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**Franticwithworry** · 4 January 2017, 01:39 PM

You're right in that the police don't accept or acknowledge false accusations in any meaningful way. I know anecdotal evidence isn't helpful in and of itself, but much of statistics starts off as anecdote.

Given the many, many people who have been affected, perhaps we need a way of collecting all their basic stories and collating them, but we need to do it discretely and potentially anonymously, not collected on a thread here given the public nature of the forum or in any way that encourages anyone not genuine. We'll probably find some additional motives too. Then, if we have what amounts to dozens/hundreds of personal stories, together with press reports of those affected/acquitted, the Henriques report and so on and so on, some people might be willing to approach their MP's in a co-ordinated approach to garner support and action.

The law and government policy needs changing and MP's are the place to start with that. (Where's the common sense in prosecuting every complaint involving a minor, no matter the context?)

Mr B might come in here with an update as he went to see his MP not too long ago.

We also need to have a discussion and define 'sexual assault'. At the moment all sexual behaviour is being criminalised and people are being prosecuted in some cases for what is, in essence at best misinterpreted signals and at worst simple bad manners.

**sqounk** · 4 January 2017, 02:54 PM

Originally posted by Franticwithworry View Post

You're right in that the police don't accept or acknowledge false accusations in any meaningful way. I know anecdotal evidence isn't helpful in and of itself, but much of statistics starts off as anecdote.

Given the many, many people who have been affected, perhaps we need a way of collecting all their basic stories and collating them, but we need to do it discretely and potentially anonymously, not collected on a thread here given the public nature of the forum or in any way that encourages anyone not genuine. We'll probably find some additional motives too. Then, if we have what amounts to dozens/hundreds of personal stories, together with press reports of those affected/acquitted, the Henriques report and so on and so on, some people might be willing to approach their MP's in a co-ordinated approach to garner support and action.

The law and government policy needs changing and MP's are the place to start with that. (Where's the common sense in prosecuting every complaint involving a minor, no matter the context?)

Mr B might come in here with an update as he went to see his MP not too long ago.

We also need to have a discussion and define 'sexual assault'. At the moment all sexual behaviour is being criminalised and people are being prosecuted in some cases for what is, in essence at best misinterpreted signals and at worst simple bad manners.

I think that is a very fine idea. A simple, but professional looking and very easily navigable website would do the job I think. That coupled with whatever it is they do to make websites pop up on search engines when entering key words....

**Silver** · 4 January 2017, 04:27 PM

A excellent piece of research shocked 777.

So from how I comprehend the situation,is that the police feel compelled(due to how they are now trained) to follow every line of enquiry,and arrest every "alleged abuser".

However the cps then analyse the reports, and decide there is not enough evidence to process the accusers allegations...hence the poor statistics for charging.

The polices statistics will always be confusing as they seem to put everything from historical sexual abuse to recent abuse within the same statistics, so there for it is very difficult to ascertain precise statics for each offence.

The changes I would like to see in historical and to some extant recent cases is a fast track system:

1. The police fully investigate the allegation,before any arrest can be made, as they do with all other offences:

-The police need to take a through "one only" statement from the accuser not several that can be changed(this must be videoed/recorded), .This should then ensure that the police remained impartial throughout the investigation.

To clarify any inconsistencies they need instant access to both party's living references, they could now use the "snoopers charter" to do this:

-The police should have instant access to the client's NHS medical reports

-Instant access to the land registry, to clarify where the "instigator" lived as opposed to victims word.

-access to the clients online profile

-access to employer history etc..

This would then provide the police with an instant guideline to see how accurate the "victims" statement is

2.Depending on how the "perpetrator" scored from 0 being unlikely, the police then act accordingly:

- a zero score would mean the police inform the so called "perpetrator "and interview with their solicitor present(depending on interview)no arrest no dbs marking.
A decision should then be agreed within 7 working days either NFA or further questioning.

If the guide shows inconstancies then perhaps an arrest should be made.

There are problem with every system however based on these guidelines I know my OH would never be in the position he is now,on bail with no charges.

