False rape accusations
Last year, two of my friends were falsely accused of rape.
One of them was lucky enough to have evidence - texts from the girl expressing enthusiasm about the experience and agreeing that she had initiated and expressed implicit consent (like getting a condom, putting it on him, and asking him to fuck her harder) - but that didn’t stop rumors spreading. It turns out she had a boyfriend, and probably fed him a different story in order to prevent him being mad at her.
My friend got uninvited from parties and had people warning his friends about his sexual offense. Eventually the story morphed into the rumor that he had assaulted two people, but when he asked the supposed second person, she had no idea what he was talking about.
My other friend wasn’t lucky enough to have direct evidence. He never found out who was accusing him - an image began circulating virally with his face, name, where he lived, and a long description of his supposed ‘violent assault.’ People he didn’t know started contacting all his facebook friends and warning them that he was a violent rapist. He received threats and hate mail.
He didn’t have any absolute proof that he was innocent, but his reputation was solid. I saw messages from previous casual sexual partners (who’d been contacted by friends of the accuser) saying the accusations were strange because he’d only ever been respectful and they couldn’t imagine him doing something like that. He lived in a house with roommates, and his roommates had met all his sexual partners, and they said all of them had seemed happy to be there and fine when they left. Everyone who knew him was confused by the accusations. He was a close, old friend of mine. I’d had seen him interact with many casual sexual partners during our friendship, and he had always been consent-oriented and not pushy. He refused to have sex with people who were intoxicated.
I suspect it might have been a similar circumstance to my first friend - he had sex with someone who had a boyfriend, and then she’d lied about it in order to avoid telling her boyfriend that she’d cheated.
It’s also possible that it wasn’t even anyone who had sex with him, but just anyone who disliked him and wanted to hurt him.
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Neither of the accusers went to the police, probably because their claims were false. They stayed out of the legal system and proceeded to destroy my friends’ reputations on a social scale. I suspect false rape accusations are more common than we think, mainly because false accusers have a special incentive not to report to the police.
And even if they are rare, the power to destroy lives is incredibly serious. One of my friends became suicidal and went on medication to keep himself from self harming. The mental distress he underwent from the false accusation seemed comparable to that of a rape victim.
The problem is that people have the power to do this to each other, and we don’t have any social system in place for preventing this. I don’t think we should believe all victims absolutely - we should ascribe probability to their stories, and be far more cautious before we take actions to socially punish the accused.
I want to help rape victims, but I can’t justify it when it’s at the expense of other victims.
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Also, there are shitty people in the world, shitty enough to hurt other people for any reason - feelings of power, personal gain, revenge - and if a woman can ruin a man’s life by falsely accusing him of rape, without having to go to the police - shitty women will absolutely take this route. They have nothing to lose if they’re in a culture of ‘never question a rape victim.’
There are people out there that have the capacity to do it and the motivation, much as is the same with actual rapists. I don’t really understand the argument that false accusations are implausible or extremely rare. “Someone shitty has something to gain by hurting another person” is not exactly a rare scenario.
Too often the response is to blame any system with exploitable reporting on the people who abuse that, as if a gun should be left lying around a crowded room because only bad people would misuse it. It’s the system, not the “bad apples.”
(And it must be kept in mind, despite agreement with the above, harassment and stalking of women who have no idea how to respond because official channels are not proportionate to the offense are also still serious problems. I know victims of stalking. I know targets of witch hunts. Yes, in our cosmopolitan social bubble, yes in the very recent past. It’s a messy, complicated world out there.)
I’ll just note that “if you find yourself alone in on a room with a really bad person in a sexual context they can seriously mess up your life and get away with it because there were no witnesses” was the status quo for women before circa 1990. Rape is a crime that almost always happens in a situation where there is no convincing physical evidence, where it is plausible that no crime occurred at all, where a material part of the crime is the effective communication of an inner mental state of the victim.
Given all that, a system that only relied on the legal system with its high burdens of proof, particularly when combined with rampant misogyny, means that rape accusations succeeded in only the most brazen and obvious circumstances. It meant men could hurt women with impunity.
I’m not saying the right answer is jus to flip things around and make men as vulnerable as women used to be, but honestly unless you start fucking in semi-public spaces like responsible degenerates I have no idea how to make this not zero sum.
Attention to the truth is not zero-sum. People should act on what they truly believe is accurate.
What we see in these accusations, and most crimes tied to ideology (ie, the belief that rape is part of rape culture is part of the patriarchy is part of conservatism, and thus that fighting sexual assault has a political component) is the desire to disavow your own judgment. You may personally be unsure a rape did not take place, but for the sake of the political project you must act as if you did.
(Additionally in these social witch hunts, the problem is rarely disagreement over the facts of what happened. It’s more about the interpretation of those facts, and things like, as you say, someone’s internal mental state.)
In the past we had the reverse of this, where you might believe a man did something heinous, but were pressured to pretend nothing bad happened so the town could continue on in peaceful harmony. So you keep him away from your daughters, but otherwise ignore the victim. That too was disavowal.
You must take responsibility for your own judgment. This includes what you think of the accused, and of the victim, and of the context, and their other relationships with people, and of moral questions like forgiveness and justice. (Very, very often in the modern context that conclusion will be: I think the accused did not mean to hurt anyone and is safe for others to be around, but the victim is hurt and needs space to feel safe now.)
It’s terrifying because people will call you all sorts of terms coded with political betrayal. But to give in and claim what you do not believe is true, is the cowardice that condemns people to silence and lies.
The good news here is that we’ve enjoyed so much social progress that Ourobouros is starting to eat his own tail, and we’ll soon be back to the symmetrical, Victorian-era standard of “never be alone in a room with someone of the opposite sex unless they’re your spouse, because it will cause Rumor and Scandal.”
aka, you won’t get accused because she cheated on her boyfriend if you are the boyfriend
Yes, this is by no means foolproof, but it is wise to reduce one’s potential attack surface.
The risk of false accusation is probably weighted more heavily on a per-partner basis, longer dating makes hiding two-timing proportionally more difficult, allows better anticipation of hangups and other risk factors, etc.
