It's eye opening about how hard it is to be believed about even a "classic" masked stranger, home invasion rape.
Having read that (and watched a couple of episodes of the Netflix adaption) I'm more likely to believe the original commenter's friend commited a rape and the victim was just compelled to deny it, possibly suffering twice.
The woman admitted she lied, in private, to friends. Where is the coercion? Are you saying we should only believe women when they are accusing men of rape? And disbelieve them later?
I think there's a likelihood that someone will lie about being raped, and a likelihood of them identifying a named individual (two numbers that should be considered seperately, since young girls who fall pregnant may lie to avoid blame, while not trying to blame anyone in particular).
I think that similarly, there's a percentage of retractions that will also be false, for various reasons.
This is similar to the statistics question about whether someone has cancer when a test comes back positive. It depends on the accuracy of the test and the base rate.
I could easily believe that there's more false retractions than false accusations (both as a percentage and an absolute number) so I'm not sure a retraction actually increases my belief in their not being a rape, particularly if a specific person is named, without taking into account other specific evidence.
This is exactly the problem. You want to determine guilt based on what you believe is generally true about the world. Not about the facts of the case at hand.
The negative ramifications of this mindset for the accused are hard to overstate.
It isn't different from the opposite determination in that sense. But the burden if proof is on the accuser (or at least it was, until recently), as expecting people proving a negative is often not feasible.
That's why each individual case is being judged individually according to evidence, facts gathered and etc.
With the same mindset you could say that if a member of some group is accused of murder, he must probably be guilty because this group of people statistically are convicted more that exonerated?
If they become equivalent, it just increases the odds that the accuser will take it to their graves and the name of the accuse will be tarnished forever.
This assumes the court system is infallible though when we know it is not. Plus, I can see something like this deterring actual victims from coming forward.
I don't agree. I would argue that the rise of the victims' rights movement suggests that culturally, the United States is beginning to see the few false reports/convictions as an acceptable casualty to the vast majority of truthful reports.
I mean, we have Marsy's Law being added to state constitutions left and right. One of its provisions is that the victim[1] can refuse a deposition before trial. This obviously conflicts with the accused's right to access all the evidence, does it not?
Another provision limits the amount of time a convicted person can seek post-conviction relief. The goal here is to remove stress from the victim, but again, we have seen many convicted people be exonerated due to DNA evidence, or other evidence that arises after the fact. Again, this is a statement of values - that the deprivation of liberty is less important than the desire of the victim to not feel anxious about the perpetrator's possible release.
[1] I would argue that calling a complainant a victim undermines the presumption of innocence. If you're a victim, it follows that the accused is a perpetrator.
This is precisely what another commenter on this thread meant when they said the presumption of innocence that underlies our system of justice is currently eroding in modern society. Assuming guilt gives too much leeway for authoritarian abuse
Innocent until proved guilty is a fundamental principle of American values. I don't at all see why we should throw that out the window and say that "a few people falsly convicted is an acceptable casualty" just so we can catch more perpetrators.
It doesn't. Not saying that we should throw in jail any accuser who fails to prove their case. But if it's proven they made it up, then we should. There are three outcomes, not two: proven guilty, inconclusive, proven not guilty. Either end comes with an equivalent penalty, middle comes with acquittal.
https://www.propublica.org/article/false-rape-accusations-an...
It's eye opening about how hard it is to be believed about even a "classic" masked stranger, home invasion rape.
Having read that (and watched a couple of episodes of the Netflix adaption) I'm more likely to believe the original commenter's friend commited a rape and the victim was just compelled to deny it, possibly suffering twice.