False Rape Accusations Are Common

From WTNH TV, the story of a woman who made a false rape accusation:

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - A young woman accused of making up rape allegations against two college football players to gain the sympathy of another student she wanted to date is going on trial this week, and claims that she was pressured into confessing are expected to play a key role.

Jury selection in the case of Nikki Yovino, 19, of South Setauket, New York, is to begin Tuesday in Bridgeport Superior Court in Connecticut, and testimony is expected to start June 18. Prosecutors and defense lawyers will be in court Monday to argue over whether some evidence and testimony should be excluded from the trial.

Yovino was a student at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield when police say she reported being raped by two Sacred Heart football players at an off-campus party in Bridgeport in October 2016.

Authorities say she later admitted that she had consensual sex with the players and told them her motive. She was charged with evidence tampering, a felony, and falsely reporting an incident, a misdemeanor. The evidence tampering charge carries as many as five years in prison.

So her fake story fell apart, and she was charged. Justice was done, right? Not really. The story continues:

Yovino withdrew from Sacred Heart. The football players were never criminally charged, but both withdrew from the school as they faced possible disciplinary action based. One player lost a football scholarship, his lawyer said.

The football players’ names have not been released by police but are expected to be disclosed when they testify at the trial, their lawyer said.

“Her actions have seriously affected them,” attorney Frank Riccio II said. “They’re no longer in school. The loss of their education and the college experience has certainly affected them greatly. And this is all because of a very serious lie.”

One case, of course, doesn’t prove much of anything, but it does underline the problem with the feminist notion that women would never (well, they have to admit, hardly ever) lie about rape.

How Common are False Rape Accusations?

Quoting from Stuart Taylor, Jr. and KC Johnson, Until Proven Innocent, 2007, pp. 374-375.

The standard assertion by feminists that only 2 percent of rape claims are false, which traces to Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 book Against Our Will, is without empirical foundation and belied by a wealth of empirical data. These data suggest that at least 9 percent and probably closer to half of all rape claims are false:

1. FBI statistics say conservatively that about 9 percent of rape reports are “unfounded” in the sense of being dismissed without charges filed, usually because the accuser recants or because her account is contradicted by other evidence.
2. Forty-one percent of 109 rape complainants eventually admitted to police that no rape had occurred, according to a careful, highly regarded 1994 study of all rape reports in a midwestern town of about 70,000 between 1978 and 1987, by Purdue sociologist Eugene J. Kanin, Ph. D. The recantations made irrelevant the claims of many feminists that police often discount valid rape claims. And because there is no reason to suppose that all false accusers recanted, the total number of false reports probably exceeded 41 percent. The police in the study made serious efforts to polygraph both the accused and the accuser; it is now much more rare for police to polygraph rape accusers, due to pressure from feminist and victims’ rights groups more interested in convictions than in truth.
   
   Kanin also concluded that “these false charges were able to serve three major functions for the complainants: providing an alibi, a means of gaining revenge, and a platform for seeking attention/sympathy. This tripartite model resulted from the complainants’ own verbalizations during recantation and does not constitute conjecture.” Other experts note other motives for false rape claims; they include remorse after an impulsive sexual fling and escaping accountability when caught in an embarrassing consensual encounter.
3. Fifty percent (32) of accusers recanted their rape charges in a study by Kanin of campus police reports on sixty four rape claims at two large, unnamed Midwestern universities. In both universities, the taking of the complaint and the follow-up investigation were done by a ranking female officer. “Quite unexpectedly then” Kanin wrote, “we find that these university women, when filing a rape complaint, were as likely to file a false as a valid charge. Other reports from university police agencies support these findings.”
4. False rape accusations occur with scary frequency and “any honest veteran sex assault investigator will tell you that rape is one of the most falsely reported crimes,” Craig Silverman, a former Colorado prosecutor known for his zealous pursuit of alleged rapists, said in 2004 as a commentator on the Kobe Bryant case for Denver’s ABC affiliate. Silverman added that a Denver sex-assault unit commander had estimated that nearly 50 percent of reported rape claims are false.
5. Fraudulent rape complaints were perceived as a problem by 73 percent of the women and 72 percent of the men in a survey of students at the Air Force Academy, West Point, and the Naval Academy, according to a March 2005 Defense Department report.
6. One in four rape reports was unfounded in a 1990-1991 Washington Post investigation in seven Virginia and Maryland counties. When contacted by the Post, many of the alleged victims admitted that they had lied.

The presumption, driven by the political power of feminists on college campuses, that any accusation of rape must be true is a classic case of ideologically driven “justice.”

The campus leftists would loudly support the presumption of innocence, and full due process rights, for a black defendant accused of robbery, or a Muslim accused of conspiring with terrorists. But since the stereotypical campus rapist is a white male, these principles go out the window.

