False allegations of rape are fantastically rare and the people who make those false allegations are almost always prosecuted, and convicted, for it. Everyone recognises that false allegations are immensely harmful - to the man who has been libled; to other women making allegations; to other women who do not make allegations because they fear not being believed.
> the people who make those false allegations are almost always prosecuted, and convicted, for it
Not really, at least not here in the UK. The Crown Prosecution Service generally doesn't consider it in the public interest unless it's a particularly serious case. For example the most recent case involved a barrister making the accusations and the guy she'd accused being jailed amongst prisoners who'd somehow gotten the idea he was a pedophile[1]. (Those kind of rumours tend to get people brutally mutilated or murdered by other prisoners - kind of a big deal.) Even then, women's rights campaigners protested against the conviction and accused the police of harming rape victims by bringing the case to court.
My assumption (perhaps wrong) was not so much that false allegations are fantastically rare, but rather that unreported and/or dismissed cases of rape are shockingly common, and that therefore giving the benefit of the doubt to the 'claimant'(?), at least when the facts are unclear, is a good approach.
That said, I'm generally hesitant to express myself based on those assumptions, but I still question them (and those of others).
Do you have any links/research that shows that false allegations are 'fantastically uncommon'? Because I've heard too many accounts of people claiming false allegation to just assume you're right.
False allegations are far from being fantastically rare.
You also have to acknowledge that when you have a rape accusation, there isn't a boolean result(either the allegation is false, or it's true and this results in some penalty). It's a broad spectrum, with only around a third of the cases resulting in conviction.[1]
Of the 136 cases of sexual assault 8 (5.9%) were coded as false reports, 61 (44.9%) did not proceed to any prosecution or disciplinary action, 48 (35.3%) were referred for prosecution or disciplinary action, and 19 (13.9%) contained insufficient information to be coded (see Table 2).