I

**slowdown73** · 7 January 2017, 12:09 AM

I was the victim of a false allegation made against me two years ago which was eventually NFA'd and led to my accuser being arrested and his partner for sending a bogus solicitors letter and attempting to extort money from my parents. I have also twice been subject to a sexual assault. The first assault took place in school and the second when i was roughly 19. I have never reported either incidents to the Police because I did not think of the matters as crimes when they took place. I blamed myself a lot particularly for the incident when i was 19 as i got involved with a friend who was a complete control freak and very manipulative nasty character. He destroyed my self confidence and self esteem. I have thought recently about reporting the matter but i have very little faith or trust in the Police particularly over how they treated me over the false allegation. Also, I cannot remember half of the details and would worry about not being believed and how I would be treated by the Police and CPS. I dont have any contact with the person who did it anymore and I feel some things are better left in the past although I still feel angry sometimes that he forced me to have sex even after I told him I wasn't attracted to him. I dont want compensation but I feel he should be punished to stop him doing it to someone else.

**sqounk** · 7 January 2017, 12:47 AM

Originally posted by slowdown73 View Post

I was the victim of a false allegation made against me two years ago which was eventually NFA'd and led to my accuser being arrested and his partner for sending a bogus solicitors letter and attempting to extort money from my parents. I have also twice been subject to a sexual assault. The first assault took place in school and the second when i was roughly 19. I have never reported either incidents to the Police because I did not think of the matters as crimes when they took place. I blamed myself a lot particularly for the incident when i was 19 as i got involved with a friend who was a complete control freak and very manipulative nasty character. He destroyed my self confidence and self esteem. I have thought recently about reporting the matter but i have very little faith or trust in the Police particularly over how they treated me over the false allegation. Also, I cannot remember half of the details and would worry about not being believed and how I would be treated by the Police and CPS. I dont have any contact with the person who did it anymore and I feel some things are better left in the past although I still feel angry sometimes that he forced me to have sex even after I told him I wasn't attracted to him. I dont want compensation but I feel he should be punished to stop him doing it to someone else.

I think everyone on this site would say that if a sexual assault is genuine, the victim has a right to be heard and seek justice (whatever justice is). Given the paucity of evidence false accusers often possess, maybe it will not be so hard to seek an outcome that you are satisfied with?
I feel personally that things have gone a bit mental with the allegations and if it were me, I suppose I'd very carefully consider it. I would ask myself some hard questions also i.e. when you say 'forced' you to have sex, what does this actually mean?

**slowdown73** · 7 January 2017, 02:01 PM

Originally posted by sqounk View Post

I think everyone on this site would say that if a sexual assault is genuine, the victim has a right to be heard and seek justice (whatever justice is). Given the paucity of evidence false accusers often possess, maybe it will not be so hard to seek an outcome that you are satisfied with?
I feel personally that things have gone a bit mental with the allegations and if it were me, I suppose I'd very carefully consider it. I would ask myself some hard questions also i.e. when you say 'forced' you to have sex, what does this actually mean?

With regards to the forced bit, he was a highly manipulative individual. When i met him i was only 19 and very naive. He made out to me he wasnt like other guys and didnt have sex with his friends which can be common on the gay scene. He was quite affectionate from the beginning and i never felt very comfortable with it but he always insisted it was platonic. However, after a year or so he wanted more and kept saying there must be attraction between us. He forced himself on me quite a few occasions including one time when we were lying together on the couch listening to music and got on top of me and pressed himself into me. He was much heavier than me and I just froze and felt repulsed by it but he wouldnt take no for an answer and took his trousers down and I noticed he had planted toilet roll in his underpants.

He was older than me and he scared me at times. He would play a lot of psychological games and didnt like me wearing certain clothes, mixing with certain people and wanted to vet any potential partners i met. I remember not going to visit him for a few days and he drew a picture of a sad face and placed it on his front door and would threaten to walk away as a friend and make my life difficult.

