False accusation doesn't specifically mean the story was made up* It could be that someone was wrongly identified as a criminal The truth about false accusations in the US is that we really don't know for sure what the percent of false claims are. We have estimates from 2-10% with the FBI saying it is 8% But this only includes cases that were PROVEN to be false by investigation. That means there are people in prison today who committed no crime but are being punished. What is unnerving about the data is that one study suggest black men are more likely to be innocent of the crimes due to misidentification and due to implicit biases from victims. As social justice groups and feminists rally for people to listen and believe perhaps we should but we should verify before moving forward.
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It was the lynching that outraged African-Americans, spurred the civil rights movement, and etched the victim's name in history, Emmett Till.
The 14-year-old Chicagoan was visiting relatives in the cotton country of the Mississippi Delta on 24 August, 1955, when he allegedly wolf-whistled at a white woman.
Three days later, his body was found in the Tallahatchie River.
Till had a bullet hole in his head, an eye gouged out, and other wounds.
The murderers had wrapped barbed wire around his neck and weighted him down with a cotton gin fan.
It was a ghastly crime that changed the United States, but the woman at the center of it, Carolyn Bryant, long remained an enigma.
A few weeks after the murder, the then 21-year-old testified in court that Till had grabbed and verbally harassed her in a grocery store.
I was just scared to death, she said.
The all-white jury cleared her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W.
Millam, of the crime.
They later publicly admitted their guilt, saying they wanted to warn other blacks.
Carolyn Bryant disappeared from public view.
Now, 62 years later, it has emerged that she fabricated her testimony about Till making physical and verbal advances.
Following the accusations against Brett Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey Ford, many people on the right were saying that she was probably lying, and that false accusations are relatively common.
So I decided to look into the data, and I found something rather alarming.
At least according to some studies, there are many more black men who are falsely accused of rape than white men.
But not only that, it appears that a man will be more likely to be falsely accused than a rapist will actually go to jail.
I felt like that's something everyone can be mad about.
It doesn't matter if you're a feminist, or you oppose feminists, you're intersectional, or a social justice warrior, or you're a conservative.
The fact remains that most people, I would assume almost all of them, would be upset to see that actual rapists go free.
And I would imagine that most people would be ashamed to find that our country would put innocent people in prison for crimes they didn't commit.
It worries me when you see the data showing that more men will be falsely accused than men will actually go to prison for being rapists.
So let's take a look at something called the Innocence Project, and the first star we have is from the hill.
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From the Hill, what the Innocence Project can teach us about sexual assault allegations.
A narrative has emerged over the past few years that women alleging sexual assault must be believed.
That narrative took on heightened visibility in the wake of the sexual assault allegations of Christine Blasey Ford and the denials from Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
It is imperative that all sexual assault allegations be taken seriously and investigated appropriately.
Something that has not always been the case.
But the Innocence Project, which was founded in 1992, has demonstrated through DNA testing that there are numerous cases of men sent to jail because they were wrongly convicted of sexual assault.
The organization boasts of 362 DNA exonerees to date, people who spent years, and in many cases decades, behind bars because they were convicted of a crime, murder, rape, assault, etc.
they did not commit.
Moreover, The organization's efforts using DNA to clear innocent people have helped identify 158 real perpetrators who were later convicted of 150 additional violent crimes, including 80 sexual assaults, according to the Innocence Project.
In news reports of those cases in which men were wrongly convicted of sexual assault, including rape, The victim identified the accused.
Indeed, the Innocence Project claims, mistaken eyewitness identifications contributed to approximately 70% of the more than 350 wrongful convictions in the United States overturned by post-conviction DNA evidence.
Misidentifying an alleged perpetrator of sexual assault crime is rare, with the majority of those cases involving a stranger to the victim.
Knowingly accusing someone falsely is even more rare, but it does happen.
That's why even when a very credible victim raises a strong allegation, some type of evidence is needed.
Mistakes happen.
