Preventing prejudice in reporting

sexual violence

To the editor:

I first would like to compliment the fine work of Emma Trotter and The Stanford Daily on the recent article regarding sexual assault campus data [“Rise in reported rapes due to new resources,” Nov. 14]. The article was accurate, informative and well written.

Unfortunately, the same could not be said of the first response to the article on The Daily’s Web site. I feel the need to respond to that posting’s propagation of harmful myths about false reporting.

The posting states, “studies have shown that 40 to 50 percent (very conservative estimate... I believe the actual number is much higher) of rape allegations turn out to be false. Please refer to Purdue Prof. Kanin’s study which found that 41 percent of rape allegations in a nine-year study were false.”

Prof. Kanin’s study was examined in the article “False Allegations of Rape: A Critique of Kanin” by Dr. David Lisak in the September/October 2007 issue of the Sexual Assault Report. Dr. Lisak is an associate professor of psychology and director of the Men’s Sexual Trauma Research Project at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Dr. Lisak says that “Kanin’s 1994 article on false allegations is a provocative opinion piece, but it is not a scientific study of the issue of false reporting of rape. It certainly should never be used to assert a scientific foundation for the frequency of false allegations.”

He makes the point that Kanin “simply reiterates the opinions of the police officers who concluded that the cases in question were ‘false allegations.’” After citing an International Association of Chiefs of Police manual (Investigating Sexual Assaults, www.theiacp.org/documents/pdfs/RCD/InvestigatingSexualAssaultsPaper.pdf, p. 13), which states that polygraph tests for sexual assault victims are contradicted in the investigation process and that their use is “based on the misperception that a significant percentage of sexual assault reports are false,” Lisak then observes that “It is noteworthy that the police department from which Kanin derived his data used or threatened to use the polygraph in every case... The fact that it was the standard procedure of this department provides a window on the biases of the officers who conducted the rape investigations, biases that were then echoed in Kanin’s unchallenged reporting of their findings.”

For a discussion of false rape allegations which recognizes that the topic is complex (as opposed to the poster’s straightforward uppercase explanation that “MANY WOMEN DO, IN FACT, FLAT OUT LIE”), see “Successfully Investigating Acquaintance Sexual Assault: A National Training Manual for Law Enforcement,” developed by the National Center for Women and Policing (www.mincava.umn.edu/documents/acquaintsa/participant/allegations.doc).

After a discussion of several ways that a sexual assault case may end up incorrectly classified as unfounded, the authors conclude, “Perhaps the most tragic consequence of routinely unfounding sexual assault cases, however, is that it fuels the myth that a high percentage of cases are determined to be false... By improperly reporting cases as unfounded to the FBI — and then having many members of society confuse ‘unfounded cases’ with ‘false allegations’ — these inaccurate statistics create the sense that a higher percentage of sexual assault cases is deemed to be false compared with other types of cases.” The authors also note that “The idea that women lie about rape... has devastating consequences for victims when they seek support from friends, family, social services and the criminal justice system.”

Allowing the expression of this kind of harmful prejudice to stand unchallenged would be a disservice to the entire campus community. The original article in The Daily says, “Campus groups have taken steps to take the stigma out of reporting sexual violence.” Let’s give them our heartfelt support.

Sally Baird

Sexual Assault Prevention Program Manager, Vaden Health Center