Stories of abused men...

A collection of experiences from abused men via reddit. Obvious trigger warning:

Male Redditors who have been abused or assaulted (sexually or otherwise) Did you seek help/support and were you able to find it?, [2], [3]

Another link I had floating around is about men suspected to be pedophiles:

Parents/Adults of reddit, why is a guy an instant pedo on sight?, [2]

IAmA former Rape Crisis Advocate who provided support to Male victims of Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence. I worked at one of only two centers nationally who provides shelter to male victims. AMA!

Some more information on false allegations

A study via Cotwa:

The study, which was published Monday, analyzed the results of new DNA testing from 634 sexual assault and homicide cases that took place in Virginia between 1973 and 1987. DNA testing was not available at the time the crimes occurred, but the study was possible because a state forensic serologist - who processed biological evidence in serious criminal cases - had retained some physical evidence, such as cotton swabs and clothing swatches.

When these old pieces of evidence were subjected to DNA testing, 5 percent of those convicted were exonerated of the crime. When only sexual assault cases were considered, the number of those exonerated jumped even higher. DNA testing supported the exoneration of between 8 and 15 percent of those convicted of a sexual crime.

Previous research had put the rate of wrongful conviction around three percent. But a difference in methodology may explain the disparity between the two estimates.

Lemon told the Associated Press that the results from the Virginia study could most likely be applied to the rest of the nation. Source

The report acknowledged certain limitations. For instance, it said that in two-thirds of the cases the samples didn't have enough DNA for testing. Roman said that may mean the number of false convictions is much higher.

Roman said there likely are "dozens, if not hundreds, of people who were convicted erroneously; dozens, if not hundreds, of people who were not convicted of a crime they committed who may have gone on to commit new crimes; and there were dozens, if not hundreds, of people who thought they had justice as a victim of a horrible crime who didn't." Source

I group this under the umbrella term of false allegations although wrongly convicted might be more fitting here.

And one huge document that I picked from my to do pile. As usual, the more interesting data points:

False Rape Allegations: An Assault On Justice by Bruce Gross, PhD, JD, MBA - The Forensic Examiner - 2009

Although there is no doubt that false rape allegations occur, it is extremely difficult to determine what percentage of rape reports is intentionally false. This is due to many factors, including jurisdictional variation in definition, criteria, and reporting practices, as well as the fact that not all rapes are reported. Although the FBI had set 8% as the average rate of false (actually, unfounded) accusations during the late 1990s, there is remarkable variation in the estimates of false allegations of rape found in the literature (Kanin, 1994; Epstein, 2005). A review of those studies on false rape accusations conducted between 1968 and 2005 showed a percentage range from 1-90% (Rumney, 2006).

Very little formal research has been conducted on the prevalence of false allegations of rape. One study looked at the 109 cases of forcible rape that were disposed of in one small midwestern town between 1978 and 1987 (Kanin, 1994). The given town was specifically selected for study because the police department used a uniquely objective and thorough protocol when investigating rape complaints. Among other procedural safeguards, officers did not have the discretion to drop rape investigations if they concluded the complaint was "suspect" or unfounded. Every rape accusation had to be thoroughly investigated and included offering a polygraph to both the accuser and the accused. Cases were only determined to be false if and when the accuser admitted that no rape occurred.

The researchers further investigated those cases that the police, through their investigation, had ultimately determined were "false" or fabricated. During the follow-up investigation, the complainants held fast to their assertion that their rape allegation had been true, despite being told they would face penalties for filing a false report. As a result, 41% of all of the forcible rape complaints were found to be false. To further this study, a similar analysis was conducted on all of the forcible rape complaints filed at two large midwestern public universities over a 3-year period. Here, where polygraphs were not offered as part of the investigatory procedure, it was found that 50% of the complaints were false.

Charles P. McDowell, a researcher in the United States Air Force Special Studies Division, studied the 1,218 reports of rape that were made between 1980 and 1984 on Air Force bases throughout the world (McDowell, 1985). Of those, 460 were found to be "proven" allegations either because the "overwhelming preponderance of the evidence" strongly supported the allegation or because there was a conviction in the case. Another 212 of the total reports were found to be "disproved" as the alleged victim convincingly admitted the complaint was a "hoax" at some point during the initial investigation. The researchers then investigated the 546 remaining or "unresolved" rape allegations including having the accusers submit to a polygraph. Twenty-seven percent (27%) of these complainants admitted they had fabricated their accusation just before taking the polygraph or right after they failed the test. (It should be noted that whenever there was any doubt, the unresolved case was re-classified as a "proven" rape.) Combining this 27% with the initial 212 "disproved" cases, it was determined that approximately 45% of the total rape allegations were false.

