As soon as the Rolling Stone piece on a University of Virginia gang rape began to unravel, I knew what was coming. The air smelled vaguely of freshly-purchased fedoras. The Internet felt defensive. And so it began. Suddenly, we were all stuck in a conversation on the falsely accused instead of the eternally silenced, a conversation about perpetrators and their struggles instead of rape victims and their trauma, a conversation about whether or not rape is something that even happens instead of a conversation about how to finally make it stop.

I am derailing that conversation, and I come bearing every ounce of truth I could muster about “false rape accusations” and the pitiful rape culture the myth of them exemplifies.

So, what’s a “false rape accusation,” anyway?

Honestly, the definition of a “false rape” will vary depending on who is talking about it. Anti-feminist folks often use the term, and the statistics available around it, to discuss scenarios in which a typically female person lies or otherwise fabricates a sexual assault or rape in order to target someone unfairly or seek attention, although – SURPRISE! – that’s not specifically what the term means in the eyes of the law, and that’s not what a “false rape” is when you see numbers about them on the books.

Let’s start with the basics: a “false” rape and an “unfounded” rape, in the language of the law, are the same thing. And for a whole lot of reasons, the data on how prevalent unfounded rapes are is skewed and altogether unreliable.

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A lot of our crime statistics come from FBI reports, which would typically be great places to look for information about crime. But when it comes to sexual violence, that isn’t so. The FBI definition of rape, which was updated in 2012 after extensive advocacy by the Feminist Majority Foundation and Ms. magazine, excluded pretty much everyone who had been raped from fitting into their statistical boxes for over four decades:

Carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.

The new FBI definition of rape is more inclusive in terms of sex and experience:

The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.

Since these changes came about in 2012, one might expect to see more accurate information flowing in to the government about rape in 2014. However, even two years in, the updated language has yet to be reflected in full by the FBI’s collected data. That means the FBI has – and still does – classify rapes that lacked a perfect victim or forcible stranger rape narrative as unfounded. And that’s a huge problem, as The Forensic Examiner has previously pointed out:

This statistic is almost meaningless, as many of the jurisdictions from which the FBI collects data on crime use different definitions of, or criteria for, “unfounded.” That is, a report of rape might be classified as unfounded (rather than as forcible rape) if the alleged victim did not try to fight off the suspect, if the alleged perpetrator did not use physical force or a weapon of some sort, if the alleged victim did not sustain any physical injuries, or if the alleged victim and the accused had a prior sexual relationship. Similarly, a report might be deemed unfounded if there is no physical evidence or too many inconsistencies between the accuser’s statement and what evidence does exist. As such, although some unfounded cases of rape may be false or fabricated, not all unfounded cases are false.

But it isn’t just the FBI’s definition of rape that stops us from getting comprehensive and accurate data about sexually violent crimes. Often, the data gets skewed in the collection process by the folks on the ground. And often, those people are cops.

The folks submitting data to federal agencies are localized law enforcement agencies, and what turns an alleged rape into an unfounded rape at your local police station could be one of many factors, including recanted stories by victims, suspicion or disbelief by police officers toward a victim, a lack of what a police station considers substantial proof, or just plain-old sexism and/or allegiance to a rapist by a police department or the officials within it.

That’s right! Police can call your rape “a lie” even if you were raped, because your rapist threatening to kill you unless you recant, a police officer pressuring you to take it all back and stop the investigation, or you being raped by someone who has buddies at the police department makes you a liar, liar, pants on fire.

One survivor, who shared their story on Free Thought Blogs, is proof alone that a false rape statistic isn’t always false at all:

I still believed in the system. I still didn’t want the man who raped me on the streets. I did everything they requested, answered every invasive question (they were really focused on my mental health history!), even got on the ground and acted out the rape for them, with the head detective on top of me acting out the part of the rapist. Not only was I absolutely hysterical by the time we were done, I’m positive that aggravated my PTSD for a long time after. And after all that, I was called in for an “interview” to discuss “a new lead in your case.” …And over and over they accused me of lying. Alone in this tiny room with two large, angry men, I was doing everything I could to keep from having a panic attack. I couldn’t respond to what they were saying; again, I think I was in shock. And they threatened me with jail time, with a felony on my record, destroying my family, public humiliation (he threatened to call the papers – something he did anyway, because, quote, “the community needs to know there was no threat to public safety”.) They said I would be charged with a false report, with terrorizing the public (there was a public awareness campaign initially after my attack, though I didn’t have anything to do with it. After the rape, I did everything I could to maintain anonymity, and only told two people – beyond my family and the cops – that I was attacked. But…I did it for attention, which was why I didn’t tell anyone? I’m just sneaky like that, I guess!) Accusations, threats, anger, pounding the table, over and over and over. The detective looked at me. His whole demeanor changed; he tried to seem kind, avuncular. “Tell me you made the whole thing up. This whole thing will disappear. Nothing will happen to you. You can leave, if you just tell me you made it up. Tell me you made it up and you’re sorry for lying, and I’ll let you leave.”

