By VennerRoad, 17th Aug 2016
False rape allegations are on the rise. What are the causes of this, and how can we put a stop to the hysteria?
False rape accuser Rhiannon Brooker
In 1975, England & Wales saw 409 criminal trials for rape (of females); in 1986, this rose to 569 resulting in 415 convictions; 1996 saw 1,107 trials with 573 convictions; 2003 saw 1,063 trials with 710 convictions. In the 12 months to September 2014, there were 24,043 reported rapes in England & Wales. The number of reported rapes continues to increase, and the percentage of convictions continues to drop.
In the UK, usage of plastic bags dropped from an estimated 7 billion in the year prior to the introduction of a 5p charge to 500 million in the first six months after the charge.
How are the above statistics related? By the tragedy of the commons. If you are not au fait with the concept, here is the original article. The theory, which goes back a lot further, can be applied to both ecology and economics, but it is basically one of human psychology. When people of a certain left wing persuasion talk about a free this or a free that, the tragedy of the commons is one of the things they forget. Sunshine is free, everything else comes with a price tag. Just because you get something free, does not mean no one else is picking up the tab.
In a free or relatively free market, the price mechanism conveys information. If there is a shortage of a particular product, a rising price stimulates production. In the absence of a price mechanism, producers don’t know how much of a certain product to produce, or even what product to produce. This is one reason a demand economy (capitalism) is far superior to a command economy (socialism by all its many names). This can get very complicated, but there are some things that can be supplied free at the point of use without its resulting in chaos. For example, if a man breaks his leg, he will be treated free in a civilised country, but people will not be queuing up to break their legs just so they can be treated for free in hospital.
Elsewhere though, free stuff results in chaos. If your local supermarket were giving away free cans of baked beans – as much as the shopper could carry – how long would this last? Now let us return to false rape allegations. Has there really been a massive increase in rapes over the past thirty years? We are led to believe there has indeed, and also that much of this increase is due to the willingness of victims to come forward. We are told that at one time women were not taken seriously when they reported rape, they were ridiculed, their character was attacked, indeed, some would have us believe law enforcement was in cahoots with rapists. Is this really the case, or can there be a different and entirely more plausible explanation?
This analysis will concentrate on the UK, but it is valid for many other countries including the United States and Canada. The punishment for rape was and can still be Draconian. It was capital in England until 1841, indeed in 1835, two men were hanged for (consensual) buggery. Although the price of rape for an accused is still very high – imprisonment and lifelong stigmatisation – the price – or perhaps one should say the risk – of making a false rape allegation, is generally very small. Since the 1970s at least, a well-orchestrated and incessant propaganda campaign on both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere (including of late in India) has concentrated on lowering or removing altogether the cost to the accuser of making a false rape allegation. As with the free cans of baked beans from your local supermarket, this has naturally led to a surge.
Not only that, women are often rewarded for making false rape allegations. Although financial reward is not a significant factor, it is a factor in some instances. The International False Rape Timeline contains many examples of this.
Teenager Natalie Knighting claimed £7,500 for an imaginary rape; eventually she was given a six month sentence.
This year, Wendy Willson was given a five month sentence for a false rape claim made purely for financial reasons. Willson, not a young woman, claimed to have been violated by a burglar in her own home.
In New Zealand, generous payouts by the Accident Compensation Corporation led to a wave of false claims for all manner of imaginary accidents. In January 2002 it was reported “Under new law changes, people who claim to have been sexually abused can receive ACC payouts without having to complain to police”. The changes were scheduled to come into effect on April Fool’s Day, so clearly someone had a sense of humour.
Most of the rewards heaped on false rape accusers are not financial, but they are real none the less. Again, the International False Rape Timeline gives an insight into some of their motives, but they can include attention seeking, revenge against a man for some real or imagined slight, against a particular type of man, or against men in general; publicity including notoriety (fifteen minutes of fame), or even to promote an ideology. The old idea that a woman was ruined by a rape has been replaced by a new one, in particular some women, including celebrities, regard it as a bizarre status symbol to claim they have been raped, whether they have been or have not, not in the overwhelming majority of cases.
