Why do some people refuse to accept that some rape allegations are false?

Because it's rape when the woman decides it is: no more, no less.

You honestly believe this? I was going to post something that no actual genuine person would think this, but apparent I'm wrong.

Stupid things like this is what's caused all this "feminist" hate.

There is a reluctance among feminists to admit that false accusations DO happen and are a big deal. Your logic doesn't really follow though. You have to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that someone has committed a crime to find them guilty - and rape is notoriously difficult to do this with as it's often one person's word against another with little evidence - so if someone is found guilty there is a lot of evidence for their guilt. If someone is found not guilty then all that means is that we can't be sure what happens or there's one bit of evidence we don't trust, it doesn't mean innocent, it means can't prove guilt.

'Innocent until proven guilty' is a defining maxim of any civilised justice system. If there is not enough evidence to convict them then the presumption is that they are innocent. To openly throw doubt on their innocence on the facile basis that it can be difficult to prove a rape beyond all reasonable doubt is shabby behaviour, especially when this person has just had their reputation dragged through the mud already and suffered the stress of teetering on the brink of a lengthy prison sentence.

'Innocent until proven guilty' is a defining maxim of any civilised justice system. If there is not enough evidence to convict them then the presumption is that they are innocent. To openly throw doubt on their innocence on the facile basis that it can be difficult to prove a rape beyond all reasonable doubt is shabby behaviour, especially when this person has just had their reputation dragged through the mud already and suffered the stress of teetering on the brink of a lengthy prison sentence.

Whenever a rape allegation manages to reach the public eye, and is later thrown out of court, or the defendant found not guilty, you always have a plethora of feminists posting

"Just because he was acquitted/found not guilty doesn't mean it wasn't rape!".


By their own logic, every time someone is found guilty of rape they should be posting

"Just because he was found guilty doesn't mean it was rape!".

I particularly dislike how they sometimes bring up low conviction rates for rape, and the particular "conviction rate" they've cited is based on the number of convictions against the number of allegations - some of those allegations will be false, and surely that messes up the "conviction rate"?

Except that's not even remotely a valid extension of their logic.

They are probably trying to communicate - some more successfully than others - that "innocent until proven guilty" goes both ways. There are a lot of people on the internet, including (or rather, especially) on this forum who will argue that any dropped case or acquittal means that the alleged victim maliciously lied. In their eyes, she can't have made a mistake, or dropped her case due to peer pressure, or just lacked evidence, or whatever. She immediately becomes LITERALLY WORSE THAN A REAL RAPIST.

See this thread, with absolutely no details of the case other than that it was dropped, people on the first page are saying the following about a 17 year old girl:

"He had part of his future in his vision and some selfish cow decided to jeopardise his ambitions
Such a cowardly thing to do"

"So is the bitch going to rot in jail or what? Tell me at least something positive comes from this story?"

"It annoys me ALOT when women do this"

"i hope her guilt twists her into something miserable"

"Hope she suffers for what she has done."

^innocent until proven guilty

In their defense, the article did state "false accusation" several times, which may well have misled readers that only glanced at it.

I agree that dropping an allegation doesn't necessarily imply it was false. However, it does make one question why somebody would put a boy through that only to decide 2 weeks later not to stand by their initial allegation.

Except that's not even remotely a valid extension of their logic.

Technically, his statement is correct as part of the law of evidence. Forgive me if this is a little slow, but it’s worth setting out the reasoning in full.

We must distinguish (a) the facts/offence – here rape- in law (i.e. the outcome of a legal decision) from (b) the facts/offence in fact (i.e. what really, truly happened). The ideal of any law of evidence is to have a perfect match between (a) and (b), so that the facts as found in the court perfectly and identically resemble what actually happened. However, it is not within (present) human capabilities to achieve this, because we have no fully reliable way of working out what happened in the past.

Therefore, our law of evidence ((a)) has to try to uncover (b) as best it can, and the way it does so is ‘second-hand’, through witnesses, physical evidence etc. These cannot produce an outcome with absolute certainty because the procedure in the law of evidence is only an attempted, and in practice imperfect, substitute for (b), we instead have to adopt standards of proof: i.e. if you get enough evidence to pass the threshold standard, the facts in law - (a) - will be conclusively presumed to represent the facts in fact - (b).

The criminal standard is proof ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. Therefore, if the prosecutor cannot prove the facts of the offence in law – (a) – to be so certain that no reasonable person would doubt that they accurately reflect what actually happened – (b) – then the case fails. There was, in law, no offence. That does not necessarily mean, however, that there was no offence in fact/reality. That may or may not have actually occurred. The law is just conclusively presuming that its decision is accurate (and that presumption is a fiction, because it cannot be sure of this). Many people on this thread have agreed with that proposition. Conversely, if the prosecutor does prove the facts of the offence in law – (a) – beyond reasonable doubt, then the law conclusively presumes that the offence occurred. Therefore, in law, there was a rape – (a). That does not necessarily mean, however, that the offence existed in fact – (b). We are only told that it definitely occurred in fact because the facts found in law are conclusively presumed to reflect reality (which, as just explained, is a fictitious presumption, because it cannot always be true). This is why, occasionally, we can get false convictions of innocent parties for any offence.

Therefore, he is/would be (I’m not going to put words into his mouth) strictly correct to say that, even if rape is found in law ((a)), it does not conclusively demonstrate (with the legal fiction lifted) that it happened in fact ((b)).