The author would go on, through support groups and advocacy, to meet other survivors like herself. Survivors who recanted because they had to – because they knew their attacker personally and faced threats of violence, or because police refused to protect them. Unfounded cases in which all that wasn’t found was justice.

But a lopsided justice system isn’t even the only factor that shapes these statistics. It’s an entire lopsided country, and a lopsided culture:

What these examinations of our own culture and prosecution system show us is that the idea of a pointed “false rape accusation” is, for the most part, an MRA fantasy. In fact, data shows that even when rape victims are found to be legitimately lying, making up, or imagining what happened to them in their interactions with police and other authorities, they typically aren’t targeting a specific individual. The fear that an angry ex-girlfriend or a vindictive bitch from math class is going to levy a rape accusation against an innocent man who hasn’t done anything wrong, then, is mostly fiction. And considering how many factors can turn a rape case – even a valid one – into an unfounded case, the data on “women crying rape” in order to hurt men is invisible and, more importantly, unimportant. What an unfounded rape case should look like isn’t a lie, but a lost opportunity for justice.

To focus on the falsely accused is to imagine someone who, statistically, hardly exists. And that’s assuming any of the data we have on the numbers of unfounded rapes is even accurate, which is a little more than optimistic.

I’ve heard and seen claims that false rape accusations are widespread, which reeks of actual bullshit. Despite a lack of data on how many women are willing to be publicly spit on and shamed to falsely accuse someone of rape, the existing numbers pretty clearly illustrate that it’s not widespread and also not a thing. Every crime has a false reporting statistic: the FBI, for example, claims that most indexed crimes are falsely reported 2% of the time, and Zerlina Maxwell recently pointed out that 10% of car theft claims are false. A paper crunching the numbers on false rape statistics by the National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women highlighted that although existing numbers on the phenomena generally range from 2% to 8%, the higher-end measurements almost always come from the state and thus run higher due to the factors mentioned above. In some cases, when the NCPVAW folks ran over the data, they even adjusted it – moving rates from 8% down to 2.5% – to take into account how inaccurate the “unfounded” category really is.

The Washington Post, a publication I will never read again for putting “rapist” in quotation marks (just don’t do it, y’all, ever), recently did a fact-check piece on a graphic by the Enliven Project that went viral after Jackie’s story in Rolling Stone began to get picked apart. The image, in which human figures are used to boil down statistics on rape and rape prosecution, was meant to drive home the fact that the number of rapes happening in our country vastly outnumber the amounts of reports, trials, jailed offenders, and falsely accused. They relied on statistics about rape accusations and allegations from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the same NCPVAW paper I mentioned above, but ignored a lot of the context and information surrounding those numbers – as well as the competing math published elsewhere.

The Post cited a study in their fact-check by the Making a Difference project (MAD) which found, according to their fact-checkers, that 7% of rape reports are false. But I read the MAD data myself, and the chart – the one of several, pages-long archives of charts – which cited “unfounded” rape reports was an 8.5% number from – you guessed it – a police department. They then mentioned that the statistic was cited in the NCPVAW paper, but failed to mention the dialogue surrounding it in which the organization found fault with how often police label cases unfounded and adjusted the math on some of the studies they included to verify that data.

The numbers on rape overall are also skewed, and put this entire conversation into a different light when examined. Rape is a historically and massively underreported crime – yet RAINN and the Washington Post fact-check a statistic claiming that close to 40% of survivors report. Those numbers immediately struck me as too high, so I went elsewhere to double-check them. It was then that I came to the crux of the problem: the BJS data, and how it is collected, is entirely off-the-mark when it comes to numbers on sexual violence.

The BJS compiles data based on the National Criminal Victimization Survey, which is flawed in its approach for myriad ways: it occurs in person, involves one spokesperson per household, and only allows respondents to discuss criminal occurrences from the last six months in their interviews. It also uses language about rape and sexual assault that rely on criminal prosecution and definitions, making it difficult for some victims to identify with and also cutting some of them out completely. (There is no room in the survey, for example, for someone who was raped while they were unconscious or drugged to say they were victimized.) The NCVS found that 173,610 people in the US were raped in 2013, which is absolute bullshit. I know, because the other studies say so.

