A Database Of The Falsely Accused and Their Accusers and Why We Need One
- empowerinnocent
- 3 minutes ago
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We are live!!
For those who don’t know, I have been affected by the world of false accusations since 2009 when a member of my family was targeted. This was followed by another set of accusations against the same person in 2014 and both of these events involved the UK Family Court. In 2015 and 2016 a different family member was targeted. These accusations involved both the English and Scottish criminal courts, and at this point I became actively involved, determined to find out all I could about, what was to me, an appalling situation. Little was I to know exactly how widespread it was.
By 2020, two more family members had been targeted, one in both the Family and Criminal courts in Scotland and the other in the Family Court in Australia. None of this includes a long-standing, but very subtle, attempt at making false accusations to destroy a father’s relationship with his son in the USA, which though accusations were made, they were never voiced in court previous to all this.
How could one family be so unlucky, you might ask? Surely, with all that going on there was some truth in it (the ‘no smoke without fire’ myth)?
ALL the accusations can and have been disproved, and I rapidly discovered that we weren’t particularly ‘unlucky’. Anyone with a mind to look will find people struggling under the weight of a false accusation of one type or another, pretty much everywhere.
I learned quite early on that not only is there no real definition of a ‘false accusation’, but that no records are kept either, in part because of that lack and in part because the prevailing narrative is that they are ‘vanishingly rare’. No, no, no!! They are very rarely prosecuted as a crime – and it is a crime to make a false report – AND the prevailing narratives are that false allegations are only made by men as a form of abuse in Family Courts and that false allegations, if they exist at all in the Criminal Courts, only relate to sexual offences. Given the stigma attached to sexual crime, people are generally somewhat reluctant to align themselves with the thought of false accusations at all. ‘We don’t want to be associated with sex offenders’ are the cries, forgetting of course, that people falsely accused of sexual offences, are not offenders at all.
The fact is that any time anyone accused of doing something that they haven’t done has been falsely accused, and this can affect anyone at any time, whether or not the authorities are involved.
Every single wrongful conviction is also a false accusation, a false accusation made by the state, and the exoneration of people like Andrew Malkinson and Brian Buckle brought this home to me forcefully. The cases of people like Timothy Evans reduced me to tears. Everywhere I looked I began to find people who have been accused of things they had not done, too often with disastrous consequences – Jay Cheshire and his Mum and a number of others spring to mind – and then there are the people who are falsely accused who never have the opportunity to undo the damage. Parents unable to ever see their children again, people unable to afford to appeal against a conviction, and people left with nothing as the stigma of an accusation of sexual crime follows them through life. The Post Office debacle, the struggles of Robin Garbutt, Jeremy Bamber and Lucy Letby (and so many others without the benefit of being chosen as ‘flavour of the month’ by the media), all began to shout to me. Even the insurance and travel industries lose £millions every year through false claims and each one of those is a false accusation – ‘I was burgled’ when I wasn’t, is accusing ‘someone’ of theft and wasting police resources and ‘I got food poisoning’ when I didn’t is falsely accusing someone of any one of a number of things and damages reputation(s).
There is so much more and I began to realise that there have been many researching, debating and supporting for decades, there are even many documentaries and even fictional programmes that address the issues but the prevailing narrative remains that false allegations are rare. (Detective drama series cover the topic regularly, and even soaps use them as a storyline, but meaningful debate rarely results.) Statistics that poked holes in that argument were increasingly failing to be published. The justice system became increasingly biased against a person falsely accused being able to defend him/herself properly.
The recent Supreme Court Judgement has made that clear.
It became clear to me that not only did voices need to be raised, data needed to be provided to refute the claims - raw, boring, intractable and factual data. I saw that a number of people and organisations had made an attempt to do this, generally in speciality areas of their own, so I resolved to bring all those databases together, or at least as many of them as I could, and in late 2025, http://falselyaccuseddatabase.com was born.
It is but yet an infant, though it has growth spurts at the beginning of each month and already its abilities have outstripped my original vision for it. More than raw data, it now has pages that itemise those all important support organisations (I didn’t want someone newly-falsely-accused to find it and then to think ‘now what’?), and I’ve included information to demonstrate how much work is being done by others, on a daily basis, to combat this scourge (I didn’t want anyone to think that the database is anything close to unique).
Its unique qualities are that:
I have defined what a false allegation is and ‘false’ has so many definitions that I’ve brought it all under one umbrella – ‘false’ is any accusation where the accused feels that they have been accused without good reason, and remains or is returned to legal innocence and
I am trying to bring together all the separate databases that I have found online. People have been collecting information but usually with very specific and specialised criteria.
What is the database for? Well, that’s for others to decide. Already I am noticing patterns and themes, and though it’s currently very reliant on what the media chooses to report, I think it’s valuable non-the-less. It will at the very least, demonstrate the very large iceberg that we are dealing with.
For more information have a look at this podcast here, recorded before the database went ‘live’:
And the database itself is here:
It’s already being viewed as far away as Norway and Canada and the USA, demonstrating that there is global interest in this topic. With 142 separate individuals having viewed the site covering 693 page views in the 2 months since launch, I think we’re off to a good start.
Please feel free to contact me at: falselyaccuseddatabase@gmail.com if there is anything you would like to say about the site or for me to consider adding to the site.
Long term planned additions include up-to-date FOIA requests for ‘no crime’ statistics nationwide, and a way of including verified cases that don’t reach the attention of the media.
More updates on the site in February (including some cool art and literature)!!
By Felicity Stryjak
Director, Falsely Accused Database
This article is an update on the previous article: False allegations - rare? Time to shatter the myth!
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