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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> I mean, this sounds a lot like how some women accuse guys of rape just to cause harm to them, instead of a rape actually having occurred.

It was deliberately crafted to be so. So if we want to apply some science to our guessing: what is the fraction of real harrassment incidents to fraudulently reported ones in our society?

You can "some women" and "because he disgregarded" your way around the disembling, but the truth is that if you really want to guess based on the evidence at hand, the guy is probably guilty.

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Hell, studies have said anywhere between 2% to 90%[0] of rape reports are false, but telling that a rape is false / true is _incredibly_ hard due to it basically being "he says" vs. "she says".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape#Rumne...

For clarity: the larger more rigorous studies put it much closer to the 2% end.

The 90% figure from that list is described by the study which listed it as from an unreliable/untested research methodology with a small sample size (18 cases). It looks more like ~20% is a more common upper bound for the figures listed.

> what is the fraction of real harrassment incidents to fraudulently reported ones in our society?

If I were to believe the personal experiences of all the women I know, most women have, at some point in their lives been harassed. I've had 20 #mee_toos on my relatively small Facebook feed.

Not a single one of them ever mentioned reporting the harassment they experienced to authorities, filing a lawsuit, writing a blog post on Medium, calling out the harasser on social media, or anything of that nature.

For another anecdote:

Two months ago, though, one friend has been tip-toeing around how to deal with a serial rapist in their friend circle. They didn't go to the police, because nothing would get done, and they didn't call that person out in public. They weren't looking for attention, or to ruin the rapist's life. They were practically tip-toeing around the issue of how to warn other women about him.

Unsurprisingly, of the many responses to that thread, three people knew exactly who she was talking about.

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