The Center for Disease Control statistics on rape and sexual assault, which are culled from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (last administered in 2011), paint a much starker picture of rape culture in America. The NIPSVS is a random telephone survey that includes landlines and cellphones, and their data shows that 20 percent of women are raped in their lifetime and almost 50 percent experience other sexual violence throughout their lifetime as well, like unwanted touching or non-penetration without consent. Their numbers point to 1,929,000 women alone being raped every year in the United States.

That’s a whole lot of women, and that data dwarfs the BJS numbers that the Post – and countless MRAs on Twitter – are using as ammo. The fact that the BJS thinks only .1% of people in the US were raped in 2012 and 2013 is a joke, and the holes in the way the NCVS collects data on sexual violence are many. But even further, their data on reported rapes sheds light on the actual problem with “false rape” numbers.

The BJS Criminal Victimization paper for 2013 claimed that 34.8% of rapes were reported that year. According to their numbers, that means 60,416 rapes were reported. That number is close to the most reliable second source we have on the matter: the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, which tallied up 79,770 rapes reported to law enforcement in the same year. But when those calculations are adjusted, you realize how minor those report numbers really are. 60,416 is almost 35 percent of 173,000 – but it’s only 3 percent of 1,929,000. And even if we relied on the FBI’s higher number, it would only be 4 percent of all of the CDC’s predicted rapes that year being reported to law enforcement. (It’s worth noting here that the CDC does not have a yearly estimate for rape of men, and only a lifetime estimate. That means that 3 and 4 percent number is actually bigger than it should be, statistically, because I’m comparing a gender-inclusive number to a larger, women-only figure.)

That’s right. 3 to 4 percent of rapes are ever reported to the police, and yet we’re concerned that those are lies. This, in the face of proof – like an MIT survey done on-campus and electronically that pointed to a 1 in 6 figure for their campus, a UK study that found only .6% of women’s rape allegations were false, and a trusted and cited campus sexual assault survey administered online in which 1 in 5 women self-identified as victims of rape or sexual assault.

Now that we’ve corrected that data set, let’s extrapolate a little bit further.

The CDC thinks 1,929,000 rapes occurred in 2014. The BJS data says 3 to 4 percent of those rapes were reported to police. Even the most generous data on unfounded rape pins the total number for all reports at around 8 percent, and even though we know from what we’ve discussed that unfounded doesn’t mean “fake” or “a lie,” let’s go ahead and assume, for the sake of comparison, that all of them were pointedly false, made-up rape accusations. (Because bitches be lying.) 8 percent of those 60,416 reported rapes would represent .2 percent of the rapes that happened that year. That means that in the face of almost 2 million rapes per year, around 4,800 would be unfounded.

However, let’s now adjust that for accuracy. Because really, it’s too generous. As we also discussed earlier, the 8 percent claim for unfounded rapes is probably more like 2 percent. And since so many of these respondents and the folks encompassed by this data clearly haven’t come forward – because only 3 or 4 percent of them did – I think it’s safe to assume that 2 percent, in this hypothetical, is a generous figure for unfounded rape overall. Using those numbers, that means that even if all the rapes that happened in 2013 were reported and prosecuted and all the cases had a different perpetrator and all those perpetrators went to jail (which, well, just isn’t gonna happen any time soon), .006% of them wouldn’t belong there. That’s a little over 1,000 out of nearly 2 million.

I need to repeat this one more time, with feeling, to get everyone to understand what I’m saying. 20 percent of women are raped in their lifetime, but we’re actually concerned with less than one percent of the population, most of whom could still function with impunity through a trial and probably never face time in our current legal system for sexually violating someone else, being falsely accused of a crime which, most of the time, nobody is even actually falsely accused of. We, as a society, are more concerned about men being falsely accused of rape – something they are more likely to win the lottery than ever experience – than we are with women being raped every day.

False rape statistics, and conversations about the prevalence of false rape allegations, are a modern Salem Witch Trial against the women of this country who face rape culture head-on every day. And I won’t fucking stand for it.

Rebel Girls is a column about women’s studies, the feminist movement, and the historical intersections of both of them. It’s kind of like taking a class, but better – because you don’t have to wear pants. To contact your professor privately, email carmen at autostraddle dot com. Ask questions about the lesson in the comments!