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'The woman who accused Allan said he had raped her multiple times over a 14-month period, and that she did not enjoy sex with him.'

'But the text messages show her directly contradicting these claims. In one message, she wrote “It wasn’t against my will or anything.” She also continually asked him for more sexual encounters and discussed rape fantasies.'

Note: this woman's anonymity is still preserved, and she has apparently faced no punishment whatsoever. The UK seems to have a flexible attitude as to whether a false rape accusation should be considered a crime.

https://thefederalist.com/2018/01/11/liam-allan-falsely-accu...

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> The UK seems to have a flexible attitude as to whether a false rape accusation should be considered a crime.

This isn't true. False accusations of rape are more likely to be prosecuted than rape.

Do we have a source for this claim - data on sexual violence is spotty, and data on false allegations of sexual violence is even spottier. The difference in estimated rates of false allegations often vary by 4-10x so I'm not sure how one can reliably make the claim that false allegations of rape are more likely to be protected.

You're right that the stats are not very good, but that's because they significantly under-count incidences of rape.

Rape cases can be complex, especially where the alleged rapist is also accused of domestic violence or coercive control, and this fear of violence from the alledged perpetrator or his family and friends leads some people to retract their allegation. Note that this does not mean they are false allegations, here's a woman who was prosecuted for falsely retracting a true allegation.

> In November 2010, the Court of Appeal considered an appeal against sentence in the case of Ms A, who ultimately pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice on the basis that she had falsely retracted true allegations of rape she had made against her husband.

The annual crime survey (seen as reliable statistics) say that about 140,000 women and about 8,000 men are raped each year. There are about 6,000 prosecutions, and about 2.5k convictions.

There are 35 prosecutions for false allegations of rape, out of about 90 cases that failed because the victim retracted their statement.

https://www.cps.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/publica...

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...

The feeling that woman make very many false allegations of rape is not ture; the feeling that they go unpunished for this is not true. It's frankly disturbing that men seek to focus so much attention on this tiny number - fewer than 100 people per year - and not on the very much larger figure of over 8,000 men and 140,000 women who are victims of rape.

> out of about 90 cases that failed because the victim retracted their statement.

That doesn't mean there were only 90 false allegations; it means there were 90 cases in which accusers effectively confessed to making false allegations. It's disturbing that so few of those confessions led to prosecution.

A fair comparison would be: in how many cases did the accused confess to rape, and how many of those were prosecuted? If two out of three confessed rapists were released without punishment, the outrage would be deafening.

Victim retraction does not mean the allegation is false, and I've already linked to a crown prosecution service document that gives details of a case where the retraction was false, the original allegation was true.

We have 150,000 rapes each year; we have 6,000 prosectutions; fewer than 200 collapse because of victim retraction; and we have 35 prosecutions for making a false allegation.

> In how many cases did men confess to rape, and how many of those were prosecuted?

i: I don't understand what that tells you? and ii: we don't have reliable stats. We can say how many men entered a guilty plea.

   2,635  Convictions
   1,522  Guilty plea
   1,112  Conviction after trial
       1  Proved in absence

> Victim retraction does not mean the allegation is false

Not always. Nor does a guilty plea (or even a confession) always mean the accused is guilty. But in either case we have more reason to believe than we usually do.

> we don't have reliable stats

Indeed. Nor do we have reliable stats about false allegations. So why are you asserting that false allegations are rare, knowing your argument is based on unreliable stats?

In 2016, about 90k instances of rape were reported to police [1]. The lowest figure I've seen for the % of accusations that are false is 2% the highest ones from well reputed sources are in the low 20s but let's go with the FBI's figure of 8% (this is for "provably false" accusations, so it's still only a lower bound). That would mean that of the 90k accusations, we have somewhere between 1.8k to 5.6k false accusations. 35 of which were prosecuted. This is a prosecution rate of roughly 2-0.5%, compared to 5% for rape (this is the figure I most commonly see when discussing the percentage of rapes that are prosecuted). I don't see much evidence to back up the claim that false accusations are prosecuted more frequently than rape.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_the_United_States

Your post is really confusing.

