False rape accusations are objectively rare, so why do they carry their cultural charge? Read an excerpt from amiasrinivasan’s “The Right To Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century”
Photo-Illustration: by the Cut; Photo Getty Images I know two men who were, I am fairly confident, falsely accused of rape. One of them was a wealthy young man accused by a desperate young woman who had stolen some credit cards and was on the run. The rape accusation was just one part of a larger fraud. The man wasn’t where she said he had been when the alleged rape took place, there was no evidence of rape beyond her testimony, and much else of what she said turned out to be false.
Some men are falsely accused of rape; there is nothing to be gained by denying it. But false accusations are seemingly rare. The most detailed ever study of sexual assault reports, released by the U.K. Home Office in 2005, estimated that just 3 percent of 2,643 rape reports made over the course of 15 years were “probably” or “possibly” false.
Except that, very often, it is men who falsely accuse other men of rape. This is a thing almost universally misunderstood about false rape accusations. When we think of a false rape accusation we picture a scorned or greedy woman, lying to the authorities. But many, perhaps most, wrongful convictions of rape result from false accusations levied against men by other men: by cops and prosecutors intent on pinning an actual rape on the wrong suspect. In the U.S.
It might seem surprising, then, that false rape accusations are, today, a predominantly wealthy white male preoccupation. But it isn’t surprising — not really. The anxiety about false rape accusations is purportedly about injustice , but actually it is about gender, about innocent men being harmed by malignant women. It is an anxiety, too, about race and class: about the possibility that the law might treat wealthy white men as it routinely treats poor people, especially poor people of color.
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