According to the US Bureau of Justice statistics, three out of four rapes happen between people that know each other. It is even higher in most countries. The average rapist is not a lone wolf, it is a friend that didn't care about consent.
No you may not. Sexual assualt is a despicable crime and offenders ought to be castrated, but it does in no way neccesitate nor does it excuse false accusations. Furthermore if your argument should have any validity it should count for other crimes as well. In that case what is the comfortable amount of false accusations of murder? theft? or any other horrible crime you could possibly come up with. To top it off lets engage in a thought experiment, lets assume that the false accusation rate was 50%. Lets imagine that a person is sexually assaulted, how serious is that report going to be taken? Now imagine the same scenario where the false accusation rate is 0.0%, how seriously is the report then taken?
I make no excuse, nor is it an argument. I expected the number of false positives to be on par with the number of false negatives. Said otherwise, the number of false accusations is way lower than the number of instances of rape that never even go reported.
To me, it goes without saying that I wish all of those numbers to converge to the lowest possible value.
> The Independent uses its front page to highlight what it describes as the justice system's failure to protect women - and men - from sexual assault.
It reports that research by the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office and the Office for National Statistics suggests that about 1,000 rapists are convicted every year despite up to 95,000 people being subjected to rape.
(about 12,000 of those (or maybe as well) are male victims.)
That doesn't matter. As espadrine says, if the number of false-positives is not similar to the number of false-negatives, you may be concerned by whichever of these numbers you find personally threatening, but you can't claim that to be "the problem". If in a community of cats and mice cat's kill 30% of mice, and mice kill 3% of cats, some cats may personally find that 3% to be uncomfortably high for their taste, but they can't say that this constitutes the worrying part of the violence problem in society.
> That doesn't matter. As espadrine says, if the number of false-positives is not similar to the number of false-negatives, you may be concerned by whichever of these numbers you find personally threatening, but you can't claim that to be "the problem".
I don't know that anyone is claiming it to be "the problem"; but rather "a problem".
False accusations are, like corruption, something that makes the law look bad; and that makes cooperating with the law look bad. It's a problem not only for those falsely accused but also for those who have true accusations to bring!
> If in a community of cats and mice cat's kill 30% of mice, and mice kill 3% of cats, some cats may personally find that 3% to be uncomfortably high for their taste, but they can't say that this constitutes the worrying part of the violence problem in society.
With due respect, this is a politically charged issue so I'm dubious of trusting random people, such as the author of that article. Are there more established sources around on this issue?
Generally a fair statement, but not always realistic:
1) I simply don't have time to read the citations of everything I read (and then check the citations' citations).
2) Even with a solid factual basis, it's easy to twist and spin and fool people who lack expertise in the field. For example, the author could simply omit essential facts.
Shouldn't the comparison be with the number of rape convictions, not the number of sexual assault convictions, since he was bringing up the number of DNA overturned rape convictions?
I've not been able to find the number of rape convictions in 2012. I found a claim of 85000 rapes in 2012 [1], and claims that 3-10% of rapes lead to a conviction.
If one really wanted to do this right, it would be necessary to look at what fraction of those who are convicted and claim they are innocent are able to get a retroactive DNA test on the evidence, and also take into account that such testing often comes after years in prison and so the comparison should be taking into account the rape convictions in the year that someone was sentenced, not the year they their conviction was overturned.
Considering that I was not even able to find a good number on the number of convictions by year, though, I have no hope of reasonably finding the information necessary for the aforementioned analysis. I've been noticing this kind of thing (not being able to find some statistics that I would have expected to be trivially findable in an intuitively obvious way by the most casual searcher) happening quite a lot over the last couple of years, and it puzzles me.
Exactly. Convictions through the roof. That's why they should take it to court. Far as overturned, do you have data on how many got to prove something with DNA? Or conviction rate without it?
How do you determine this?