kinds of crappy things, literally disempowered and enslaved, and then approached by a woman who fits the perfect stereotype of what people would want to see as the false accuser - a strong sexuality, powerful, cheating on her husband, and angry and vengeful at rejection.

Ana Mardoll said...

And, additionally, she's a "foreigner" from the perspective of the people telling the tale. It really hits ALL the Bingo card squares.

Makabit said...

A note on that story--we read it in a class I once took. It's played a bit for laughs in the Hebrew, and the professor hammed that up. (So to speak.) People laughed.

One of the men in my class said, "This is a story about a enslaved teenage boy being threatened for sex by someone who has the ability to destroy him if he crosses her. Why is this funny?"

I shut the hell up. Because he was right.

Pierce Harlan said...

Ana, you would do well to avoid any further libel of my Web site, False Rape Society. You obviously think you've got us pegged as misogynists because we dare to advocate for persons who've been falsely accused. Your fantasies are your problem, but for you to suggest that we argue that "if a woman's skirt is too short, she can't be believed if she says her date raped her," that is not only false, it is actionable. Ours is the world's leading Web site dedicated to giving voice to persons wrongly accused of rape and similar atrocities. Although we advocate for persons who've been wrongly accused and who, too often, are unjustly deemed guilty by reason of an accsuation alone, we are also allied with rape victims, who invariably loathe and detest false accusations because they diminish the integrity of actual rape victims.

You would do well to spend several weeks reading through the true life stories of the wrongly accused and the other objective authorities we cite before you assume you understand a very complex issue that doesn't lend itself to black and white gender politics.

Ana Mardoll said...

Oh, I can tell this is going to be a fun day already. *sigh* Let me get my coffee.

*clears throat* Hi, Pierce Harlan, welcome to my blog. I'm sorry that I've given offense by stating my personal interpretation of something on your site. Let's look at what I actually said:

Let's unpack "her outward manifestations of assent did not match her subjective disinclination to engage in sex", which essentially boils down to "she looked like she wanted to have sex, and that matters more than what she thought or what she says she said". This boils down to dismissing ALL rape cases that don't involve 14-year-old virgin nuns because if she didn't want to be raped and then be blamed for the rape, she shouldn't have worn that skirt, gone on that date, had a drink at that bar, etc. That is victim blaming and it is Not Okay.

You started when you linked to a blog that seems to be arguing that if a woman's skirt is too short, she can't be believed if she says her date raped her. It's not my fault you don't know what victim blaming is and have chosen not to educate yourself despite repeated urgings to do so.

So what I have actually done is quoted something directly from your website, and then given my interpretation of what that statement essentially boils down to in practical terms. And then when I referenced it against, I very clearly said that your site seems to be arguing certain things.

If you'd like to explain why your site isn't arguing those things, I'm sure I'd be glad to hear what "her outward manifestations of assent did not match her subjective disinclination to engage in sex" actually means to you. But if you want to start throwing around terms like "libel" and "actionable", then I'm pretty sure you've got an uphill climb ahead of you, seeing as how the only thing I've said about your site is my interpretation of a direct quote from your webpage.

Izzy said...

Well said. And about a thousand times more diplomatic than I would've been.

Would you prefer me not to flame Dipshit von Defensiveberg here? I can take it to my LJ.

Ana Mardoll said...

I'm honestly not sure how to handle this situation in general because this is our first "issue" on the blog. I've got a post up here (http://www.anamardoll.com/2011/11/open-thread-safe-spaces.html ) that was, ironically, written last night before this comment went up.

I think we need to decide in advance what the blog policies are on banning, moderation, commenting, and flaming are. I know a lot of people are uncomfortable with flaming and banning, and other people are more comfortable with those things than with a lack of either.

Basically, I'd really like to find a policy that keeps everyone here and happy minus the couple of people who would really probably be happier elsewhere because I can tell in advance that they're never going to agree with anything I'll ever say on the subject. :/

So, um, yes to the "flame via LJ" and also definitely go weigh in, if you will Izzy, on the open thread. :)

EllieMurasaki said...

You would do well to spend several weeks reading through the true life stories of the wrongly accused and the other objective authorities we cite before you assume you understand a very complex issue that doesn't lend itself to black and white gender politics.

You would do well to spend several weeks reading through the true life stories of people who have been raped and who were accused of making false accusations of rape. Start with http://abcnews.go.com/US/rape-high-school-cheerleader-vows-fight-school-district/story?id=11972052 about a cheerleader who was raped by two athletes, refused to cheer for them, got harassed every time she walked into the cafeteria because she refused to cheer for them, sued the school, lost, got told to pay the school's legal fees...fun stuff. Far's I know her rape kit still hasn't been tested even though the rape was years ago, and grand juries refused to indict the rapists, so they're getting off without a mark on their reputations. She, meanwhile, is disbelieved at every turn, even though there are witnesses who heard her shouting 'stop, no', and shortly thereafter found her naked from the waist down and crying.

Everyone who acknowledges having been raped goes through this. And one can't press rape charges unless one acknowledges having been raped.