Social Justice Warriors at Evergreen State College

Credible reports protestors w/ bats roaming campus for 2 days. People hit, won't report. @heathereheying students & I warned @GovInslee 5/25 pic.twitter.com/soH4djQigc

— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) June 5, 2017

Hypocrisy: Marquette on Sexual Assault Awareness

It’s now “Sexual Assault Awareness Month” at Marquette, and here is the video that talks about it:


As is always the case on college campuses, the issue is framed in terms of needing to “raise awareness.” Presumably, if everybody is “aware” that some guys would like to rape (or otherwise sexually assault) a woman, the problem will go away.

The people promoting this campaign, of course, continue to simply lie about the incidence of campus rape. For example, they cite a 2000 Department of Justice Report to support the claim that “It is estimated that nearly 25 percent of college women have been victims of rape or attempted rape since the age of 14.” We have analyzed this report, and it in fact shows no such thing.

Other studies of the issue show a vastly lower incidence of sexual assault among college women.

But of course, if you are trying to “raise awareness” why not get everybody as overwrought about the issue as possible?

Then there is Marquette’s rhetoric about how sex without “consent” is sexual assault.  That sounds reasonable on its face, but unfortunately, the definition of “consent” is warped.   Some of what the university says about consent is sensible (“Giving in or going along with someone . . . to avoid being hurt is not consent”). But some of it is absurd. For example: “Giving in or going along with someone to gain approval . . . is not consent.” So if a girl allows a guy to have sex with her because she wants his approval he has raped her.

Then there is “Silence and passivity do not equal consent.” So if a woman allows a guy to fondle her, or have sex with her, without any protest or resistance, he has raped her.  This may be true in the fever swamp that is feminist academia, but it’s not true in the real world.

Such absurdly broad definitions of rape cheapen the meaning of the term “rape” and trivialize real rape.  This feminist tendency to call every unfortunate sexual encounter that a woman may, in the morning, feel unhappy about “rape” is the reason that a vastly lower number of college women say they have been raped than are classified as rape victims by feminist researchers.

But at least, Marquette is taking a forthright stand against date rape, right?

But what happens when women on campus are the victims of actual sexual assault? Especially, what happens when the assailants are members of the basketball team? Marquette covers it up. One case involved a woman who began consensual intercourse with a male student, and then told him to stop. Not only did he refuse, but he roughed her up badly in the process.

The woman met with Student Affairs staffer Stephanie Quade. According to the Chicago Tribune:

The woman said she met with Quade, who encouraged her to focus on her schoolwork and mental health rather than pursuing charges, the woman said. Quade also asked if she had thought about praying about the situation, the woman said. She said she left the meeting in tears.

“I felt like they were trying to get me to be quiet and disappear,” she said. “I’ve never been made to feel so dumb, so stupid and so much like I didn’t matter.”

Marquette, which was legally required to report the incident to local police, failed to do so.

Another article in the Chicago Tribune described a separate incident:

One of the woman’s friends told police she became uncomfortable as the night wore on. The friend said an athlete poured alcohol into cups for the women and called them “big girl shots.” She told police that athletes were “dancing inappropriately” and that she overheard one say, “We’re (going to have sex with) these bitches tonight.”

At some point that night, the 19-year-old woman said, one athlete trapped her in a bedroom before grabbing her by the ears and forcing her to perform a sex act, police records show. The athlete told police the sex was consensual.

After leaving the room, the woman encountered another athlete who gave her two more shots of alcohol and started dancing with her. Minutes later, the woman went to a different bedroom with three other athletes. She recalled one slamming the door shut in the face of a friend who was worried about her safety. A second athlete put her hand in his pants, and another put his hand inside her pants, according to her statement to police and school officials.

She recalled that the encounter ended when a friend found another athlete to unlock the door, records show. The 19-year-old woman said she was slumped down in a chair with her pants undone and an athlete standing over her when her friend entered the room.

When the woman shared her account with campus security officers, they discouraged her from going to Milwaukee police by telling her the allegations would draw news media attention, she said.

This is what we would expect from the modern, politically correct university. Marquette bureaucrats will recite all the politically correct cant about sexual assault, will display ribbons and subject undergraduates to all sorts of indoctrination. But when faced with real sexual assault, they cover it up.

The problem, quite simply, is that Marquette has too many bureaucrats. They specialize in mouthing fashionable clichés, setting up “offices” for this and that, having workshops, subjecting students to all kinds of exercises to “raise awareness,” and declaring that this is “Sexual Assault Awareness Month.” Yet all this is fundamentally irrelevant, bureaucratic busywork, essentially. A genuine response to sexual assault would involve reporting it to the police and actually punishing the offenders.

Bureaucratic make-work, in other words, can’t substitute for actual moral integrity. The latter has been sorely lacking at Marquette.