Effects of False Rape Accusations
What’s the truth and what isn’t? That’s a question law enforcement must answer, almost everyday, when dealing with crimes. Sexual assault, in particular, is a subject where the truth could be a he-said-she-said type of situation. Moreover, law enforcement generally has a difficult time apprehending a perpetrator, due to the lack of eyewitness accounts of the crime or lack of evidence. The reason being, investigating sexual assault is not as simple as it appears, considering the means of which the evidence must be received (“Pocket Guide for Police Response to Sexual Assault”). Sometimes, reports of crimes are determined to be inaccurate. Consequently, the effects, psychologically, of being wrongly accused could affect a person for the entirety of their life.
To begin with, there are a few stipulations within the research. Rape has a considerably lower reporting rate with “only 36 percent of rapes, 34 percent of attempted rapes, and 26 …show more content…
Two teams compared 136 cases based on those three categories, but later realised they needed a fourth category “Insufficient information” (Lisak 2010). The results concluded that only 8 of the cases were false reports, 61 did not proceed, 19 had insufficient information, and the remaining all went through some kind of prosecution. The two teams concluded that false reporting is rare. Although, when a sexual assault is considered to be false, falsified by a witness or just generated false by a group of participants in a study, they generally have the same rape myths involved (Lisak). “Rape myths were present in all three allegation types. The two categories of false allegation both contained more rape myths than the true allegations,” (Norton and Grant 275) meaning false sexual assault reports can provide examples for future
What’s the truth and what isn’t? That’s a question law enforcement must answer, almost everyday, when dealing with crimes. Sexual assault, in particular, is a subject where the truth could be a he-said-she-said type of situation. Moreover, law enforcement generally has a difficult time apprehending a perpetrator, due to the lack of eyewitness accounts of the crime or lack of evidence. The reason being, investigating sexual assault is not as simple as it appears, considering the means of which the evidence must be received (“Pocket Guide for Police Response to Sexual Assault”). Sometimes, reports of crimes are determined to be inaccurate. Consequently, the effects, psychologically, of being wrongly accused could affect a person for the entirety of their life.
To begin with, there are a few stipulations within the research. Rape has a considerably lower reporting rate with “only 36 percent of rapes, 34 percent of attempted rapes, and 26 …show more content…
Two teams compared 136 cases based on those three categories, but later realised they needed a fourth category “Insufficient information” (Lisak 2010). The results concluded that only 8 of the cases were false reports, 61 did not proceed, 19 had insufficient information, and the remaining all went through some kind of prosecution. The two teams concluded that false reporting is rare. Although, when a sexual assault is considered to be false, falsified by a witness or just generated false by a group of participants in a study, they generally have the same rape myths involved (Lisak). “Rape myths were present in all three allegation types. The two categories of false allegation both contained more rape myths than the true allegations,” (Norton and Grant 275) meaning false sexual assault reports can provide examples for future