I was very vulnerable at the time and in hindsight should have walked away but i lived with my parents and got locked out of the house regularly by my father who had an alcohol problem and witnessed domestic abuse between my parents. I didnt have many other proper friends and he seemed trustworthy at first. I remember having to stay at his house one weekend after being locked out by my father. I was dating someone at the time which he knew about but he tried to grope me and said he wouldnt tell anyone and my partner didnt need to know.

I eventually stopped going round to see him and he tried to make my life hell. He rang my boss at work pretending to be someone else and said he had attempted suicide. He stalked me by following me in town and waiting for me in a car park. He sent a threatening letter to my work and letters to my home address every few days saying he would cause a lot of trouble for me and would tell other people personal things I had shared with him. I went to the police in the end about the letter and phone call to my boss and they warned him to stay away but he continued to harass me. I made friends with someone from a social group and found out later they met up every week to talk about what i had been saying and doing which I didnt know about at the time.

I eventually moved away to live with my partner but he found my address and came up to my local area and posted an anonymous birthday card. I also think he visited my home address because he wrote to me and told me where I lived. Fortunately, he hasnt bothered me for over 15 years now as the last time he contacted me, I threatened him with going to the Police if he contacted me again. It was a nasty horrific experience which wrecked my nerves and affected my mental health. I was lucky to find a very supportive counsellor who helped me to understand this was very abusive.

**Peter1975** · 19 January 2017, 07:00 AM

Using the rape campaigners own statistics against them.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

I offer the above quote, attributed to Benjamin Disraeli as both a disclaimer to what follows and as a criticism of the tactics of rape “victim-survivor” groups such as Women Against Rape (WAR) Rape Crisis (RC) and The End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAWC).

Inspiration.

The premature death of the campaigner Jill Saward gives much food for thought, particularly her experience at the hands of the justice system at the time.

Things had to change, there is no doubt about that.

Consider her story for a moment. She was violently raped and suffered a great deal, first from her attackers then the salacious press and finally the judiciary. My personal opinion was that it did indeed take huge amounts of courage for her to become the first rape victim to waive her right to anonymity and speak out and she should correctly be remembered as genuinely brave, especially if you remember the climate of 1986.

She was destined to become a rape campaigner when those 4 masked men broke in that fateful night and a crime that truly shocked the nation would give her a powerful voice.

I read up on her work, she was an active campaigner until close to the end of her life. If she was a lone, brave voice 30 years ago, she would be joined by others in what has become almost a victim industry. I can’t say I blame her, I have genuine respect for her but what she and other campaigners like her petitioned for in the last 30 years has much to do with the current climate and the ease in which false accusations can now be made and often prosecuted.

She is often credited with suspects of sexual offences losing their right to anonymity until the trial as it was then. She spoke out time and again whenever restoring even a limited amount of anonymity was mentioned.

She wasn’t going to stop there. There will never enough reported crimes or convictions for Saward and the groups mentioned above. Her last lunatic campaign idea, similar to other campaigners desires for specialist “rape juries”, was to show juries a video, pre trial, “educating” them on “rape myths” or what we and those that actually respect the law might more accurately call prejudicing a jury, in the same way that specialist rape juries could be called specialists in convictions.Thank goodness she was never elected to parliament.

I came to a conclusion; she lived in a bubble. She spent 30 years surrounded by genuine victims of rape. Her views were distorted and shaped by her horrible ordeal and everyone she came across would join her in that bubble, agreeing with her and reinforcing her beliefs with their own terrible stories.The bubble became an echo chamber and no sensible voices from outside that bubble could be heard.

The abuse of sheer numbers, real and imaginary.

A common theme among all these survivor groups is that reporting rape is still a taboo and that fear of not being believed is preventing more victims coming forward.

To support this argument they cite their own figures, based on the numbers coming through their doors and multiplying by population, claiming that 60-90% of rapes are not reported and up to 500,000 sexual offences are committed each year. An extraordinary number. ‘Something must be done, not enough is being done’ they cry.*

Given that the number of reported rapes has doubled in the last 4 years (while conviction rates halved) you can’t help but get the impression that it will never be enough until they can simply point to someone and declare them a rapist and have them locked up without the “victim” being “raped again” by having to go to court.

