Should Women Who Claim Assault Be Imprisoned?

[Lummy]

It's a given in the OP that she lied because she said she lied.

[Chris]

It doesn't protect anyone except perpetrators of sexual violence. Sexual assault is well known to already be the least reported crime on Earth as things are. In that context, making it a crime just to report a crime seems like something that would only even further discourage reporting and thus enable the crime to occur more often.

The fact is that even the police themselves estimate only 2 to 10% of all claims thereof are false and that claims of sexual assault can rarely be either proven of disproven beyond any doubt at all. The point for our purposes here is that people almost never lie about being attacked in a sexual way, to which end I think it's silly of you to pretend like that's a commonplace phenomena. To me, this line of thinking sounds like the Republican Party's constant howling about "voter fraud" in every election even though there proves to be an average of less than one case of impersonation per state per national election. We all know that they just want to make it as unnecessarily difficult as possible for demographics that aren't normaly loyal to them to vote. Similarly, I feel that those who are constantly protesting "false claims" of sexual violence and never, you know, acts of sexual violence, are doing so either out of complete ignorance or else for a very bad reason.

As someone who has endured my unfair share of rape, I would say that there are extremely few examples of sexual assault or domestic violence claims that have struck me as being false so far. The cases that seemed false to me have been very obvious, like the high-profile case of sociopath Jodi Arias who murdered her boyfriend in quite an astonishingly sick, brutal, and gory way that was so elaborate and complicated that it was obviously pre-planned and tried to disingenuously persuade the court (on like her third story) that it was a spontaneous act of self-defense. Or you could look at this scheme we've heard about in the news this last week where a pro-Trump corporation tried to pay women to fabricate claims of "sexual misconduct" against Robert Mueller, who is, of course, the special prosecutor investigating the affairs of the Trump campaign in the 2016 presidential election. Those would obviously have been false, politically-motivated claims...had anyone taken the offer. My point being that false claims are not common and are usually extremely obvious and demonstrably false. Legal penalties for proveable cases thereof already exist, obviously. Hence why the company I referred to a moment ago is now under FBI investigation as a result of word of this scheme coming to light. But that is different from penalizing people just for reporting crimes in the abstract, which is the prospect I (or, more correctly, the president) raised in the OP.

My point is that if you're going to send someone to prison (which is much more serious than someone simply not advancing in their career, for example) for a "false claim" then I think you should have to prove that it's false. Otherwise you simply advance rape culture by discouraging survivors from coming forward.

I think that's pretty much what everyone is saying, punish accusers only if its proven in court they deliberately lied.

[Captdon]

Polly can't take yes for an answer.

[Mister D]

I think that's pretty much what everyone is saying, punish accusers only if its proven in court they deliberately lied.

This is another one of those ironic moments when Polly just isn't listening to what anyone is saying.

[Orion Rules]

Well our members tend to reflexively agree with everything Trump says, so let's try this new one:



So what do you think? Should women be imprisoned for coming forward with stories of sexual violence?

Hell-o IMPress Polly, the question used in the last sentence above is incomplete for lack of evidence. If one makes a story up, of course that would be altogether different from someone whose story is real, and the first should deserve some type of sanctions against their behavior, but the latter is innocent of making a story up, so should not receive the 'reward' of a punishment. An innocent person on either side of an angle should be considered innocent, until proven to be false in their declarations of innocence.

[Boris The Animal]

Let's take the scenario of a person who accuses another of rape/sexual assault and ends up to be disproven. In New York State, Penal Law 250.50 Filing a false report is a Class A misdemeanor and is punishable by up to a year of imprisonment. Not to mention the possible civil retaliation by the accused for defamation of character, unlawful arrest/imprisonment, punitive damages (and they can be steep). So people had better have all their ducks lined up beak to tail if they accuse someone of inappropriate contact. I'm not discounting rape at all, God forbid. But the Kavanaugh debacle where Dr. Ford admitted she lied is just cause to make sure when an accusation is made, there can, and must be clear cut and concrete evidence that corroborates the accusation.