No one makes false accusations of rape. The consequences of making any accusation of rape, true or not, are worse than the consequences of being falsely accused of rape.

tl;dr: you're being misogynist and pro-rape. Fuck off.

Ana Mardoll said...

Ellie, would you like to clarify that post a little? I do think that false accusations happen -- not at a higher level than other accusations, though -- and I think I said so in my OP. :)

However, I fully agree with you -- if I understand correctly -- that victims should not be assumed false accusers. The legal system should work properly and investigate fully and take the situation seriously, and when it doesn't, it has seriously failed us all.

EllieMurasaki said...

Almost no one makes false accusations of rape. Happy?

Ana Mardoll said...

Yes, thank you. :)

Izzy said...

Sounds good!

I'm funwithrage.livejournal.com.

Thanks!

Izzy said...

Oh, Lord.

First of all: get a grip. I'm pretty sure that any credible lawyer would laugh you out of his or her office, because...see above re: what Anna said.

Second, if you have a serious mission and want people to take your site for something other than a misogynist trollpit? Maybe you might want to consider their criticisms before showing up all ZOMG I WILL SIC MY INTERNET LAWYER ON YOU EVIL EVIL WOMEN.

TIP: There is no time in the history of the Internet when "I will sue you because you hurt my feelings on a blog" has done anything for anyone's image.

Also, I'm sorry, the "False Rape Society"? Yeah, *there's* a title that suggests open-minded people who wish to take a balanced perspective on accusations of rape or abuse. Except not. It's like "Father's Rights" attorneys--I can and do support both parents having an equal claim on child custody as a baseline, but someone who announces their practice as Father's Rights...no. Just no.

If you're concerned about defendants' rights, or the presumption of innocence, that's one thing. Your name does not make it sound like you are.

Nor does your follower here, who shows up mostly to talk about how many cooties girls have, as far as I can tell. You might want to look into who's posting quotes from your website and how they're representing themselves before you start with the condescending "spend several weeks reading through" blah blah blah. Because I'm betting Ana, or I, or anyone else here can read through your "objective" site in a lunch break, not even counting the pauses to vomit, and would still think you're full of it.

If what you mean by This is beyond dispute. ... For example, for some such claims, while the claimant herself might think a rape occurred, her outward manifestations of assent did not match her subjective disinclination to engage in sex, so it wasn't rape. is "Sometimes women say yes, and mean no, and then accuse the guy of rape,"...say that. And give proof. Not "true life stories"--those don't fly in he-said-she-said. Proof.

PROTIP: There are people, right here on this blog, who made the point that sometimes people *do* make false rape accusations*, and who did so in non-sexist ways that don't suggest "she was asking for it." Which your quote does. Read and learn, Bucky.

*Or get raped and accuse someone who isn't the actual rapist, for that matter.

Izzy said...

Hopefully the one I just wrote is non-flamey--I tried to keep the cursing and so forth down.

Izzy said...

To expand on that:

Drunk sex is tricky in real life. I've had sex while drunk, I've had sex while drunk and regretted that sex later, and I don't think I was raped: I came in at two with a ten, woke up at ten with a two, it happens. Long-term-relationship sex is tricky in real life: the chemistry stops fizzling, the flame dies, but you still like the person, so sometimes you do the sexual equivalent of "...sure, we can spend Thanksgiving with your aunt, honey." These things happen, and they're not wrong or criminal.

However: people also intentionally encourage other people to drink in order to lower known sexual boundaries or standards. People press drunk people for sex when they *know* those people wouldn't consent while sober. People manipulate or harass or indirectly threaten their long-term partners into sex in ways or at times when their partners are not comfortable.

The line can get blurry sometimes. But pretending that there's nothing over the line--that all drunk sex is "hey, we've both had a lot of beers" Sophomore Hijinks or that all not-entirely-enthusiastic married sex is "well, you did go to my company party"--and not taking measures to prevent that line-crossing is worse than the alternative.

Kit Whitfield said...

Pierce Harlan: if your go-to is implicit threats of legal action rather than argument, it doesn't make you look like you have very good arguments. It makes you look like you're more interested in dominance than in justice.

You enter the marketplace of ideas, you are consenting to have your speech commented upon. That is the nature of free speech. The law does not exist merely to favour you.

--

Sailorsaturumon132000: you are not making intelligent points. You are exercising unconscious incompetence. I only pray that you never end up on a jury for a rape trial, because people like you are the reason rapists get away with their crimes as often as they do.

chris the cynic said...

I didn't actually mean to come into this thread, I thought I was clicking on a different link. I'm not going to read through the the whole thing so I might be taking something out of context or saying something already said. From what little I read before I realized I was somewhere I do not want to be makes it seem like I might have useful information to pass on (sorry if I'm wrong.)

Mad Gastronomer said at Slacktivist/Slacktiverse a while back (long enough that I'm not sure whether it was before or after the split) that false reports of rape are roughly equivalent to false reports of other crimes. So based on that a false report of rape is about as likely as a false report of, say, murder.

So what I think that means is that if there's a rape investigation, the odds that there was really a rape involved are about the same as the odds that there was murder involved when a murder investigation is taking place.

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