 |
| I found even the title of this chart to be misleading. |
This morning, I read an article from The Economist entitled, "After a year of #MeToo, American opinion has shifted against victims." The very title implies every accuser is a "victim." The article laments the growing skepticism against people making high-profile accusations:
"Yet surveys suggest that this year-long storm of allegations, confessions and firings has actually made Americans more sceptical about sexual harassment... The share of American adults responding that men who sexually harassed women at work 20 years ago should keep their jobs has risen from 28% to 36%. The proportion who think that women who complain about sexual harassment cause more problems than they solve has grown from 29% to 31%. And 18% of Americans now think that false accusations of sexual assault are a bigger problem than attacks that go unreported or unpunished, compared with 13% in November last year."
The article adds the following statement: "According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, an American non-profit organisation, 63% of sexual assaults are not reported to police, whereas between 2% and 10% of assault cases are falsely reported."
This statement is very misleading. Below is my comment left on the website. If anything, we have overestimated underreporting while minimizing the number of false accusations. This discussion is worthy of a complete analysis on my main site, but for now, I wanted to share a few thought on this subject.
*****
The statement about 63% of rapes/ sexual assaults going unreported while only 2%-10% of sex assault claims are false is an intentionally misleading statement by the victim advocate cult.
The claim that 63% of sexual assaults/ rapes go unreported is a bold conclusion stemming from the National Crime Victimization Survey. The NCVS is a “self-report study” that includes “attempted” as well as “completed” acts, including “verbal threats.” The study relies on the survey taker, not a trained law enforcement official, to determine whether an act is an “unreported crime.” It is completely up to the survey taker to determine an act is a "crime."
But what are "attempts" and "verbal threats"? Some feminists feel looking at a woman too long is "stare rape." If a woman goes to a bar and gets drunk, she can decide if her subsequent sexual acts are consensual or not. There were feminist discussions considering whether a guy who was about his feelings about his lover just to engage in intercourse or who cheated on them during a relationship was rape. A woman made headlines recently for accusing a child of "sexual assault" after his backpack brushed against her backside. Had there not been security cameras and witnesses, she would have been accounted this alleged one in five women.
The NCVS understands it has limitations: “The estimates of rape/sexual assault are based on a small number of cases reported to the survey. Therefore, small absolute changes and fluctuations in the rates of victimization can result in large year-to-year percentage change estimates. For 2010, the estimate of rape or sexual assault is based on 57 unweighted cases compared to 36 unweighted cases in 2009." That is 57 "unreported cases" out of sample size of nearly 71000 people: In 2010, 40974 households and 73283 individuals age 12 and older were interviewed for the NCVS. Each household was interviewed twice during the year. The response rate was 92.3% of households and 87.5% of eligible individuals." Still, the survey strongly suggests the amount of under-reporting may be over-reported. (2010 NCVS summary)
The NCVS claims of underreporting dropped from 63.7% to 50% in the 2000s but has climbed to 67% in recent years. No doubt the campus rape scare and MeToo claims play roles in this, but with those movements came false claims. Remember the Jackie UVA case in Rolling Stone? Then Janice Dickinson admitted she lied about Bill Cosby harassing her to sell memoirs. Now we have the Kavanaugh case. While Ms. Ford stated certain memories of an assault were "indelible in the hippocampus," so were the memories of many people who made widespread claims of the 1980s and 1990s about satanic pedophiles and child sacrifices in daycare centers across America. Only problem was those claims were proven false, just as a fair number of these claims today are found to be without merit.
But even if only 2% and 10% of sexual assault claims are false, that means there are between 18,080 and 90,400 falsely accused people forced to register as "sex offenders" right now.
We used to have something in this country called "innocent until proven guilty." We've seen that concept under attack by campus sex assault accusations leading to college inquisitions in which presumed innocence was a foreign concept. We're now seeing the consequences of those actions. And now we see the MeToo Movement calling for similar inquisitions. Well, for every action is an equal and opposite reaction. MeToo is past due for a backlash, and the Kavanaugh hearings have become the Jackie UVA of the MeToo movement.
-- Derek Logue of OnceFallen
