Comment by jfengel
4 years ago
The problem is that only a tiny percentage of harassers and rapists are ever convicted. The court -- rightly -- sets a very high bar to conviction, and police and prosecutors often won't even attempt it unless the evidence is overwhelming.
You're concerned that this is stacked against you, but the courts are stacked against the victims. So it doesn't really suffice to decry the one problem without addressing the other.
So perhaps you can see what it looks like to many women when you say, "Hey, I'm sorry this happened to you, but this bad thing happened to my brother, so _shrug_". Did your brother go to the courts and police to address these issues? It may been unlawful termination.
There is a large domain of behavior that is either nebulously legal or difficult to prosecute but which makes our communities much, much worse. It's counterproductive to tell the people victimized by that to stop talking about it. The solution is to go forward and find ways to set up our communities to protect people. And that can't mean just asking victims to accept that.
> the courts are stacked against the victims
Ah, that pesky presumption of innocence getting in the way of our 100% conviction rate. /s
The first sentence is literally:
"The problem is that only a tiny percentage of harassers and rapists are ever convicted. The court -- rightly -- sets a very high bar to conviction, and police and prosecutors often won't even attempt it unless the evidence is overwhelming.".
First, its a poor place and topic for sarcasm (it just an observation, i'm not against it, i do have good friends like that) but more than that, GP actually adressed the point you're trying to highlight in his first sentence.
That wasn't being disputed. It does mean that, in the real world, a lot of victims will never see justice until there's overwhelming evidence, if ever.
"The problem is that only a tiny percentage of harassers and rapists are ever convicted."
How can that be known? Why do you presume that someone is a harasser or rapist if they weren't convicted?
Less than 1% of rapes lead to felony convictions: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/06/less-than...
Same article notes that between 2-8% of rape complaints are false. Worries about false rape claims are wildly overblown.
The number of fake rape complaint surely depends on how they're treated.
If an accusation only has effect if it's proven in court, there will be few of them.
If you can destroy someone's life by a mere accusation, false accusations will be very common. Also, just a threat of such an accusation will be very powerful.
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> Same article notes that between 2-8% of rape complaints are false. Worries about false rape claims are wildly overblown.
That is a HUGE percent of false accusations! On the high end that's 1 in 10! In the middle, it's 1 in 20. That's a LOT.
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How are these numbers even measurable?
> Less than 1% of rapes lead to felony convictions
We can measure the numerator here: it’s the number of felony rape convictions. But how do we measure the denominator? In some rape trials, the central question of fact is whether a rape occurred at all, or if the sexual encounter was consensual. If a rape trial leads to acquittal based on reasonable doubt over that question, is that alleged rape included in the denominator or not?
> Same article notes that between 2-8% of rape complaints are false.
So here’s a different question. If 2-8% of rape “complaints” are false, then clearly we aren’t counting these false accusations in the denominator for the 1% figure, are we? But what do we do with the cases we can’t determine with certainty either way?
One way of interpreting these numbers might be:
* 92-98% of rape accusations are not provably false.
* 1% of the remaining accusations are provably true. 1% of 98% is still roughly 1%, so we’ll round to 1% of all rape accusations are provably true.
* 91-97% of rape accusations can’t be proven.
Does this make sense? A 90% acquittal rate for rape cases? That seems way out of line with other criminal justice statistics. So at some point we’re including accusations that never even result in charges being filed due to lack of evidence, and possibly accusations that are never brought to the criminal justice system in the first place. In either case, this vast majority of cases is legally indeterminate: neither conclusively proven to be rapes committed by a specific suspect, nor conclusively proven to be false accusations.
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The article notes that 2-8% of rape cases are PROVEN false. The real number is definitely higher than that as people do go to prison under wrongful conviction. Bottom line is if you don’t have compelling evidence for a crime you don’t have a case. That’s a good thing as it protects us from unjust punishment most of the time. It’s real sad that victims that can’t prove their case don’t have justice but it’s much more important that the innocent are not wrongfully punished.
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And yet you wouldn’t like to fall within those 2-8%.
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>2-8% of rape complaints are false
Complaints is the key here. Obviously, we can't say much about the incidents that don't go reported. If one looks at the conviction rate for rape complaints it's around 2%. So if we take the lower estimate for false complaints, it still means that only 4% of cases are provable one way or the other, and that those which are have a 50/50 chance of being true or false complaints. (I'm looking at '92 stats, at a glance it appears the the rates for both rape and false rape convictions have risen a fair bit since then).
Interestingly, a 2% conviction rate is on par with that of robbery.
https://blogs.findlaw.com/blotter/2017/07/how-often-do-rape-...
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I think that's 2-8% where there is quite a bit of evidence that the allegations false. Quite a few allegations there isn't evidence either way besides the accounts of the two individuals.
From your source: "...based on the best of the imperfect measures available."
What are these imperfect measures? How imperfect are they?
Doesn't your set of statistics show that rape accusations are 2-8 times as likely to be proven false as they are to be proven true?