Another figure they repeat is that 80% of reported cases are no further actioned. Their take on that number is that not enough is being done to prosecute and the police are letting the victims down with shoddy work, leaving their evil attackers free to roam the streets. That is most certainly the case but how often? Here their use of numbers falls down if looked at seriously.

Their general assertion is that only 2-5% of reports are false so 95-98% of reported rape should go to court and as they are all telling the truth the conviction rate should be 100%. These last numbers are not ones they bandy about, lest they seem like lunatic zealots.

What they do instead is use the 55% conviction rate of the remaining 20% of cases that make it to court but present it as a percentage of the total number of reports to the police. This gives them the the “conviction rate” of 7.5%.(down from 15% 4 years ago) Depending on the credibility of their audience they are also not above sometimes picking a number out of the sky* like 500,000 and using the number of convictions to give an ever lower conviction rate. 2,689 convictions last year would give a “conviction” rate of just 0.54%.Who could argue that this is not terrible and more needs do be done?

The figures are used to hide the fact that they do not want to get into complicated debates about the many reasons reported rapes are far lower than they believe they should be and most importantly why so many cases are no further actioned. Why should they if they can use just numbers to steer their agenda past the remaining obstacles that long established law and plain common sense have in their way. A statistical scaremongering to back up the emotional blackmail.

The myth that dare not speak it’s name.

Another common theme is that false accusations are a very rare occurrence. Saward and those she inspired forever bang on about these “myths” that false accusations are rife and this was one of the things Saward wished to put in her horrible video. The myth of false accusations is confusing juries and preventing more convictions they say.

How rare?

Saward, on her website, cites the 2005 home office research document “A gap or a chasm” and gives the loose figure for false allegations of “between 3-13%” The widely agreed on figure at the time and the conclusion of that report, the most comprehensive ever undertaken, anywhere in the world, was 8%.

She was the most generous of her kind for being honest about the pretty wide range of that number. An accurate figure is impossible to obtain for many reasons I need not go into here.

Still she skirted over this issue and even though the figure could be as high as 13% by her own admission, without irony she would state whenever challenged that false accusations are so rare they shouldn’t concern anybody. It’s the real victims that matter.

Number Crunching Time

How many false accusations are there?

I am going to use the latest available figures published in October 2016 by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary: These reveal that there were 23,851 rapes against adults reported in England and Wales in the previous year and 10,160 reported rapes against children.This is a rise of 123% in 4 years when the two are added together. A total of 34,011.

I have chosen the arbitrary figure of 4% for the rate of false accusations for these calculations as the numbers can be halved to 2% to please the victims groups lower estimates and doubled to 8% to reflect the 2005 Home Office statistics. - A report that they are more than happy to draw on when its supports their agenda.

Adult only rapes: 23,851 x 4% = 954 false accusations per year or just over 18 a week.

Child rapes: 10,160 x 4% = 406 false accusations per year or just under 8 per week.

So that gives us a grand total of 26 false allegations made to the police every week or using the range of 2-8% between 13 and 52 per week or just under 2 to 7.4 per day

Finally, these figures are for recorded rape only so lets ramp up those numbers and include all sexual assaults:

The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) reports 108,762 sexual offences recorded by the police in the latest figures (2015-16)

108,762 x 2% = 2,175 false allegations per year, 41 per week or 6 per day.

108,762 x 4% = 4,350 false allegations per year, 83 per week or a little under 12 per day.

108,762 x 8% = 8,700 false allegations per year, 167 per week or almost 24 every single day.

Conclusion:

Given that there is no available contextualised data, the numbers of false accusations above are impossible to verify except in the broadest of terms but they were intended purely as a rebuttal to the constant narrative of “rape facts” that are used to bludgeon serious debate on a serious matter. The rape groups know what they are doing. In fact they are certain within their bubble that their facts and their numbers are correct.

