Tag false allegations of abuse

The Politics of Feminism and Women’s Law: A Response to Zerlina Maxwell’s Editorial “No Matter What Jackie Said, We Should Generally Believe Rape Claims”

Moderator Leave a comment

Implicit in the headline of this op-ed is that even “wrongly accused” men are “perps.”

The only complimentary thing this writer can find to say about attorney Zerlina Maxwell’s December 6 column in The Washington Post is—yeah, scratch that; it has no redeeming qualities.

The editorial is not only intellectually callow but morally vacuous. Even its research and computations are careless.

Ms. Maxwell’s piece concerns a story published last month in Rolling Stone Magazine about a purported gang rape at the University of Virginia. The story was swiftly lofted upon a current of hot air then failed to maintain elevation because of a number of holes.

By Ms. Maxwell’s pained logic, the story’s having nosedived is all the more reason why allegations of rape should be accepted wholesale.

Many people (not least U-Va. administrators) will be tempted to see this as a reminder that officials, reporters and the general public should hear both sides of the story and collect all the evidence before coming to a conclusion in rape cases. This is what we mean in America when we say someone is “innocent until proven guilty.” After all, look what happened to the Duke lacrosse players.

In important ways, this is wrong. We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says.

Default means negligence, which Ms. Maxwell equates with propriety. According to feminist algebra, negligence = propriety is a balanced equation.

Note that Ms. Maxwell isn’t actually making an argument for policy reform. We already do, by default, believe what an accuser says, hence outraged and anguished accounts like the ones you’ll find here: “Stop False Allegations of Domestic Violence.”

Ms. Maxwell fails to appreciate that our crediting what a rape accuser says “as a matter of default” means the slope is greased all the way to the bottom. Accepting allegations of rape on faith means accepting on faith all allegations that relate to or imply violence.

And the grease flows sideways, also, not just top-down.

According to the same policy, women  too, are victimized by false allegations, false allegations made in criminal, civil, and family court (as well as to government agencies like Child Protective Services)—and the standard applied in non-criminal procedures is already much reduced from “innocent until proven guilty.” Women unjustly lose their good names, their livelihoods, their children, and their homes (and that’s just the abbreviated list). These are among the consequences of equating allegations with facts “as a matter of default.”

false-rape-letterMs. Maxwell concludes: “Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.”

She asserts that rape leaves a “lasting psychological wound” but that the fallout from being falsely accused of rape is minor and ephemeral. “The accused would have a rough period,” she allows. “He might be suspended from his job; friends might defriend him on Facebook.”

Haunting is not only that people like Ms. Maxwell can appeal to pathos to make their case or that they can make such an appeal despite demonstrating no faculty for empathy; haunting is that their appeals nevertheless succeed.

Ms. Maxwell says the “cost of disbelieving women…signals that women don’t matter and that they are disposable.” No, it signals that no one is any more disposable than anyone else.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Why It’s Valuable to Report Your Story of Restraining Order Abuse or Other Procedural Abuse on an E-Petition or Similar Medium

Moderator Leave a comment

Government statistics used to train police officers and judges are derived significantly from surveys, as discussed in the previous post.

These surveys are represented as “science” but are in fact simply acts of collecting responses, responses that may be completely anecdotal (that is, unverified and most likely unverifiable). Interviewers ask questions, and volunteers answer. Some studies according to which policy is determined (for example, on college campuses) may not even be conducted person-to-person; they may be electronic.

Policy that indelibly impacts lives on a grand scale may be based, yes, on glorified questionnaires.

“Science” that influences research trends and legislation, and that consequently conditions police and judicial impulses, is derived by “randomly” eliciting responses from a sample population—and not a particularly large one at that.

When you hear a controversial statistic, the kind that appears in international headlines and in feminist blogs from one end of the Internet to the other, like one in five college women has been a victim of sexual assault (a statistic drawn from a Web survey administered at two American universities), that figure was based on survey data.

What is a petition?

It’s a survey (of personal experience and public sentiment).

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

The Relationship between False Allegations of Rape and Restraining Order Abuse

Moderator 1 Comment

It’s not without regret for how they may affect victims of sexual violence that a number of journalistic reports that expose false rape allegations have been highlighted on this blog. Although the blog’s focus is restraining order abuse, the potency of restraining orders and the laxity applied to the allegations they’re based on derive from the specter of domestic and sexual violence, the shadow of which has infected and jaundiced the perceptions of our legislators and judges.

The volume of false rape allegations that have been brought to public attention this year—mostly in the U.K., which is less squeamish about acknowledging fraud of this sort—will probably make further mention excessive, because it threatens to distract from reports and explications more directly relevant to the blog’s primary concern, which is restraining order injustice (a redundant phrase). Several news stories were noted this month, and some of these stories are each but one of a series that trace the same saga of mischief.

“Law Graduate Falsely Accused Boyfriend of Rape and Assault as Excuse, Jury Told” (Steven Morris, The Guardian, 2014)

“Oxford Union ‘Rape Victim Knew Her Claim Was False’” (Oliver Duggan, Amelia Hamer, and James Rothwell, The Telegraph, 2014)

“Woman Accused of Making Repeated False Rape Allegations” (The Inquisitr, 2014)

“Woman Sentenced after Falsely Accusing Two Men of Rape” (UPI, 2014) (see also commentary by attorney and former Houston Law Review editor Robert Franklin)

“Woman Who Cut Herself with Razor and Claimed She’d Been Raped Is Jailed” (Michael Donnelly, Belfast Telegraph, 2014)

“Victim of False Rape Accusation Seeks Compensation” (The Northern Echo, 2014)

“Man Wrongly Accused of Sexual Assault Sues Police” (Rachel Olding, Sydney Morning Herald, 2014)

The purpose of collecting these reports of false rape allegations hasn’t been to discount the claims of real victims or even to reveal that false allegations are made, which should be unsurprising in a sociopolitical climate that’s eager to credit allegations of violence against women; the purpose, rather, is to reveal the motives of false accusers and to emphasize that there’s no lie that a dedicated false accuser will balk at telling and holding fast to. It happens that when false accusers frame people for a crime society holds in the highest contempt, their motives become more noteworthy.

If accusers are willing to falsely allege even rape (and casually), there’s no estimating how many “lesser” false accusations are made routinely, particularly when no risk or serious investment is entailed. Civil restraining orders are had in hours if not minutes based on brief interviews with judges, and there are no repercussions to their plaintiffs if the allegations they’re based on are untrue. They can furthermore instantly gratify multiple motives for false allegations at the same time.

These motives are sorted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under five broad rubrics: mental illness (or aberrance), attention-seeking/sympathy, profit, alibi (blame-shifting or cover-up), and revenge (or spite).

A false restraining order litigant with a malicious yen may leave a courthouse shortly after entering it having gained sole entitlement to a residence, attendant properties, and children, possibly while displacing blame from him- or herself for misconduct, and having enjoyed the reward of an authority figure’s undivided attention won at the expense of his or her victim.

S/he may, besides, be crackerjacks.

The exposure of false allegations of rape shouldn’t be interpreted as denying the reality or brutality of sexual violence. What it should do, however, is serve as a rude awakening to those who believe (and promote the belief) that allegations of abuse should be accepted without suspicion. It should also stress that false allegations aren’t negligible, rare, or harmless.

They’re anything but.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com