One claim that is made frequently about proven false rape accusers is that they have mental health issues with the implication that rape or no rape, they are victims and deserving of tea and sympathy rather than punishment.
This is absurd, in the first place, who does not have mental health issues in the Twenty-First Century? Our ancestors laboured from dawn to dusk in a world without electricity. The wealthy had an easier life, but if an ordinary person fell by the wayside, he was gone. A woman who went gaga might find herself chained to the wall in a bedlam, or even burned as a witch. Today, wars and austerity excepted, we have a higher standard of living than at any time in the past, yet people suffer from depression – like everyone, from eating disorders, they self-harm, we even have a particular disease associated with traffic, road rage, which on occasion can see an innocent motorist or civilian murdered over a triviality.
If a reasonably intelligent, educated woman makes a false allegation of rape against a man, and that false allegation results in his arrest, she has committed a despicable crime, and should be punished for it, no ifs, ands or buts. If she has genuine mental health issues or is vulnerable, she should be locked up to protect society or herself. Actions have consequences.
It is though not only false rape accusers who are rewarded by the ongoing rape of due process, for that is what is happening. Based on absurd, manipulated, and even contrived statistics, the anti-rape industry continues to insist the conviction rate for rape must be increased. The obvious way to do that is to refrain from bringing so many weak cases, and also by prosecuting false accusers to the full extent of the law, but they will have none of it.
Time and time again we hear the mantra that false allegations of rape are extremely rare, and that prosecuting false accusers will discourage genuine victims from coming forward. One braindead feminist academic dismisses false allegations per se.
Leaving aside the contrived statistics, anti-rape activists, so-called, are not shy of lying about rape themselves. After Alexander Economou proved the woman who had accused him of drugging and raping her was simply lying, one UK activist went on the Victoria Derbyshire TV programme and although not alluding to him by name, branded him a rapist again. After Rhiannon Brooker was shown decisively to have fabricated her rape allegations against Paul Fensome, the same woman and her organisation made a vociferous defence of this evil schemer, claiming she was innocent. The same nonsense can be found on the other side of the Atlantic. It is of course a non-sequitur that prosecuting false accusers is bad for justice. Most false allegations of crime are motivated by financial gain, eg bogus insurance claims. Very often in such cases there will be a real crime, although the value of the chattels stolen will be greatly exaggerated, but false claims of this nature are regularly prosecuted.
In any case, it is clear that the majority of rape allegations in the modern world, certainly in the West, are not rape but regret sex and similar. So many of them involve women who have consensual sex then days, months, even years later, claim to have been raped, and the authorities tolerate this. In the UK there is no statute of limitations on rape allegations; in Canada, statutes of limitations have been removed. Statutes of limitations in the United States vary, and are currently under attack. And it gets worse.
So-called rape shield laws introduced ostensibly to protect rape complainants have been used to stitch up innocent defendants, as in the case of Nathaniel Lewis who received an eight year sentence after being falsely accused of rape by student airhead Christina Heaslet. Five and a half years later, the Supreme Court of the United States quashed his conviction. At one time, the sexual history of a complainant may have been a cause for embarrassment, but in the Twenty-First Century when homosexuals aspire to and hold high public office, when celebrities and prominent business people talk openly about their sex lives and fetishes, and when even members of the Royal Family have been acknowledged publicly to commit adultery, is this really an issue?
Genuine rape victims and false accusers alike are guaranteed lifelong anonymity while the falsely accused must see his name dragged through the mud. There is a valid argument for anonymity, but only in cases involving minors – for obvious reasons, and celebrities when the well-known phenomenon of the bandwagon effect draws all manner of liars out from under their rocks, something that can and often does poison the minds of jurors against an accused. In these cases, neither the accuser nor the accused should be named publicly.