The campaigners and the home office may well be quite correct in their huge estimates of unreported sexual offences and I have no problem with believing that those numbers may well be higher. Neither would I think to argue that many guilty rapists are being no further actioned.

I have never thought that rape and serious sexual assault are anything but wicked crimes and those that commit them deserve the full weight of the law and the public revulsion that follows.
In an ideal world all sex offenders would be caught, there is no debate to be had about that.

Also in that ideal world an innocent man would never even be accused of those wicked crimes unless it was a genuine case of mistaken identity. I need not mention the dreadful consequences of being falsely accused, they are surely widely known, except in that bubble.

The campaigners also like to quote the 2013 cps report to the dpp which is used to give the estimate of 400,000 offences per year and I gather ,a small sample of prosecutions for perverting the course of justice is used as the basis for asserting that false reports are miniscule. I haven’t read it and my uniformed opinion on this is admitted . I will get around to researching this one day, or maybe not.

** My apologies to the memory of Jill Saward and sincere condolences to her friends and family.

**Franticwithworry** · 19 January 2017, 01:03 PM

That's a great post, Peter1975. A few things I would like to add to the debate -

1) While rape and sexual assault are heinous crimes, those falsely accused are as much victims as anyone else. Falsely reporting a crime, wasting police time and perjury are all offences and just because they are committed in the pursuit of an imagined sexual offence makes then not less, but more heinous than if it were any other. Accusations of sexual offences wreck families to a greater extent than almost any other crime, especially when it is family doing the accusing. That needs acknowledging and addressing. It's often not possible to 'get on with life and forget about it.'

2) The statistics about unreported sexual crimes, are, to an extent, scaremongering. How these figures are arrived at is questionable and again, reporting other crimes is not encouraged on the basis of how many go unreported. Frankly, several things happened to me when I was a girl that these days would be considered criminal. Several of them I considered nothing more than a nuisance and I dealt with them as such. So far as I can tell, many assaults of a different nature go unreported, while the parties sort things out for themselves, dust themselves off and go in their way and no-one thinks anything of it. There's no need to report every little thing. We need to redefine sexual assault and stop criminalising bad manners or misinterpreted signals. Flirting that includes putting a hand on a knee or accidentally brushing up against someone in a crowded place should not be categorised as crimes, but currently they are. Speaking as a woman, I'd say we seem to have lost some of our backbone, the ability to distinguish between sexual and non-sexual touching and the ability to recognise our own part in miscommunication signals. Soon, if we continue the road we are on, it won't be safe for any man or boy to instigate a relationship with someone for fear of criminal consequences. It's a reversal of the power struggle and, to my mind, it's not good. Sexual crime is heinous, but we don't need to create it when it isn't there and society becomes less civilised when we routinely jail the innocent in pursuit of the guilty. I don't want to see any genuine rapist go unpunished, but redefining rape and sexual assault so that all sexual contact is criminal on the say-so of one party is not the way to go. Allowing the falsely accused to forever have a stain on their character so that there is never a bold - this crime did not take place and this person is innocent, is not the way to go. I don't believe that sexual crime is as rampant as the campaigners suggest, and they are as potentiallt dangerous as anyone else on an ill-thought-out crusade.

3) The government is responsible for at least some of the increase in false accusations. Time and again we see men being accused of sexual crime in the midst of divorce proceedings. It's my understanding that Legal Aid has been withdrawn for Family Proceedings unless there is a criminal component. Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but dear goodness, what did they expect when they did that? I would be interested to see statistics, if there are any, of the number of divorces which cited criminal behaviour, sexual and otherwise, before and after the change. The rise in Parental Alienation is astronomic in recent years, and there has to be a reason why parents are finding it acceptable, to behave this way.
Government pressure, intended or otherwise, seems high on the list.

4) I think that ultimately, we have 2 issues - the criminalisation of sexual behaviour based on what frankly are no more than whims - if I want this person to touch my knee it's not an offence, but if I don't it is, and I don't have to say anything until later kind-of-thing, and the whole business of completely fabricated events and the motives there are to create them.

