One of the great fears that a lot of people seem to have about rape is:
If we believe more rape victims, then what if I get accused of rape?
There's some good news.
Firstly, unless you have some underlying severe personality disorder, the likelihood that you will go on to rape someone is incredibly low. As explained in my previous post, almost all rapists have some underlying psychiatric diagnosis, and most of those diagnoses are severe personality disorders. People with psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia or with intellectual or cognitive disorders are fairly unlikely to harm others, even though they do make up a small proportion of those who assault or rape people.
Secondly, we have the likelihood that someone will make a false rape accusation against you. Fortunately, only 5% or 1/20 rape accusations are false. When you consider that 1/4 of women (and 1/6 of men) are raped in their lifetimes and only 1/6 of all rapes are even reported in the first place, this gives you only 1/480 or so women and probably less than 1/720 men given less likely to report rapes who would make a false rape accusation. And that's assuming that people who make false rape accusations only make one of those. The more they make on average, the rarer these people are. Over a lifetime we only tend to know and interact with 500-1000 people, including distant acquaintances. Which leaves us with the most likely outcome being that we might know one or two false rape accusers, and probably won't even know about the accusation they made. On the other hand, 21% of the people we know have been or will be raped or sexually assaulted, which is a horrifying statistic.
So no, it is not very likely that you will get falsely accused of rape. In fact it is exceedingly unlikely. With this in mind, we can go back to the real issues at hand: preventing and punishing rape and supporting and helping rape victims.
Just to be clear, here are some infographics for everyone, because these days no article is complete without infographics. EDIT: one of the infographics has been edited for clarity, to include references and for greater accuracy. The reason for not including female perpetrators and under-reporting of male rapes to the police are due to a lack of available data, not because these issues don't exist. Female perpetrators are very much under-reported and sadly very few male victims (of both male or female perpetrators) go to the police.
Additionally, I posted my infographic on imgur so I could share it with a friend before I posted here, and decided to see what would happen if I posted it to their gallery. The results were... telling and somewhat predictable.
References:
- Finkelhor, D., Hotaling, G., Lewis, I., & Smith, C. (1990). Sexual abuse in a national survey of adult men and women: Prevalence, characteristics, and risk factors. Child abuse & neglect, 14(1), 19-28.
- Tjaden, P., & Thoennes, N. (2000). Full report of the prevalence, incidence, and consequences of violence against women: findngs from the National Violence Against Women Survey. Washington, DC: United States Department of Justice, 71.
- Mouzos, J., & Makkai, T. (2004). Women’s experiences of male violence: findings from the Australian component of the International Violence Against Women Survey (IVAWS). No.: ISBN 0-642-53842-5, 162
- Lisak, D., & Miller, P. M. (2002). Repeat rape and multiple offending among undetected rapists. Violence and victims, 17(1), 73-84..
- Lonsway, K. A., Archambault, J., & Lisak, D. (2009). False reports: Moving beyond the issue to successfully investigate and prosecute non-stranger sexual assault. The Voice, 3(1), 1-11.