“Having demonstrated that the percentage of false sexual assault reports is not as high as many people think, this does not deny their terrible reality. We all know that false reports do really exist, and they are incredibly damaging both to criminal justice personnel and to the countless victims of sexual assault whose credibility they undermine.”
—Dr. Kimberly A. Lonsway, et al. (2009)
Everyone “thinks” that male invocations and criticisms of false rape claims are really the misogynist yowls of the disentitled patriarchy…or something like that. They aren’t. Rape is the tinderbox issue. If complainants of false accusation and unjust demonization, who are typically men, seem to focus on false rape claims, it’s because that’s where everyone else’s focus is directed.
Rape overrules all other concerns and trivializes them.
Read the epigraph by Dr. Lonsway again and ask yourself what’s missing from her brief catalog of “incredibly damaging” consequences of false rape reports.
Her statement owns that “false reports [of rape] do really exist.” It also owns that they’re “incredibly damaging.” But it completely discounts the damage to the people falsely accused by those reports.
They’re not even mentioned as victims; they don’t count at all.
If victims of false rape claims aren’t acknowledged to be victims of anything, then how can victims of false accusations of other sorts expect to be afforded a sympathetic ear? Societal regard has been coerced to the extent that acknowledgment of false accusation (any act of false accusation) is equated with rape denial. To own false accusation is a significant problem is to commit an act of moral treason.
What those who haven’t been abused by process will never appreciate, so long as false accusation is dismissed as inconsequential, is that any foothold a false accuser can obtain can spell the end of someone’s life as s/he knew it.
People can be hounded to the end of time, particularly through civil procedures (like restraining orders), which generate records that gnaw, humiliate, and limit life options, and that open the door (gapingly wide) for further false accusations. The falsely accused can lose everything. They can find themselves felons and exiles, homeless and jobless, and possibly suicidal or homicidal…based on nothing real or true: a layered sandwich of lies.
What’s more, the dismissal of false accusation as an urgent societal concern is contagious. It influences judicial policy and practice; it influences the law. Thus is the problem compounded: False accusation is encouraged, because it’s effective. There are no risks, so there’s no downside.
Denial of the problem worsens it.
Our civil rights advocates vociferously decry violations of women’s rights, children’s rights, minority rights, gay and lesbian (GLBTQ) rights, animal rights, and on and on, and there aren’t any of these rights that aren’t violated by false accusers. None. Children are scarred (voicelessly); women are stigmatized and stripped of all resource; minorities, who may have the least access to legal representation, are railroaded or sidelined; gays and lesbians are handily represented as “creepy queers”; and pets are abandoned (possibly to be killed).
They might as well be living in 1956…and that’s significantly because of the “rape question.”
Look, how widespread false accusations of rape are is irrelevant. It’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is that they hurt and they kill, as do false accusations of all varieties. Rape also hurts and kills…but only also. What hurts and kills must be censured categorically, not selectively.
Dogma must be rebuked. Those who haven’t been falsely accused have no place at the table. They’re due to listen for a change.
The reason so many energies are concentrated on the “rape question” is that until the harm of being falsely accused of society’s “worst” crime is acknowledged, there can be no expectation that the harm of being falsely accused of any other will even register.
Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com
*Rape has been used to chasten society’s conscience, which means anti-rape advocates have determined society’s conscience. Their priorities have become “our” priorities and to gainsay them is to be ridiculed and vilified. A reason news stories of false rape claims are bruited by those denounced as “MRAs” (men’s rights activists) is because they often reveal deeply warped motives and methods, and these deeply warped motives and methods aren’t exclusive to false rape claimants.
TALKING BACK to restraining orders 