Unfortunately, like the two studies presented here, the empirical studies that exist on the frequency of false rape allegations are sparse in number and have notable limitations. Small sample sizes and non-representative samples preclude generalizability. Regardless, the mere number of publicized incidents of false accusations of rape over the last two decades indicates not only a need for further investigation into the problem, but a better understanding of how to identify such cases. [...]

The most frequent context and motive for the fabricated rape was consensual sex with an acquaintance that led to some sort of problem for the accuser. The perceived problem was typically something that caused feelings of shame and guilt in the accuser (such as contracting a sexually transmitted disease or becoming pregnant), which was bound to be discovered and received negatively by family or friends.

Approximately half of the accusers who were motivated by a need for an alibi identified the alleged rapist. Their goal was not to harm or cause problems for the acquaintance, but to protect themselves in what they perceived to be a desperate situation. As with most lies, the false rape accusation allowed the accuser to deny responsibility by creating an alternate reality into which to escape.

The next most common reason for lying about being a victim of rape was revenge, rage, or retribution. In the Midwest study, this included 27% of the non-student and 44% of the student accusers. In these cases, the false victim had suffered some real or perceived wrong, rejection, or betrayal by the alleged rapist. As the purpose of making the accusation was to obtain some measure of revenge, the "suspect" was always identified. Researchers in the Air Force study also found that spite or revenge and the need to compensate for a sense of personal failure through an alibi accusation were the primary motives for false rape reports.

False Allegation - Divorce edition

The data is not rock solid, but here is what I got. From some reports SAVE offered, there was an interesting factoid in the "Cost of false allegations" one:

In about 70% of cases, the allegation is deemed to be unnecessary or false. Source: Johnston J et al. Allegations and substantiations of abuse in custody-disputing families. Family Court Review, Vol. 43, No. 2, 2005. & Foster BP. Analyzing the cost and effectiveness of governmental policies. Cost Management, Vol. 22, No. 3, 2008. 10, 11

I could not find the data via google scholar but instead found this part:

CUSTODY DISPUTES INVOLVING ALLEGATIONS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: TOWARD A DIFFERENTIATED APPROACH TO PARENTING PLANS - Peter G. Jaffe, Janet R. Johnston, Claire V. Crooks, Nicholas Bala - 2008

Multiple, serious conflicting allegations of child maltreatment, domestic violence, and parental abuse of drugs and alcohol are commonly raised in high-conflict custody-litigating postseparation families. Substantiation of claims can be difficult, which poses great challenges for professionals involved in making parenting plans. With regard to substantiation of those claims, published research is limited, and studies are mostly of small and nonrandomly drawn samples, but findings from the few studies that exist indicate a significant proportion of domestic violence allegations (50–75%) and child abuse allegations (22–52%) in family law matters can be subsequently substantiated in some manner (Bala, Mitnick, Trocmé, & Houston, in press; Bala & Schuman, 1999; Brown, 2003; Johnston,
Lee, Olesen, & Walters, 2005; Shaffer & Bala, 2003; Thoennes & Tjaden, 1990).

It took me a while to understand that paragraph. This means that about 25-50% of DV allegations and 48-78% of child abuse allegations can NOT be substantiated. That is a whole lot if you ask me. But again, data is not rock solid.

Nice quote on false rape accusation vs believing rape victims

“People are making a false dichotomy out of this. It’s not either believe rape victims or give the accused due process. Believe rape victims insofar as it warrants personal kindness and aid. Believe the accused insofar as it warrants a fair trial and the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven. Saying you don’t want to rush and call someone a rapist doesn’t mean you want to rush and call someone else a liar.”

Thanks for the find Vejuz

A Survey on False Allegation by SAVE

The way the survey is worded is a bit disappointed as one would like to see more detailed results. Anyhow, still somewhat interesting / relevant.:

Telephone calls were placed to 10,000 households around the country. [...] These are the highlights:

- 11% of respondents said they themselves had been falsely accused of abuse
- Over 15% of the respondents personally knew someone who has been falsely accused
- 81% of the falsely accused persons were male
- Nearly 70% of the accusers were female
- In over a quarter of the cases – 26% – the accusation was made as part of a child custody dispute

College Rape Accusations and the Presumption of Male Guilt

The important part:

OCR requires universities to render judgment using "a preponderance of the evidence" standard. This means that in a rape case, a campus disciplinary board of faculty, administrators and perhaps students serves as both judge and jury. Few if any of these judges are likely to have professional competence in fact-gathering, evidence analysis or judicial procedure. Yet to deliver a verdict of guilty, they need only believe that the accused is more likely than not to have committed the crime.