Finally, we should mention the sexual grievance industry. Earlier it was pointed out that false rape allegations are seldom made for financial reasons, but that is only part of the story. The reality is that there are untold droves of people out there from so-called mental health professionals and counsellors to charities, feminist academics, and ambulance-chasing lawyers who are making a comfortable living out of both false rape accusers and mentally disturbed women. Unless you have studied this subject, you can’t appreciate how far off the planet some of these people are. Some of those involved in this racket believe the UK, the US, Australia, and most likely the entire world to be controlled by networks of Devil worshippers who breed babies for sacrifice. It was this sort of insane belief that led to the McMartin and other cases in the United States plus similar witch-hunts elsewhere including the UK. These saw innocent people – women as well as men – given Draconian sentences for imaginary crimes, and entire families destroyed.
Therapists have had a particular pernicious effect, brainwashing already seriously disturbed women into believing they have been raped by their own fathers. One high profile victim of this sort of quackery is the American actress Roseanne Barr who was duped into believing she had been sexually abused as a baby by her mother.
In order to put a stop to false rape allegations and to properly serve genuine rape victims, we must remove the entire process from the tragedy of the commons, in short women who make gratuitously false allegations must pay a price, and those who encourage this madness for whatever reason must have the plug pulled on their obscene racket. So what is to be done in real terms?
Number 1: a statute of limitations for reporting rape. There could be a DNA exception for this, and special rules for the young and genuinely vulnerable adults, but there is absolutely no reason for a reasonably intelligent, educated woman to delay the report of her rape for months.
The widely accepted claim that such delay is the result of rape trauma syndrome or more generally, trauma, has absolutely no basis in fact. Rape trauma syndrome does not exist. The main reasons for such perceived delay are delusion and deception, not necessarily in that order.
Number 2: shutting down the sexual grievance industry. All so-called rape counselling services and related organisations should have their charitable status withdrawn, neither should they receive a penny of state funding, either at the national or local level, nor through the National Lottery. There should be an end to Legal Aid and state funding for law firms engaged in this racket, the most outrageous of which saw over two thousand bogus claims processed by one such firm, a scam that was exposed by Ministry Of Defence investigators.
A corollary of this is that rape crisis centres and so-called helplines should be replaced by dedicated police services.
While it is true that at times the police response to allegations of rape has been inadequate, it is not true they have learned nothing since the 1970s. Women detectives to investigate, women doctors to deal with rape victims; and dedicated forensic nurses (SANEs) are required, not zealots who will try to convince women to reinterpret their unsatisfactory sexual adventures as rape when what they have really experienced is bad sex.
Number 3: no more anonymity for alleged victims in rape cases, and an end to prejudicial practices such as pre-recorded cross-examination and testifying from behind screens.
Number 4: an end to this “I was too drunk to consent” nonsense. Contrary to feminist myth, it has always been an offence to ply a woman with drink in order to have sex with her.
William Camplin was so convicted in 1845, and transported for life, but young women who drink like fish and then have willing sex with men, including at times total strangers, are not rape victims, they are sluts. Some of the student cases especially that are brought to trial should never get anywhere near a courtroom.
Number 5: meaningful punishments for dedicated false rape accusers. The case of Rhiannon Brooker has already been mentioned, but the case of Alison Welfare was equally shocking. Her victim spent two months in custody, and but for CCTV evidence would almost certainly have received a sentence of ten years and upward, yet she was sentenced to a mere 12 months, which in practice would have been six.
For casual false rape claims that do not identify or lead to the arrest of a particular individual, offenders should be prosecuted for wasting police time subject to the discretion of the investigating officer.
The bottom line is the need to restore due process to all criminal investigations and trials that involve allegations of sexual impropriety. The anti-rape mafia has achieved the bizarre double of simultaneously demonising rape and trivialising it. If modern women are as empowered as their champions would like us to believe they are, they need to deal with this ugly business as adults, rather than allow themselves to be infantilised by those who ultimately do not have their best interests at heart.
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