5) And this is a bit controversial I think, but we're getting to grips with the idea that we need to teach boys about consent (some of us always did, I know :-)), and the fact that a skimpy dress or flirty behaviour isn't an invitation for sex, but we are going too far down the road of letting girls think that they're not responsible for anything when it comes to their sexual behaviour and that they can change their minds about consent without communicating it.

Human behaviour is messy and we all need to be responsible. Much as I admire campaigners of all ilks - without them some changes would come far too slowly - we cannot make any one section of the population solely responsible for any one thing.

**Franticwithworry** · 19 January 2017, 03:21 PM

Originally posted by sqounk View Post

I think everyone on this site would say that if a sexual assault is genuine, the victim has a right to be heard and seek justice (whatever justice is). Given the paucity of evidence false accusers often possess, maybe it will not be so hard to seek an outcome that you are satisfied with?
I feel personally that things have gone a bit mental with the allegations and if it were me, I suppose I'd very carefully consider it. I would ask myself some hard questions also i.e. when you say 'forced' you to have sex, what does this actually mean?

In relation to the 'what does 'forced' actually mean, there is a phrase that I think is very useful when describing rape or sexual assault that doesn't involve injury.

'Coercive control' refers to sexual activity which occurs without consent but without violence or overt aggression or injury. It applies very well to the husband who demands 'conjugal rights' from a wife who is afraid of him and perhaps additionally afraid of waking and frightening sleeping children. It also encompasses relationships as described by slowdown73, where manipulation and emotional abuse are involved. People who use power for sexual gain, making their target too afraid to object are still guilty of sexual crimes. It's an area ripe for false allegations, but there are genuine crimes. Consent is a very difficult area when you're dealing with a bully, as it is with many crimes involving coercion.

**Pond31** · 19 January 2017, 06:03 PM

franticwithworry wrote an excellent message. I am trying to break it down to responding but I just cannot do it well enough. I shall just say that it is well written, informative and sensible.

**Peter1975** · 21 January 2017, 05:17 PM

I have been meaning to add some caveats to my post above. Many thanks for your kind remarks but it was a little premature me posting it. I had a bit of a bee in my bonnet and busy with other things, I rushed it so I could put it to one side. I will finish it one day.

It was really a first draft of my attempt to debunk the rape groups use of statistics to push their lunatic agenda and I missed a page of notes that fell on the floor. Saward, for example, talks about supporting a friend that was falsely accused, admits that it is a terrible thing to do but then dismisses it as an aberration. She annoyed me quite a bit, although I feel like I picked on her somewhat. She just seemed to personify the problem with "the other side" and although they have a great amount to add to improving care for genuine victims, they should certainly never be allowed to make policy. Unfortunately, their endless mantra of not enough convictions, victims won't come forward etc is echoed in parts of government, police and by the DPP.

The figures are simplistic bunk tacked on the end, inspired by shocked's great post. It would be good if we had a number we could use. There are too many variables and not enough data unfortunately but if we could use a percentage of the ONS crime stats, together with our own data we may be able to come up with a number we can throw back at them. They use simplistic bunk themselves. Unfortunately, the only FA in their eyes have been convicted of PCJ or WPT, even a no crimed report doesn't prove the accusation was maliscious.

Franticwithworry also wrote a great post and I can't think anything to disagree with. There is probably a great deal to add, this is a complex subject and FWW highlights some of the complexities brilliantly.

This was the thing that both annoys and concerns me with the rape groups. The lack of public discourse on why conviction rates are so low and have halved as they like to claim (compared to reporting, not cases in court) For one example, they do not talk about the prevalence of historical cases very much. Could these be responsible? Could it be that juries are less likely to convict when a complainant can't remember much from 30 years ago? They just want to avoid talking about it and say, the conviction rates have fallen, the law is failing us and something more must be done. I can't help but feel they are either disingenuous or just plain blinkered. Almost to the point that they are failing victims of rape themselves.

**Franticwithworry** · 22 January 2017, 01:10 PM

Ed get

It could be that the conviction rates are so low because there are so many reports without substance? There's no point in encouraging people to report 'assaults' if all that happens is that any and all contact between men and women gets reported as 'assault' and 'assaults' that never happened get invented.

