I’ve don’t know anything about the numbers dealing with false accusations. And while I agree that rape is a far bigger problem afalse accusation is no cake walk for the accused, and those that have been the victim of it ar going to be more sympathetic to those that claim it is the case.

That said I’ve never had someone tell me they were raped and had any reason to doubt them. I do think rape happens far more often than false accusations of rape, bt for the victims of either crime the numbers don’t really matter. What matters is that it happened to them and it was a horrible thing to have happen.

I also think it is natural for men to be more worried about false accusations than rape. I think men, in general, see that false accusation as a more likely personal threat than rape. What happened at Duke University is something I remember, and I was one of the people who wanted those guys strung up. I don’t ever want to be on their position, and it’s something I worry about in reference to myself. It’s something I am conscious of my vulnerability to. It’s not likely to happen, but it could. So I can understand being concerned with it, but at the same time it doesn’t automatically make me doubt every accusation of rape.

But, I don’t think there are or can be any good numbers on sexual assault for the same reasons it is so hard to judge at trial; it’s all about consent, which is ephemeral, almost invariably privately expressed, and usually implicitly expressed. If there were a sure way of sorting false accusations from true ones, trials would be much easier. Compared to gathering data for statistics, the legal system devotes enormous resources to each case, and still can’t determine the truth or falsehood a lot of times. I don’t see any way a statistician could do better.

Many people say that the 2-3% statistic is too low. From my research I believe that it’s probably roughly accurate, although it’s hard to get a dead-on statistic about something like how many people lie in a given situation.

There’s also a big difference between making a police report and a personal claim that a rape occurred. I know a couple people that have given false accounts of rape, for attention or because of mental illness, and the police were never involved. Someone lying about a rape has an incentive not to let her “rapist” face his accuser in court.

I believed my ex’s accounts of sexual abuse by her father and others, which specifically included coitus, despite the fact her hymen was intact on our wedding night, up until I found out she was telling people I beat her. (That was not a gray area or subject to interpretation; there was no BDSM or rough sex, and I withdraw when angry rather than shoving or even shouting; it was total fabrication.)