Compare and contrast: conviction rates, false reporting rates
From The Atlantic a few days ago:
Of the 600 rape cases reported in Delhi in 2012, only one led to a conviction.
That first number (1 in 600) seems extremely low. When analyzing this sort of thing it does seem worthwhile to account for differences around the world - the Dubai legal system has also recently been in the news in relation to about 1300 years of how Sharia law has typically been applied to women's testimony. It's possible to acknowledge differences in treatment in different societies throughout the world rather than requiring a uniform conclusion about every place.
Compare to what a post at Oxford University Press's blog entitled 'Myths about rape myths' has to say about conviction rates for the same crime in England:
the current proportion of recorded rapes that result in a rape conviction is about 7%.
...Throughout the criminal justice system, the proportion of offenders who end up convicted is tiny — higher than rape for some crimes, lower than rape for other crimes. Burglary has about the same attrition rate (from recorded crime to conviction).
As far as the second number goes to what extent should you expect conviction rates to differ for different crimes?
A few other tidbits of that Oxford piece authored by London School of Economics professor Helen Reece:
There is not good evidence that people are less likely to acknowledge or report rape than other crimes.
... There isn’t good evidence that people are less believing of rape complainants than other complainants. Mumsnet’s recently launched rape awareness campaign is called simply ‘We Believe You’. There also isn’t good evidence as to the proportion of women who do cry rape. To achieve justice, it is important to be both sympathetic and questioning towards all complainants, including rape complainants.
... It may be messy, but people do tend to show sexual consent with roundabout signs; there is no formula. If people tell the researchers that coffee is one of those signs then it probably is. Sometimes rape myth reformers’ real objection seems to be to a traditional construction of heterosexuality in which men pursue women. ... jurors have to work out if the woman was consenting. This can only be done by looking at her behaviour, and of course the defendant’s response to it.
... There isn’t good evidence that people blame rape victims more than other crime victims. Public opinion surveys such as the Amnesty survey ask people if they think rape victims are ‘responsible’ and then treat responsibility as equivalent to blame. It isn’t. In fact, there is evidence that people tend to blame rape victims less than other crime victims
The paper underlying the blog post here is apparently free to view for a limited time. It's important both to know what you do know and to know what you don't know.
Compare Justin Holcomb's assertion that "Fact: Police statistics show that the number of falsely reported sexual assaults is less than that of other crimes—2%." to actual studies on this sort of thing (this metaanalysis can be found summarized by Wikipedia) Justin Holcomb never did supply a clear reference for this statement - eventually I got a list of all his sources after first communicating on a blog and later reaching him through his publisher. His sources were either quite dated (decades old and I was feeling too lazy to pull them from the library) or irrelevant to the specific claim he was making. Reading the different sets of figures that various researchers have estimated (ranging from 1.5% to 90% false reporting), the most generous description I can possibly grant to Justin Holcomb's assertion is "misleading". Given the high level of disagreement combined with most studies estimating false reporting in excess of 2%, "highly likely to be false" is probably a better description. This seems to be one of the areas in which we just can't reach firm and credible figures.
Churches often haven't handled such sexual abuse allegations well and it's important to address that. At the same point in time there's also the need to follow the evidence rather than trample all over it as is often the case.