The “which is worse” fight about rape

[Cross-posted to Femocracy.net ]

Last week, I wrote a post titled “Why the media gets rape so long,” which sparked a lot of discussion on the Feministing Community page . Naturally, a high volume of comments is gratifying, but a lot of them centered on a throwaway line I wrote within the context of looking at a male-dominated media structure, which was:

Meanwhile, not addressing that it might be a guy’s worst nightmare to be falsely accused of rape, but in my mind at least, it doesn’t match a worst nightmare of actually getting raped. And I do not intend to stereotype against all males here, as there are many men who realize the seriousness of sexual assault; I’m merely saying anecdotally, this has been my experience several times.

Now I was fully aware that when I was writing, this line could get me into trouble – I just felt like the time needed to untangle that line of thought would require a whole separate post. Knowing that what you are writing will probably be contentious, merely because you haven’t added enough nuance, is what I think of as the blogging equivalent to jumping off a cliff. And given the discussion that followed, and a confluence of a couple of other factors, I think I’d like to unpack this thought further now.

It seems like whenever there’s an attempt at a serious discussion about rape, participants in the conversation set up a false dichotomy: actual rape versus false accusations.

Then the discussion is always about which is worse, more traumatic and more damaging to its victims. So as I approach this, I would like to start out by saying that I think false rape accusations are damaging. They are damaging to the person who was falsely accused of rape, resulting in potential damage to one’s reputation and alienation from one’s community. Beyond that, false accusations are damaging to actual victims, who are taken less seriously to an exponential degree to every false accusation that’s revealed; this is in turn damaging to everyone that sees sexual assault as a very real and serious issue and wants to take action to prevent its incidence in the future.

To any person who is falsely accused of a crime, it hurts that person’s reputation, relationships, sense of stability, etc. And I mean any crime.

But to argue that it is statistically as frequent as rape, and just as harmful, minimizes the seriousness of rape in our society and how often it’s overlooked.

And I say this because, as many of you have probably noticed, rape is usually likened to mugging in terms of its degree of criminal seriousness, particularly by commenters who argue that false rape accusations are worse. I believe this is due to the false dichotomy – because false accusations kind of fall on an equivalency scale of false accusations of any other crime, and if this has to be just as bad as rape, then rape must full on a level of robbery or something else that falls somewhere short of murder.

Quite honestly, I can’t think of any person that, given the choice, wouldn’t rather be robbed at gunpoint, and give up maybe a wallet and cell phone, than be raped. The idea of losing power over my own body, to being forcefully assaulted and penetrated, and the resulting physical, emotional and mental harm is both terrifying and an ever-present possibility that ultimately I cannot prevent. So I’m confused as to why this comparison is always made, unless it’s designed to minimize the seriousness of rape, or underline to how some people can’t relate to the fear of getting raped. Some people want to play devil’s advocate, to intellectualize rape as a crime – while overlooking that it provokes a very visceral response for a pretty large segment of the population.

The reason I’ve been thinking about this is because the timing of my post roughly coincided with an open thread on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog, in which commenters engaged in a similar discussion of false rape accusations versus actual rape – and it got so ugly that TNC had to shut it down. One of the commenters in the discussion said he had been falsely accused by a woman he had only spoken to for five minutes; since obviously I don’t know the background of his story, I will have to take him at his word. He argued that false rape accusations happen all the time, presumably because it happened to him and made his life really difficult. Now, all feminists who read about this issue and think about it a lot know that statistically, false rape accusations happen far, far less than actual rape. So (presumably feminist) commenters tried to make some points of clarification for this one commenter, all the while being careful to say that they were sorry for his ordeal, that when it happens it is a serious problem, but the incidence of rape is much higher. Needless to say, the first commenter’s response was not so level-headed and generous, and it began to spiral out of control and tempers ran high all around.

Now I would like to take a moment to review some familiar , provided by the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network:

-One in six women and one in 33 men will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. One in six. Think about your five closest friends. Statistically, one of you will be sexually assaulted. That is scary.

-Every 2 minutes someone is sexually assaulted in this country. Every two minutes!

-Sixty percent of sexual assaults are never reported.

-Statistics wildly vary about false rape accusation rates, but the FBI puts the occurrence at least than 10 percent of reports. In the 1996 report, which has the most-often repeated data on this, it was 8 percent. Compare 8 percent of rape accusations that are false against all the rapes that are reported – and only 40 percent of rapes are actually reported.

Now, I dare you to try to Google search false rape accusation statistics if you haven’t already. I won’t link to it, but no wonder there’s a perception that women are liars. A plethora of sites say 1 in 4 rape reports are false, up to 50  percent of accusations are false, or even up to 98 percent, that there are more than 500,000 false claims a year.

So there are a lot of sites perpetuating that women are liars, which is odd because the falsely-accused commenter described the situation of feminism’s treatment of rape as “A very strong political movement has as one of its fundamental beliefs the idea that women never lie, and that men are always guilty until proven innocent.” Leaving aside the fact that feminism is blamed for many of society’s ills, does he really think we live in a society where women are perceived as unblemished truth-tellers who are always taken at their word?

What depresses me is that this reveals a negative underlying attitude towards women, which explains why so many DON’T take rape seriously. One of the top keyword combos that most frequently leads to my blog is “feminism hate men.” When I first saw that, I half-laughed, half-choked. I laughed because it’s such a common belief, and choked because I certainly don’t hate men, and neither do my fellow feminists. Many of us love our fathers, brothers, male relatives, male friends, boyfriends, fiancés, husbands, etc. What the hell? So I Google-searched the term, which taught me that feminism is a “hate-group” against men.

It is possible that there is a continuum, between men that think feminism is a hate-group designed so us ladies can keep our boot heels on the back of men’s necks, to men that minimize the seriousness of rape, to men that argue that women are liars that make up false rape accusations merely to keep men down by socially tarring and feathering them with such a sordid claim? [Please note that I leave feminist men out of this continuum, even the ones that don’t know they are feminist but respect a woman’s right to be equal, and to have control over her own body, and who see rape as the serious crime that it is.]

We do need to confront rape, and there are so many people and organizations that are doing honorable work towards awareness and prevention and counseling. But how far can this go when it falls on ears that are so tone-deaf? I see feminists across the blogosphere bending over backwards to try to sympathize with the falsely accused and explain they take false accusations seriously, yet focusing solely on that ignores the scale on which rape happens. For the struggle to find a middle ground and advance their position, they are shouted down, because of the lies that feminism is a hate group, feminism is designed to keep men down, and rape is the one crime where the accused are guilty until proven innocent – even though those of us looking at the criminal justice system see that it’s the victims who are in fact guilty until proven innocent, and what they are already guilty of is the possibility of a false accusation.

To really begin to reduce the incidence of rape, we need everyone in society to get on board. But how do we do that if we can’t even have a civilized conversation supported by (real) statistics? How do we stop fighting over which is worse – false accusations or rape? To all those who argue the first, I’m willing to say right now – I agree false accusations are serious. They hurt everyone, and unfortunately, they are most often made by those that seem to be in need of counseling to begin with. I don’t understand why this means we need to treat all potential victims as if they are liars out for revenge or simply to hurt someone for kicks. If I can agree false accusations are serious on its own scale, why can’t you agree that rape is serious on an even more frightening scale, and in an even more traumatic way?

Needless to say, it is incredibly, unbelievably, mind-numbingly frustrating.