Recent figures on false rape allegations in the United Kingdom are absent. It is undoubtedly true that, due to legal dominance feminism (LDF), there is now widespread agreement among legal academics that only 2% of rape complaints are false (Greer, 1999). However, this claimed empirical fact is an ideological fabrication. As far as can be determined, no study has ever been published that provides evidence for the "Two per cent false rape allegation" theory.
Measuring false allegations is made more difficult by the fact that regulations on unfounded complaints vary from region to region, resulting in extremely diverse statistics. An article in 2014 in the Huffington Post stated that males are more likely to be victims of sexual assault than to be falsely accused. The statistic, however, is always used to rebut the myth that women cry rape. The statistic has significant implications for rape cases.
If juries knew, once they sit down to deliberate, that only two per cent of allegations were false, then some may think that there was a 98% chance that the complainant was telling the truth.
The citation for the 2% figure eventually returns to Susan Brownmiller's anti-rape book Against Our Will, published in 1975. The number was referenced in a speech given by a judge in the United States in 1973. Brownmiller's book contains no citation for the figure. Nonetheless, this statistic is frequently used in the UK.
Another figure floating around is that 0.6% of rape reports are false. This is also unverifiable. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) released the original figure (CPS ,2020). However, this figure is even more misleading than the 2% figure because it only applies to allegations that have been proven false and false complainants have been prosecuted. This figure does not include cases that were found to be false by a jury or those that were dismissed due to a lack of evidence. In fact, it is uncommon for a false rape allegation to result in criminal proceedings.
Despite the difficulty in measuring false rape allegations, there are indirect data that strongly suggest that significantly more than 2% of rape allegations are false. As a result, there is no compelling reason to think that practically all rape reports are true. Aside from the limited empirical evidence, there are other compelling reasons to believe that a significant proportion of false rape reports surpass 2%.
The 1992 British Home Office Study
Grace, Lloyd, and Smith reviewed all rape cases reported to police in England and Wales during the first three months of 1985. This study comprised 302 cases out of 328 that had sufficient information. The researchers depended on the information in the reports, but they also investigated reports from medical examiners and the accounts of complainants and alleged offenders in an effort to examine the police classifications.
The police highlighted “No-crime” 24% of the 302 cases for a variety of reasons, although only 34% of those “No-crimes” were classified as false allegations. Therefore, 8.3% of the sample of 302 cases were false allegations.
The 1999 British Home Office Study
The British Home Office conducted a study of 483 rape cases reported to the police in England and Wales in 1996, in response to a decrease in the number of rape cases resulting in convictions. The researchers interviewed a number of complainants and criminal justice employees, and the quantitative data were taken directly from police classifications. There was no mechanism for examining their classifications, unlike the later Home Office study mentioned. The police classified 123 of the 483 cases investigated as "No crime," and 53 (10.9%) as false allegations.
The 2005 British Home Office Study
Six regions in the United Kingdom were chosen for this study, and 2,643 cases were examined over a 15-year period. For the purposes of this study, the researchers gathered data from sources other than police reports, including case files, forensic reports, medical examinations, questionnaires completed by police investigators, interviews with complainants, interviews with victim service providers, and content analyses of victim and witness statements. The researchers determined that the "No-crime" label was widely practised, referring to it as a "Dustbin" category.
The police classified 216 (8.2%) of the 2,643 rape cases reported to them as false allegations. The categorisation, however, was based on police suspicions about individuals who had been drinking or taking drugs. The researchers noticed that classifying a case as a false allegation on these grounds violated their own categorisation guidelines.
These regulations state that a case can only be classified as a false allegation if the complainants make a clear and credible admission or if there are substantial evidential grounds. The researchers recalculated the regularity of false allegations using those agency rules and discovered that 67 of the 2,643 (2.5%) cases met the criteria.
These numbers are both seriously questionable and harmful intrinsically. In fact, it will never be possible to determine how many allegations are false. Despite the fact that as a society we respect the verdict of a jury, an allegation does not become true simply because it results in a conviction. Neither does an acquittal indicated innocence. Even though there are many doubts, only two people are aware of the actual events that led to a given claim. There are no reliable figures for the number of false allegations in rape cases. There never will be.
Conclusion
There is no reliable evidence for how many allegations are false. False allegations must be considered with objectivity and impartiality. No one is helped by the pressure applied by the public and notable figures, such as the Victim Commissioner, Vera Baird, on the police and CPS to drive up the number of charges and convictions (see here) They only result in charging more weak cases, leading to more unsuccessful prosecutions and in many cases in wrongful convictions.
Each complaint should be taken seriously and investigated thoroughly; the pressure to raise the numbers should not be a factor to dismiss false allegations. The numbers are not a game. Pretending there are certain inalienable truths about the state of rape in the justice system is misleading and does significantly more harm than good.
Enesa Ibrahimi graduated in Criminology and Psychology in 2021. Following completion of her Master’s degree in Criminal Investigation in 2022, she now works in researching false allegations and claims of wrongful conviction. Fluent in three languages, she is soon to embark upon a PhD.
Please let us know if you think that there is a mistake in this article, explaining what you think is wrong and why. We will correct any errors as soon as possible.