This is the lowest standard. It is much less demanding than "beyond a reasonable doubt," which is used in the criminal justice system, and the intermediate standard of "clear and convincing proof." Yale, Stanford and many other universities have rushed to comply with OCR's directives.

On campus, where casual sex is celebrated and is frequently fueled by alcohol, the ambiguity that often attends sexual encounters is heightened and the risk of error in rape cases is increased. The consequences for a wrongly convicted student are devastating: Not only is he likely to be expelled, but he may well be barred from graduate or professional school and certain government agencies, suffer irreparable damage to his reputation, and still be exposed to criminal prosecution.

“A lack of conviction doesn’t make a person innocent.”

Says feminist Susan Brownmiller. Hattip to Toy Soldiers.

What about innocent until proven guilty?

Are Men Society's Scapegoats?

An article that gives us some neat factoids:

"Men are about 19 more times more likely than women to say they have been falsely accused of sexual abuse. About 85 percent of these abuse allegations are made by women during battles over parent time, during the throes of divorce, or when a live-in situation is failing. ... "(A) sex-abuse charge -- even if false -- often costs the father his job, his health, his friends, his reputation, and his relationship with his child." [Citing Warren Farrell]

[...] The U.S. Department of Health and Human Service's Administration for Children & Families says of the percentage of the 3.3 million referrals for child abuse and neglect in 2009 it investigated, "Two-thirds of reports found all allegations to be unsubstantiated or intentionally false (64.3% and 0.1%, respectively)."

[...] "As a society, we don't typically think of men in the role of a victim. We can't even recognize it when we're confronted by physical evidence," Palmatier writes. "On the other hand, we're inclined to believe accusations about men."

Not only is it unfair and dishonest, she says, but it's "damaging to boys and young men, gender relations, relationships, families and 'the best interests of the children.' And it gives the women who are predators a free pass."

Automatically assuming the worst of men is a form of discrimination, she, Farrell and others say. And they're right.

Some DV tidbits linked via that article:

Ongoing ASU research may create more understanding of female perpetrators of “intimate partner violence” and encourage services for both the perpetrators and male victims.
Kellie Palazzolo, an assistant professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, is the adviser for the research project that began fall 2009.
One goal of the research is to understand how college students perceive female and male perpetrators, she said.

[...] “It’s often been taken for granted that women can’t really do that much damage, so it’s OK to maybe slap your boyfriend or do something of that nature,” Palazzolo said.

[...W]hen the man or woman was violent against a victim but didn’t kill the victim, participants said the male perpetrator should be punished more than the female perpetrator.

“When a man hits a woman, society has a perception that a man should never hit a woman,” Scarduzio said. “That’s just kind of a cultural norm.”

Also, the results found that when a woman hits a man, there is another reaction.

“People try to explain that and say, ‘Well maybe she was acting in self-defense or maybe he did something to her to make her hit him or maybe it was an accident,’” Scarduzio said.

[...] “People don’t want to think that a female can be violent just on her own, without someone provoking her,” Scarduzio said.

She said this view can hinder services for women who are violent and need to be helped as well as for male victims.

[...] Katie Harris, a doctoral communications student working on the research, said male victims are portrayed negatively through stereotypes.

“When men are victims of intimate partner violence, people tend to say things like, ‘Oh, well, he’s a wimp for getting beat up by a girl. He isn’t a real man,’” Harris said.

Feminism is built on believing women’s accounts of sexual use and abuse by men.

...said Catharine MacKinnon. This article gives us some numbers on false reporting:

Advocacy literature typically claims that about 2 percent of rape complaints are found to be false, the same rate as for reports of other violent crimes. But that figure seems to have no basis in research. According to the FBI, about 9 percent of rape reports are dismissed as “unfounded,” without charges being filed. While advocates claim that this is often because the authorities lack proof or distrust reports of acquaintance rape, dismissals due to insufficient evidence usually occur further down the pipeline. Generally, an “unfounded” complaint is one in which the accuser recants or her story is contradicted by available evidence.

Gauging the true prevalence of false accusations is extremely difficult, particularly since rape reports are handled and recorded differently from one jurisdiction to another. But what reliable information is available suggests that the figure is not insubstantial.