I have already linked the ONS crime survey stats which say there are about 144,000 rapes of women and about 8,000 rapes of men each year, and the CPS stats for prosecutions (4517 April 2017-May 2018).

Why are you using the FBI definition when the submitted article is about advice for England, coming from a case in England?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/13/false-...

Kier Starmer used to be head of the CPS (the organisation that's releasing this advice) and he says:

>In recent years we have worked hard to dispel the damaging myths and stereotypes associated with these cases. One such misplaced belief is that false allegations of rape and domestic violence are rife. This report presents a more accurate picture.

I've already linked the report that he's talking about.

Your original claim was,

> False accusations of rape are more likely to be prosecuted than rape.

We have the rate of prosecution for rape: 4-5%. In order for your claim to be true we need to obtain the rate of prosecution for the false accusation of rape. To do this we need the total number of false accusations and the number of such accusations that were prosecuted.

Even with conservative definitions, about 2-8% of accusations are determined to be false (and I'm being generous and not even considering the estimates that don't just examine instances where th allegations are provably false). I found that 90k rapes were reported, which would yield 1.8-5.6k false accusations.

Thanks for pointing out the mismatch of the 35 prosecutions for false accusations of rape coming from England and not the US. Unfortunately I was not able to find the number of prosecutions for false accusations of rape in the US (Google gave two whole pages of articles stating that it's important to believe accusers, and no statistics).

But if we apply the same analysis with your figures then the results are even worse. Of the 144k alleged rapes we would have 2.8k- 11.4k false accusations. Even if we just used the lowest estimates of the rate of false accusations then it would still only be 35 of the over 2,800 false accusations that get prosecuted - only 1.25%. The higher end for the estimates of the rate of false accusations would put the percent of false accusations that get prosecuted even lower, under one percent.

> There are about 6,000 prosecutions, and about 2.5k

So 3500 NOT GUILTY verdicts huh? And none of them could possibly be false accusation?

This case alone demonstrates it is true, and apart from this case there are other similar cases where no action was taken. Granted, it would be spectacularly embarrassing for the CPS/DPP if the accuser in the case had ended up being prosecuted herself, which is perhaps the explanation for the egregious neglect of justice here - I'm not sure how it is possible to get much more open and shut than clear evidence explicitly stating that what was accused never took place.

> This case alone demonstrates it is true,

You were not at the trial; you haven't read the court transcripts; you weren't there; you don't know.

> You were not at the trial; you haven't read the court transcripts; you weren't there; you don't know.

I could say the same to you.

You’re extrapolating an entire country’s legal culture on sex crimes from a single editorialized reading of a single case; and at that, it’s targeted toward Joe Schmo’s quick glance at the days news over a morning coffee, not to serve as any kind of legal briefing.

“It wasn’t against my will or anything.”

So in your mind she definitely lied to the police and it's inconceivable that she lied in her text messages?

That's impossible. Anytime there is a rape case and the accused doesn't confess guilt, there is a implicit accusation that the accuser is lying.

So all counts of rape not prosecuted count as a potentially unprosecuted count of false accusation.

> there is a implicit accusation that the accuser is lying.

No, this is a bizarre interpretation of the legal system.

A man can think he has consent and a woman can think she did not give consent. That doesn't mean one is lying, it means one didn't understand the situation.

This is very different from inventing a situation that never happened which is what we mean when we talk about false allegations.

Are you using your own definition for "false allegation"? One that isn't used by the English courts or the UK statisticians?

The poster I was replying to was using a very loose definition of unprosecuted crime, basically implying that anytime one person says a crime occurred and it goes unprosecuted then it should be counted as such.

That kind of lazy statistic cuts both ways.

The accuser believes there is a crime, the accused thinks it's a false accusation.

Legally speaking, with rape the police aren't usually really sure a crime occurred as there is no proof. That's why they don't prosecute.

That's hilarious.

In the UK they need permission from 2 senior prosecutors to DROP a rape prosecution.

But the need permission from the DPP to even START prosecuting a false rape accusation.

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