False rape reports, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center said in 2009, are 2 to 8 percent of reports, drawn from "methodologically rigorous research." That range is now the number people quote when they want the subject closed. A new examination in Aporia, by Aaron Dymarskiy, Alden Whitfeld and TheLawOfAverages, goes back to the studies underneath it and finds the arithmetic does not say what the citation says.
Rape is not in dispute here. It is a serious crime, under-reported, often unresolved, and devastating when it is real. The argument is about the other error. A false accusation is also a harm: to the person named, and to the next true complainant, who has to speak into a room that has been lied to. Minimising the first error does not protect victims of the second. It spends their credibility.
The trick in the 2 to 8 percent figure is the denominator. In the Making a Difference project, 140 reports were classed false out of 2,059, about 7 percent. Most of the rest were not shown to be true. They were closed early, suspended, inactivated, or left as information reports. A further 8.5 percent were called baseless. If you keep only the cases in which investigators could actually reach a conclusion, and treat the recorded false reports as the numerator, the share is about 16 percent. Lisak's much-cited paper, the one that settled on 2 to 10 percent, coded 136 campus cases and confirmed false reports only where a thorough investigation had shown the assault did not happen. Only 56 cases reached the stage at which that test was applied. Eight false reports out of those 56 is 14 percent. Eight out of 136 is the number that got quoted.
The British and Australian files move the same way once withdrawn complaints are not left in the pot as if they were proven rapes. Grace, Harris and Grace, Kelly, Heenan and Murray: police "no-crimed" large fractions, complainants withdrew, investigators sometimes recorded that they thought the report was false. Count only the cases police marked false, divide by every file opened, and you get something near 8 percent. Exclude the files in which nobody could tell, and the rate rises into the tens. In one re-cut of Harris and Grace it goes much higher. The Aporia authors are frank that their own recodes are subjective, and that a withdrawal is not a confession. Even if withdrawals are dropped from both sides rather than counted as false, they still get figures above the NSVRC range. That is the modest claim, and it is enough.
The same method, run backwards, shows the game. If "true" means only a conviction, the Making a Difference files produce a "definitely true" rate of about 1 to 8 percent. Nobody serious believes that. A small number is easy to manufacture. Inflate the denominator with the unsolved, and shrink the numerator to whatever you are willing to call certain. Do it for false reports and you get a reassuring 2 percent. Do it for true reports and you get a scandal. The files are mostly ambiguous. Ambiguity is not evidence that the ambiguous cases are true.
None of this is a finding that a third of women lie. It is a finding about reports to police, in older studies, coded by people with theories. Public accusations, of the kind that do not go near a detective, may be more or less false than that. Proven false, a recantation corroborated, a contradiction on camera, a complaint shown to be impossible, is a subset of the doubtful. The 2 percent figure uses that subset as if it were the whole, then compares it with every allegation ever made. That is how a rare event is produced on paper.
The cost of the paper event is practical. Juries have been told for years that false complaints scarcely exist. A liar who knows the statistic knows the benefit of the doubt. Every exposed false case is then recruited as proof that the true ones are theatre. The undermining runs in both directions, which is why exposure is not a favour to the accused alone. A named false accuser, charged where the law allows and recorded where it does not, is what keeps the true complaint from having to carry the liars. Rape is serious enough that the false report should be treated as a serious wrong, not as a rounding error introduced to protect the narrative.
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/how-common-are-false-rape-accusations