Just ask the hundreds of wrongly convicted people freed by the Innocence Project.
Last month, the BBC ran this story, The Truth About False Assault Accusations by Women.
Over the past 20 years, only 2 to 10 percent of rape accusations are proven to be fake, argue the authors of a 2010 US study.
That figure does not include Any unsubstantiated accusations where an investigation was unable to prove a sexual assault occurred.
So an accurate figure of the total remains unknown.
Other studies have figures in the same range.
The FBI has put the number of unfounded rapes, those determined to be false, after investigation at 8%.
Fake rape accusations get a lot of attention.
Both the Duke lacrosse team case in 2006 and the alleged University of Virginia gang rape in 2014 were widely covered by the media.
They were terrible miscarriages of justice, but they were not representative.
The BBC covers how there's an estimate of 2 to 10% of false rape accusations being provably false, with the FBI saying it's 8%.
And they state that this means they were able to prove it.
It's also possible there are actually more false claims that have never been proven false.
The fact that the Innocence Project has freed hundreds of men who were falsely convicted of rape says that the number is actually probably a little bit higher.
But unless we can prove them to be false claims, we can't add them to the statistics of false rape claims until those people are proven to be falsely convicted.
And that means there are probably people who will spend time in prison for decades, for the rest of their life, and never be able to clear their name.
And while that is a miscarriage of justice, I think there's something interesting that can be pointed out.
According to RAINN, which is the Rape Abuse Incest National Network, they say the vast majority of perpetrators will not go to jail or prison.
Out of every 1,000 rapes, 994 perpetrators will walk free.
They say that 310 are reported to the police.
57 reports lead to arrest.
11 cases get referred to prosecutors.
7 will lead to a felony conviction, but only 6 will actually be incarcerated.
And that means if we go by even, the 2% figure, the lowest estimate, we can say that an even number of men will be falsely accused as the number of people who actually go to jail for the crime.
But if we use the FBI statistic, it says that there are more people being falsely accused of rape than rapists actually going to jail.
Right now there are a lot of people saying, listen and believe, I believe women, or believe survivors.
But the old adage is, trust but verify.
And that means we should probably listen and believe, but verify.
If someone comes forward with a claim of a crime, even if it's not sexual assault, we should listen and believe.
But verify.
We shouldn't take action against anyone unless there's evidence to prove it.
Unfortunately, that means sometimes bad people will go free.
But it is better that guilty people escape than innocent people suffer.
And as we can see with the Innocence Project, there are a lot of people who are falsely convicted of crimes that...
Now, the reason I highlighted the Emmett Till case in the beginning was because it was an admitted false accusation that resulted in the death of a young black child.
Innocent people are being punished for crimes they didn't commit, and the actual rapists get away with the crimes.
Now the reason I highlighted the Emmett Till case in the beginning
was because it was an admitted false accusation that resulted in the death of a young black child.
And when looking through data, I found one source that says, in most instances, false accusations, they tend to be
racist.
This is a report called Race and Wrongful Convictions in the United States, and it was published by the University of Michigan.
In the report, they have a section on sexual assault.
They say, judging from exonerations, a black prisoner serving time for sexual assault is three and a half times more likely to be innocent than a white sexual assault convict.
The major cause for this huge racial disparity appears to be the higher danger of mistaken eyewitness identification by white victims in violent crimes with black assailants.
Assaults on white women by African American men are a small minority of all sexual assaults in the United States, but they constitute half of sexual assaults with eyewitness misidentifications that led to exoneration.
The unreliability of cross-racial eyewitness identification also appears to have contributed to racial disparities in false convictions for other crimes, but to a lesser extent.
Eyewitness misidentifications do not completely explain the racial disparity in sexual assault exonerations.
Some misidentifications themselves are in part the products of racial bias, and other convictions that led to sexual assault exonerations were marred by implicit biases, racially tainted official misconduct, and in some cases, explicit racism.