**Peter1975** · 22 January 2017, 03:41 PM

Originally posted by Franticwithworry View Post

It could be that the conviction rates are so low because there are so many reports without substance? There's no point in encouraging people to report 'assaults' if all that happens is that any and all contact between men and women gets reported as 'assault' and 'assaults' that never happened get invented.

We know that happens. The policemans view, posted on here somewhere puts the amount of false claims as high as 8/10. Most of those, I doubt would be recorded as they would skew the statistics further and make the useless police look worse.

I don't have the exact quote to hand but I saw one of the rape groups spokesman saying " we find ourselves having to educate rape victims....the fear of not being believed leads them to not be honest about how much they had to drink or whether consensual activity took place"

In other words, they are not witnesses of truth and their claims, if there is any truth to them at all, are discredited at the investigation stage. They are not lying about the rape they insist, they are just lying about how it happened and that is the nasty polices fault, putting forces under pressure to help the poor victims tell a more robust story lest they have to record yet another complaint that the cps will take no further.

As for the doubling of complaints, putting aside what's in the news and the amount of historical cases, I offer this example of reading between the lines:

The 2013 CPS report to DPP Starmer, carried out over a 17 month period compared 35 prosecutions for false claims against 5,651 prosecutions for rape, ... only 35 liars against 5,600 rapes... there is no problem....

He added that the report also showed that a significant number of false allegations of rape (and domestic violence) "involved young, often vulnerable people. About half of the cases involved people aged 21 years old and under, and some involved people with mental health difficulties. In some cases, the person alleged to have made the false report had undoubtedly been the victim of some kind of offence, even if not the one that he or she had reported."

What?!

It's just silly kids making stuff up, they will soon learn when they grow up he seems to be saying. Or could he be letting slip that there is a problem with the millennials adopting the default position of crying rape when the bloke they slept with on a friday night didn't text them back?

On the one hand saying there are 2 liars a month so it's insignificant, and on the other, maybe, tacitly admitting why so many complaints are discarded - they are lies.

**Franticwithworry** · 22 January 2017, 07:05 PM

I know that happens too. It's almost too obvious to state and it was a slightly tongue-in-cheek remark and I hoped the question mark would convey that. It didn't. :-(

This may be pie-in-the-sky, but I would like to see every report taken seriously and treated with respect and due diligence. As I've said before, the complainant has no right to be believed no matter what. The accused has as much right to be believed and treated respectfully as the complainant. Complainers of sexual offences do not have a monopoly on the truth. Leading on to -

So, when NFA's are dished out, there should, I think, be a category of 'no crime' and or one that records officially that the complaint was not credible. In other words, something more than simply 'not enough evidence'. The police and the CPS are making themselves look foolish by always to come to such a vague conclusion at the end of their investigations and refusing to acknowledge when something cannot be true.

Take our experience in Scotland - taken to trial because 'the policy is to prosecute every sexual complaint that involves a minor. Not called to court on the day because the judge, prosecutor and defence agreed that no crime had taken place. No NFA, no verdict, no acknowledgement of any kind, and legal limbo because the complaint stays in the system and could be resurrected at any time though that's unlikely to happen. Why doesn't someone make the decision not to prosecute because there was no crime? What a waste of time, effort and money - the states and my man's. Are they so desperate for figures that they have to 'buy' them like this?

At the moment there seems to be too much of agencies, charities, help-groups or friends influencing what people think of occasions to which they were not witness. 'He touched you? That's an assault. You need to report it. It's your responsibility to report it.' 'You'd had a lot to drink? He must have raped you. You need to report it. It's your responsibility to report it.'

Vulnerable people might need help to come forward but they don't need pressure or to have interactions they were happy with turned into something that they are not.

What I was getting at with my original remark was that we need some way of categorising and counting NFA's.

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Prevalence of false rape and sexual assault accusations

Prevalence of false rape and sexual assault accusations

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