False Rape Accusations — Who’s The Victim?

He had tried to hang himself, and had managed to break some veins, maybe fracture a little cartilage, by the time his wife discovered him. It had been touch and go, I suppose, and a long time in the intensive care unit, but he had truly cheated death.

This 55-year old highly-credentialed university professor didn’t look the part of a depraved rapist — little or no hair, red-faced, bashful, perhaps — but that very accusation caused him such despair that he tried to take his own life.

A student had accused him of this horrible “impropriety.“

Obviously, these charges of sexual misconduct shamed him severely.  He maintained that the charge had been trumped up.  The woman who had accused him had indeed some kind of a psychiatric history.

It is not uncommon for women to make this sort of accusation.

He told me he did not want to hate women.  He also told me that he had a female judge.

I cannot help but think of the E.M. Forster novel “A Passage to India” which draws as accurate a psychological picture as anyone could of the sort of young woman who could make such an accusation.

Strangely enough, I could find essentially nothing about this as part of the psychological literature.  I did find a lawyer who had started a blog online, and said that this was a very large and essentially ignored problem.

He even cites a woman who accused a man of rape when he refused to buy her a beer. Somehow this seems the opposite of politically correct.  And yet, some of the articles on this self-same blog suggest that as much as half of all rape accusations are false.

Other sources, usually from feminists (some again cited on the self-same blog) cite as few as 2 to 8%.

I will admit that I thought little about this until I saw the patient cited above, in a clinic where pretty much all the patients are poor folks.  And that is what the professor became, after a decision against him, and being dismissed from his job.

Who can say what is worse — for a woman to be victimized by rape or for a man to be victimized by a false accusation? We want to seek truth, don’t we? I can’t help but think of the famous speech by Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men” where he said “You can’t handle the truth.”

Truth — real truth — must be independent of political correctness. It takes guts.

I was actually impressed by the attempted objectivity by — would you believe — the center for military relations.

This group, set up allegedly as an independent 501 (c3) not-for-profit corporation, has a series of statements about military personnel matters. They did assert, in response to the question of gays in the military, that homosexually was incompatible with military service in 1981.

So I am putting together the fragments and seeing that somehow, we are still so confused about sex and lies that we have trouble describing what is going on, let alone seeking truth.

It will take time to move forward.