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>Less than 1% of rapes lead to felony convictions
Car break-ins outnumber car thefts by several orders of magnitude. Assaults outnumber murders by probably a similiar amount.
I'd be very suspicious if there was a class of crime where any large fraction of instances result in higher level charges being brought. Especially with how plea deals work.
>between 2-8% worries about false rape claims are wildly overblown.
If 2% of the time cops fired their weapons it blew up in their hand or 2% of car crashes resulted in a fatality it would be an outrage.
2-8% is huge when you're talking about people's lives being permanently altered for the worse.
If anything the worries are under-blown. But then again, when compared to the rest of the court system (not that long ago they were framing random minorities in order to close cases) and prosecution process 2-8% might not be that bad.
Do you think that OJ was innocent?
And if not, doesn't that imply you also agree (to an extent) that trials/law enforcement on heavily politicized cases have the potential to be totally mismanaged and end in injustice?
OJ probably did it but the prosecution failed to prove him guilty so he walked free as he should.
He's lucky he was a wealthy celebrity or he wouldn't have gotten the full protection that the courts supposedly afford to the accused.
Because I know people who have been harassed and raped and whose harassers and rapists weren't punished.
I know literally dozens of stories like that, and maybe a handful where the harasser or rapist was punished at all. Of those, even fewer where they were convicted of a crime.
The majority of these cases the victim isn't public in their accusation, there's no argument that they're trying to gain something or hurt someone else. So by comparing the data that is presumably more honest, that people make in private, to that in public, we can assume that most instances of harassment go unpunished.
I'm one. I'm also male. It was brutal. No, I did not go to the police. I was far too afraid.
> The court -- rightly -- sets a very high bar to conviction
Rape convictions are so abysmally low that there's been a lot of rethinking in feminist circles as to whether the "beyond reasonable doubt" standard -- or even the presumption of innocence -- is fair or just. Some countries have been looking for ways to ameliorate this. For example, in thr USA, college date rape is such a problem that universities are required to investigate accusations of sexual harassment or assault and discipline offenders based on the looser preponderance standard, or be found in violation of Title IX by the federal Department of Education.
It seems like 68% [0] of rape prosecutions result in a conviction. And that’s higher than the 61% rate for violent crimes.
So it seems we’re pretty good at convicting rapists, it’s the arresting that we’re bad at. And since RAINN [1] estimates that only 230/1000 are reported to police and of those only 43 lead to arrest and 9 to prosecution. If the ratios stay the same, then if we reported every rape then convictions would increase 4x.
[0] Table 21, as of 2009 https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fdluc09.pdf [1] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fdluc09.pdf
This problem can only be solved with trial by coin toss
> The court -- rightly -- sets a very high bar to conviction, and police and prosecutors often won't even attempt it unless the evidence is overwhelming.
Huh? Have you ever heard of the Central Park Five? Google "Central Park Five" and you'll have a more enlightened view!
The Central Park five voluntarily confessed and were almost certainly guilty. The only issue was that there was a sixth perpetrator who had raped the victim after and wasn’t caught at the time.
If you did a little research you will find they got paid $41,000,000 by the City of New York!
You think the City just handed over tens of millions of dollars because settling would be cheaper then going to trial?
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"Almost certainly guilty," huh? Citations please? Are you talking about a DIFFERENT "Central Park Five" than the ones who were exonerated? Or are you just ironically quoting Trump? Do you agree with him that hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case
>From the outset the case was a topic of national interest, with the commentary on social issues evolving as the details emerged. Initially, the case led to public discourse about New York City's perceived lawlessness, criminal behavior by youths, and violence toward women. After the exonerations, it became a high-profile example of racial profiling, discrimination, and inequality in the media and legal system. All five defendants subsequently sued the City of New York for malicious prosecution, racial discrimination and emotional distress; the City settled the suit in 2014 for $41 million.
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-central-park-five/convictio...
>On December 19, 2002, Justice Charles J. Tejada of the Supreme Court of the State of New York granted a motion to vacate the thirteen-year-old convections in the infamous case. He did so based on new evidence: a shocking confession from a serial rapist, Matias Reyes, and a positive DNA match to back it up. A year later, the men filed civil lawsuits against the City of New York, and the police officers and prosecutors who had worked toward their conviction. In 2014, they settled that civil case for $41 million dollars. Despite their exoneration, the police and prosecutors involved in the case maintain that they were guilty of the crime.
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-48609693
>Five black and Hispanic boys, aged between 14 and 16, would be found guilty and jailed for the crime.
>They became known as the Central Park Five.
>But they never committed the crime.
[...]
>The role of Donald Trump
>New York in the 80s and 90s was much more dangerous than it is today.
>Race relations were strained - especially when it came to the police.
>Meanwhile, Donald Trump - then a New York property mogul - seemed convinced the teens were guilty.
>He spent a reported $85,000 (around £138,000 today) on four full-page adverts in New York newspapers titled: "Bring Back The Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police!".
>He wrote: "I want to hate these murderers and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyse or understand them, I am looking to punish them."
>In an interview with CNN at the time, he said: "Maybe hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done."
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