African-American sexual assault exonerees receive much longer prison sentences than white sexual assault exonerees, and they spend on average almost four and a half years longer in prison before exoneration.
It appears that innocent black sexual assault defendants receive harsher sentences than whites if they are convicted, and then face greater resistance to exoneration even in cases in which they are ultimately released.
Personally, I don't believe that Christine Blasey Ford fits the profile of a false accusation, and I don't believe she was lying, but there's no real evidence to claim she's telling the truth, either.
So, I can listen to her.
We can believe her, but we can't take action in any regard without evidence.
She was able to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and I believe that was treating her with a great deal of respect.
But without evidence or corroboration, nothing could be done, and thus Brett Kavanaugh has been confirmed.
A lot of people claim that Kavanaugh is not facing a criminal trial, and this is a job interview.
But as I explained in other videos, we shouldn't prohibit people from having jobs, even the Supreme Court, simply because someone has an accusation against them.
In all things, people deserve the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
Think about the men who have been falsely accused.
More men falsely accused than rapists actually going to jail.
This means that those who are falsely accused have their lives upended, even if only for a couple years while the investigation is going on.
There is a ridiculous stigma to being accused of rape.
And many people, mostly men, sometimes women, deal with trauma.
They lose their jobs, they lose their home, they lose their friends.
Their lives are destroyed, even if they don't go to prison.
We shouldn't allow people to be punished in any way, be it by the criminal courts or by our culture, simply because there was a claim without evidence.
There's a lot of data that claims there's this amount of false rapes and this amount of people going to jail, and it's hard to know if any of the data is actually accurate.
I used the wide range of 2 to 10% because that's what's widely cited among most sources you will search through, and the FBI, which says 8%.
There's also the Making a Difference Project, which says 7%.
It's hard to know for sure.
But when we use RAINN, which is a non-profit helping victims of sexual violence, they say only about 2% of perpetrators will actually go to prison.
If that's the estimate we're going to use, then more people are falsely accused than rapists actually go to jail.
There are other estimates, but the reason I'm using RAINN is because RAINN is a non-profit that is trying to advocate for victims.
The National Review has a story that says, The piece basically talks about how there's a bunch of different ways to interpret the data, and it's presented in a partisan manner.
manner, but they end by saying, I have a strong aversion to misleading statistics, especially
when they are used as arguments from authority to shut down debate.
What percentage of sexual assault claims involve actual criminal incidents?
I have no idea, and I doubt that anyone really does.
When it comes to hot-button political and cultural issues, we need to do a better job of admitting that we don't know.
This piece does well to highlight that the data is all over the place, and it's hard to know what the actual numbers are.
The reason I wanted to do this video is because it is a fact that people go to prison for crimes they didn't commit, and that rapists don't go to prison when they should.
That is something everyone should be mad about.
But we do have data from the University of Michigan that it tends to be black men who are wrongly accused, sometimes because they were misidentified, sometimes because people are actually racist.
But I'd imagine that people on the left should be upset about this.
We can say, listen, and believe.
But if we don't verify, we will repeat the mistakes of the past.
And that's why I opened this video with a story about Emmett Till.
Because it's happened before, it will happen again, and it is happening today.
If you're someone who doesn't like racism, you don't like false accusations, and you want rapists to go to prison for the crimes they commit, I think this is an issue that most people could actually get behind, and perhaps find some unity.
But I don't know.
I feel like a lot of people just want to be tribal for the sake of tribalism.
They don't want to accept the data.
They don't want to read the sources.
Many people want to claim that racism isn't a big problem.
Many people want to claim that false accusations don't actually exist and are extremely rare.
But the truth is, false accusations do exist, and many of those falsely accused are falsely accused for racial reasons.
So maybe this is something everyone should pay attention to.
But let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
It's very difficult to actually know for sure what is going on.
That's why I ended with the national review piece straight up admitting we don't know.
We're trying to do better, but we know some of it is true.
So comment below and let me know what you think.
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New videos every day at 4 p.m.
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