i'd wager that's true of every crime, from thievery to murder.
what you're suggesting is to treat every accusation as true.
And even when rape accusations are false, they're primarily not what the fertile imaginations of HN imagine, which seems to be women who've taken a dislike to some nerdy colleague for no reason, or the willing partner who decides later that it was actually rape.
In reality, the majority of them are very young girls, or cheating wives, who need to come up with some alibi for their parents or husband and so invent a classic stranger with a knife rape scenario rather than point the finger at some innocent person. Often they don't even intend to go to the police but the parent who they lied to files on their behalf.
https://qz.com/980766/the-truth-about-false-rape-accusations...
10% of false rape reports may be made by people in the hope of recieving medical care they need for other reasons, which is a tragic statistic in itself.
"To classify a case as a false allegation, a thorough investigation must yield evidence that a crime did not occur."
2-10% provably false allegations does not mean 90-98% are true.
i have little doubt that most allegations speak to truth, but it also seems to me that trying to manipulate numbers in this way isn't beneficial.
But you're missing my main point, if, as one study found, 78% of false rape claims involve claims of weapons, gang rape or physical injury then it's not going to happen during a Silicon Valley office Christmas party.
The raw numbers are paired with a narrative, when really the real data blows the narrative apart.
sorry, i was unclear. it's found in the link under "only between 2% and 10% of all reports are estimated to be false".
You're throwing away a datapoint - "the police decided not to press charges or Bob was found not-guilty in court".
Additionally if we followed your recommendation (which is essentially to lower the evidentiary standard for rape), it would probably result in more false accusations, which would multiply the number of wrongful convictions.
What you're arguidng for is exactly why we have the Weinstein's of the world, and why they feel empowered to abuse.
The comment still doesn't make a lot of sense to me in the context of workplace standards. Frequently claims of sexual harassment DO result in the alleged harasser being dismissed, regardless of whether they're true. So isn't this just an argument for the status quo? And if the evidentiary standard is lowered further, won't it still translate into a larger percentage of rape/harassment claims being fraudulent? Is this really the best way to address the problem of unprosecuted rapes?
The stats argument is clever but I don't think I could support it. I don't think a person should be punished because of the actions of people he doesn't know completely outside of his control. In another universe where false accusations are more common it would mean you make a different decision despite all the facts of the case remaining constant.
Why don't you think reasonable doubt a good standard in this case? I recognize that I try to err on the side of not punishing people but if I can seriously say that Bob really might not have done it then I don't think I could hand down judgement.
Now, let’s look at the statistics. Rape is much more common than false accusations of rape. Now, you run a simulation using these statistics. What happens? The rule of believing Alice results in vastly more cases where you make the right decision than the rule where you believe Bob. And it results in vastly less social harm overall.
So what’s fair? I’d assume that you’d say it’s to believe Bob, since you have no “hard evidence” to the contrary. (To nitpick: a sworn statement by a witness, Alice, is evidence admissible in court.) But that means that 10-20 women are forced to leave their jobs or work with their rapists for every one man who is spared from wrongly being fired due to a false accusation. From the point of view of minimizing social harm, you’ve failed.
Of course, in reality, you’re usually going to have some other evidence to go on. Bob might say, “Alice is lying I was at the bar with my friends when the alleged rape happened.” If so then you should believe Bob, of course. The idea of shifting the burden of proof might not work in a criminal case, but for the reasons explained above, the considerations in a work place scenario are very different: false negatives are just as bad as false positives.