It’s Time to Dismantle the Myth of the False Accuser

We Need to Start Thinking Differently About Sexual Harassment and Assault

If the myth is to be believed, a significant percentage of accusations of sexual harassment or assault are false. Vindictive women carelessly wield their power to bring low the men who have angered or disappointed them by making baseless accusations against them. People who do have legitimate claims come forward right away and those they report it to take their claims seriously and help to bring the perpetrator(s) to justice.

The problem is, everything about this myth is wrong!

It’s not in line with reality on any level. And continuing to hold victims to a standard that doesn’t meet their lived experience is not only unfair, but it’s also mean. It punishes people for being victims of a crime (yes, men get assaulted too, overwhelmingly by other men) and it traumatizes victims even further. It’s time for us to view sexual harassment, sexual assault, and their aftermath as they are and not as we might imagine they should be.

Let’s take this myth apart, piece by piece.

Myth: A significant percentage of accusations are false and women, in particular, do it to be vindictive.

Statistically, somewhere between 2–10% of accusations of sexual assault are indeed false accusations, but the story doesn’t end there. In “What Kind of Person Makes False Rape Accusations,” Sandra Newman explains:

False rape accusations loom large in the cultural imagination. We don’t forget the big ones: The widely-read 2014 Rolling Stone article, later retracted, about a brutal gang rape at the University of Virginia; the 2006 accusations against innocent members of the Duke University lacrosse team. These cases are readily cited by defense attorneys and Republican lawmakers and anyone else who wants a reason to discuss the dangers of false allegations. What if a woman has consensual sex, and then regrets it the next day? What if a woman gets dumped by her boyfriend and decides to accuse him of rape as revenge? What if she’s just doing it for attention? Are false accusations reaching epidemic levels in today’s hard-drinking hookup culture, where the lines of consent have been blurred? Critics argue that reports of rape should be treated with more caution, since men’s lives are so often ruined by women’s malicious lies.

But my research—including academic studies, journalistic accounts, and cases recorded in the US National Registry of Exonerations—suggests that every part of this narrative is wrong. What’s more, it’s wrong in ways that help real rapists escape justice, while perversely making it more likely that we will miss the signs of false reports.

First off, there is no “rape demographic.” People of all ages, ethnic backgrounds, and genders get raped — women, men, non-binary and transgender people; little babies, and old nuns. But there is a certain demographic of people who make false accusations -“adult false accusers who persist in pursuing charges have a previous history of bizarre fabrications or criminal fraud. Indeed, they’re often criminals whose family and friends are also criminals; broken people trapped in chaotic lives.”

Sandra Newman notes that even within that group, a comparatively small number of false accusations that are made are ever reported to the authorities. Although personal gain and revenge are often motives, they almost never involve previous lovers. Teenaged girls may indicate they’ve been assaulted to get out of trouble with parents for missing curfew or being discovered to be sexually active, but in these instances, it’s overwhelmingly the parents who are insisting on pursuing reporting and not the girls themselves.

But if a woman without any history of dramatic falsehoods says she went home with a man and, after they’d kissed a while consensually, he held her down and forced her into sex — in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, you can just assume it’s true. This is not because of any political dictum like “Believe women.” It’s because this story looks exactly like tens of thousands of date rapes that happen every year, and nothing at all like a false rape accusation.

Myth: Victims of rape or assault will be believed and taken care of when they come forward. The authorities will pursue assailants and seek justice for the victims. There’s no reasonable reason not to come forward right away.

In a perfect world or even a reasonably fair and just world, this is exactly what would happen. But that isn’t the world that we live in. When those who do not understand this make victims wrong for not behaving as they think they ought to, they revictimize them. They also show themselves to be woefully uninformed. Those who understand sexual assault dynamics know full-well that this imagined scenario is most often not congruent with reality.

A couple of days ago a reporter for The Washington Post published an article she’d been researching and writing for three years. It’s a story about what happened 12 years ago to Amber Wyatt, a girl she’d gone to high school with who had been raped and who immediately reported it to fellow party-goers and the police. Her physical exam showed trauma consistent to rape and she had the semen of one of her attackers in her body. But despite all of that, her community, from law enforcement to fellow students and parents, actually turned on her, rather than bringing her attackers to justice. For a more detailed account of why that might be, read the article.

Too often this is what happens to victims who come forward. In Stubbenville, Ohio, in the high profile case there in 2012, the name of the girl who reported her rape has become synonymous with “lying whore.” In the immediate aftermath of the accusation, which included video evidence of the crime, “Poppy Harlow at CNN drew outrage when she expressed sympathy for “these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students.” What about the 16-year-old girl who was attacked, many people wondered. What about her future?”

We live in a culture that cares less about justice than about not ruining the prospects of bright young men. We don’t like to think that people we know and may even admire, could be capable of such things. Even in the highly unlikely instance that an accused rapist is tried or convicted, he often spends little time behind bars. Brock Turner only spent 3 months in prison, half of his six-month sentence for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, because the judge didn’t want to “ruin his future.” Nevermind the physical and psychological damage done to his victim. The message seems to be, “That’s what girls are for.”

According to RAINN, out of every 1000 instances of rape, only 13 cases get referred to a prosecutor, and only 7 cases will lead to a felony conviction. Out of every 1,000 sexual assaults, only 310 are reported to the police. We’re seeing the reasons for that play out right now on a national stage. Harassment, name-calling, death threats, hacked email accounts, slut-shaming, and ostracization are what you can reasonably expect if you report sexual assault. Not help; not justice!

Go check out the new hashtag on Twitter #WhyIDidn’tReport for 37 thousand more examples from both men and women about why they didn’t say something at the time or how their report was brushed off or quietly dropped. When interviewed for the Amber Wyatt story, former Fort Worth Police Department sergeant, Cheryl Johnson, said it was common practice to not pursue cases or for grand juries not to indict, despite strong evidence of a crime.

“We had cases where there were photographs and confessions from the suspects that were no-billed,” Johnson told me in 2015 in the tidy living room of her Fort Worth home. One case in particular stuck with her: A man admitted to giving a woman drugs that would render her unconscious — and then raping her after she had passed out and photographing the act. The victim was sent the photographs of her own rape, which she turned over to police. Still, the grand jury decided not to indict.

Further shaming or punishing of victims who did not immediately come forward in the face of this culture shows a complete lack of understanding of the realities as well as a dearth of compassion.

As Elizabeth Breunig wrote about the Amber Wyatt case, “To look into the eyes of a vulnerable person is to see yourself as you might be. It’s a more harrowing experience than one might readily admit. There is a version of yourself made powerless, status diminished, reliant upon the goodwill of others. One response is empathy: to shore up your reserves of charity and trust, in hopes that others will do the same. Another is denial: If you refuse to believe you could ever be in such a position — perhaps by blaming the frail for their frailty or ascribing their vulnerability to moral failure — then you never have to face such an uncomfortable episode of imagination. You come away disgusted with the weak, but content in the certainty you aren’t among them.”

It’s high time for us to stop doing this to victims and to dismantle the myths that surround sexual harassment and assault once and for all. False accusations are exceedingly rare and are made by a particular kind of person- one who frequently lies about other things too or who is trying to get out of trouble by deflecting blame, but who ultimately doesn’t want to pursue actual charges or prosecution. Victims quite often face a huge web of systemic obstacles to being believed and to being treated with respect. Perpetrator's behaviors are often excused or go unpunished. How about we as a society stop holding victims to the standards of how it “should be” and start actually believing them and helping them?

© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.