Let's consider the methodological problems involved in this claim. I'd like everyone to really think about this. It concerns a very old and unsolved problem in criminology, first described in the 1830s by Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian mathematician and sociologist--
also a key figure in introducing statistical methods to the social sciences. There are two problems here, but let's start with the first: Estimating the Dark Figure of crime. google.fr/search?q=dark+…
There's a huge literature on it, it's fascinating. I'll summarize it *very* crudely. There are several ways to estimate crime rates. A crime may be reported officially--"police-reported crime." We could use that number to count the crime rate. It is (in brief) a problematic way.
We can also count the number of convictions. Basically, we use official crime statistics in one form or another. Quetelet's insight was that these statistics tell us nothing about unreported, un-prosecuted crime--and there are many reasons, especially in cases of sexual violence,
that crime might go unreported to the police, or prosecutions might not be obtained. So criminologists have come to appeal to victimization surveys to complete their portrait. It's a useful addition, and often shows the dark figure (for every crime but homicide) is quite high.
(Why not homicide? Because almost every society takes homicide *very* seriously, and it's impossible to ignore it when you've got the evidence of a dead body. Police-reported homicide and the homicide rate calculated through victimization surveys tend to be about the same.)
I'm about to write a thread so long no one will read it--maybe I should save this for an article. But before accepting very firm-sounding statistics about the number of women who've been victims of sexual violence and the number of false rape claims, have a look at these ideas.
And consider that for the same reason it is difficult to prove that a woman has been a victim of a sexual assault--there are very rarely witnesses; the forensic evidence is often compatible with "consensual sex"--
It is equally difficult to prove a woman made a false rape claim. She may well have made a claim that cannot be proven in court, but finding evidence that she's *lying* is a lot harder. How do you prove that? Basically, the only way would be to find evidence in direct conflict--
with her account (e.g., that the person in question wasn't even in the same city on the night she claims he raped her), or if she confesses. These are rare events. In many cases, unfortunately, it isn't possible to establish what happened--especially if the incident+
+as often happens, is reported long after police can gather fingerprints, get DNA evidence, consult multiple witnesses, or make a solid independent case one way or another. I'll leave it at that, I just encourage people to think about this when told these statistics are "a fact."
They're actually "a theory."
