[dchftcs]

The impact of false accusations don't start just with prosecution. People lose jobs and friends with it before that stage. I've personally seen people fired for a mere police investigation into something much milder that was eventually dropped.

Also, I did some checking and I can't find sources supporting "100 cases per year".

Various sources say unfounded allegations are estimated to be 5-20% in different research, while there are hundreds of thousands of sexual assault cases in the US alone. This gives an estimate of multiple thousands to tens of thousands of cases per year.

I'm also not sure why you think worrying about false conviction /allegations in DUI and drugs should preclude us from worrying about something less prevalent. Can't people take precautions on all these things that threaten one's reputation and livlihood? There are many things that could have killed you with a 0.01% chance if people didn't bother to fix them, such as battery explosions, and letting them pile up because there are other things to worry about is not the way safety engineering works.

[foxyv]

This is why we need unions. You can be fired for chewing gum too loudly or just being around when the boss is pissed off. We need to band together to defend each other against malicious employers.

With regards to the 100 cases per year. I was using UK statistics for false rape allegations. Ironically, men are more likely to be raped by other men than be investigated for a false rape allegation.

> Can't people take precautions on all these things that threaten one's reputation and livlihood?

Of course! But if their "precautions" mean they are also being nasty to people I'll be happy to call them out on it.

[dchftcs]

I don't think denying a ride to a stranger in a sketchy situation counts as being nasty. If it's not false accusations, it could be a knife at your throat or whatever (your example about male rape definitely doesn't help your case here).

Let's have a thought experiment.

If we take the prevalence of false accusations be several thousands a year (the lower end of the estimate), it would be between 1 to 2 incidents per 100k population in the US. For your UK statistics, I can't find a citation either - in terms of prosecuted cases you're perhaps right, again the buck doesn't just start with prosecution. Reported rape incidents can be up to 70k and prosecuted incidents is less than a tenth of that, and it's probably similar for false accusations - what I can find is an estimated prevalence of 3%, so in the UK it would be up to 2.1k among reported (not necessarily prosecuted) cases.

Incidentally, 1 to 2 per 100k is in the ballpark of rape statistics in low-crime areas, such as Hong Kong, Japan or Singapore. So the risk of rape in those areas is similar to the risk of false accusations in the US.

With this in mind, if a woman denies a ride to a strange man in Hong Kong in the middle of the night, does that mean she was nasty to the man? If you say yes, it's probably not the prevailing sentiment in those areas; if you say no, perhaps that can point to some cognitive bias.

For unions, sure let me know when you're able to set them up. Similarly, you can tell women in Hong Kong or Singapore to not worry about rape because you're going to do something to make the world better for them. But another important nuance is that unions won't help as much as you think they would. In the case of false accusations of pretty much anything, a lot of the damage is social, for people who are not already powerful; rape is an especially touchy topic that you would find fellow union members, especially female members, and sometimes spouses, to be less than sympathetic.