In a particularly controversial study published in 1994, now-retired Purdue University sociologist Eugene Kanin found that 40 percent of rape reports filed in an Indiana town over a 10-year period turned out to be false by the “victim’s” own admission. Kanin (ironically, a pioneering researcher on sexual assault in dating situations) has been widely criticized for using data from a police department that subjected rape complainants to lie detector tests, which many believe are likely to mislabel anxious or agitated victims as liars and pressure them to recant. He found a similar pattern, however, in police records from two state universities where lie detectors were not used and all victims were interviewed by female officers.

While Kanin has cautioned against generalizing from his research, his conclusion that “false rape accusations are not uncommon” is supported by other evidence. Some years ago, a Washington Post investigation in Virginia and Maryland found that nearly one in four rape reports in 1990-91 were rejected as unfounded, and many of the women in those cases admitted they had lied when the newspaper contacted them. In several surveys of prosecutors and law enforcement officials, estimates of the share of rape complaints that turn out to be false have ranged from one in eight to one in five.

Also there is this study:

Over 15% of the respondents personally knew someone who has been falsely accused
81% of the falsely accused persons were male
Nearly 70% of the accusers were female
In over a quarter of the cases – 26% – the accusation was made as part of a child custody dispute
11% of respondents said they themselves had been falsely accused of abuse

Those numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt though...

Shifting the burden of proof for rape cases

An interesting post on the False Rape Society and some citations by feminists. We start with Jessica Valenti (creator of Feministing):

". . . we should look to [Swedish rape laws] as a potential model for our own legislation. [...] "In fact, some activists and legal experts in Sweden want to change the law there so that the burden of proof is on the accused; the alleged rapist would have to show that he got consent, instead of the victim having to prove that she didn't give it."

Continue with that:

"What all this means is a shift in the burden of proof to the defense would entail that the defense establish, with a preponderance of the evidence, that it was more likely than not that the woman alleging the rape did give clear indications of freely chosen agreement to engage in the sex acts. Affirmative consent constitutes the kind of consent that would be . . . necessary to overcome the presumptive or implied nonagreement in the law. . . . . What the defense would be required to do would be to introduce adequate evidence to show that the alleged victim did openly and affirmatively express a yes of her own free accord.

And finally:

Criminal law professor and feminist Michele Alexandre wants to junk all of that and severely limit the way consent may be legally manifested. She insists that the contract theory of consent treats women’s bodies as goods and proposes to change criminal law so that all the non-verbal manifestations of assent are invalid to show legal consent. Specifically, “express consent entails verbal or written assent that leaves no doubt as to the victim’s agreement to the sexual interaction. . . .” (The other-worldly reference to "written assent" is a dead giveaway that this professor is operating in a different universe than the typical bedroom where real couples are getting it on.)
She would make the sex act a presumed crime whenever a woman cries rape. The burden would be on the defendant to prove “that express and present consent was explicitly obtained at the time of the actual sexual interaction, not before or after . . . .” Only if the defendant is able to establish “express, present, and uncontroverted consent to the sexual interaction at issue” does the burden shift to the prosecution to prove withdrawal of consent, and “withdrawal of consent can happen at any time during the sexual interaction.”  (The latter point about withdrawal is not objectionable under the contract law theory of consent.)

In practice that would mean guilty until proven innocent and not innocent until proven guilty as it is the norm today.

False Allegations

Some numbers from Radar:

A review of 556 rape accusations filed against Air Force personnel found that 27% of women later recanted. Then 25 criteria were developed based on the profile of those women, and then submitted to three independent reviewers to review the remaining cases. If all three reviewers deemed the allegation was false, it was categorized as false. As a result, 60% of all allegations were found to be false. Of those women who later recanted, many didn't admit the allegation was false until just before taking a polygraph test. Others admitted it was false only after having failed a polygraph test.


In a nine-year study of 109 rapes reported to the police in a Midwestern city, Purdue sociologist Eugene J. Kanin reported that in 41% of the cases the complainants eventually admitted that no rape had occurred.

In a follow-up study of rape claims filed over a three-year period at two large Midwestern universities, Kanin found that of 64 rape cases, 50% turned out to be false.4 Among the false charges, 53% of the women admitted they filed the false claim as an alibi.

According to a 1996 Department of Justice report, “in about 25% of the sexual assault cases referred to the FBI, ... the primary suspect has been excluded by forensic DNA testing. It should be noted that rape involves a forcible and non-consensual act, and a DNA match alone does not prove that rape occurred. So the 25% figure substantially underestimates the true extent of false allegations.

To be fair, it is hard to get cold hard facts on how often false allegations happen. This seems to be the best we got.