There's this idea that a false allegation of sexual assault is the one weapon that shamed women wield. Men have fists and cash and the threat of death; women have this. A shy call to 999 on a Monday morning that leads to the slow sirens of police arresting her ex at work, a sorry officer shielding his head as he falls into the car.

It's a story we know by heart. One that's been acted out for us under stage lighting, read out loud as we fall asleep, one that's been Biroed on to our skin so many times it has entered our blood memory. In high and low culture, in literature and soaps. In To Kill a Mockingbird and A Passage to India and Of Mice and Men. In the cartoon South Park and the film Wild Things. In the Bible, where Potiphar's wife accuses the slave Joseph of raping her after he refuses her advances – Tintoretto painted her ripping off Joseph's clothes; Rembrandt painted her telling her husband. Joseph stands in semi-darkness; she is bathed in calm white light. In The Graduate Mrs Robinson tells her daughter that Ben raped her in order to halt their relationship. On Hollyoaks, an experiment two years ago where they invited viewers to form a "jury" to decide whether Gilly had raped Jacqui resulted in them finding him not guilty; the current storyline sees Kevin falsely accusing Brendan of sexually attacking him. In Dexter, a subplot sees Dexter's colleague Batista being accused of rape after consensual sex. In Ian McEwan's Atonement, a confused witness falsely accuses Robbie of raping her cousin. And on and on. In Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn's best-selling new novel, the protagonist (spoiler, irritators) makes two false rape claims: one an act of revenge, and the second to account for a murder. Plan B's album The Defamation of Strickland Banks is the story of a soul singer wrongly convicted of rape.

It's a trope that exists because it's powerful – it moves on stories and confuses the reader, and builds sympathy in a raw and painful way. It's a plot device that works, but one that should be questioned. As blogger Jennifer Kesler pointed out, comparing rape on TV to that of murder: "No one ever thinks: maybe the murder victim wanted to die, maybe it was a consensual death." And while TV's "murder is bad" message remains, it perpetuates an idea that rape can be complicated. That women lie.

But it's fiction. It's fiction. When real occasions of false allegations are published, they're news for the same reasons – they're lurid and exciting, and they make you feel something. But they're news because they are so rare. The Daily Mail specialises in perpetuating this narrative, with stories such as "The rape lies that ruined our lives" – it used the phrase "cried rape" in 54 headlines over the past year. Headlines such as "Wicked women who cried rape trapped by three-in-bed photos" reveal women to be the scheming harridans they always suspected, harridans who use their sexuality as a weapon, whose power lies solely in their body. These were real cases of false allegations, but the idea that it is a widespread problem, a weapon women use, is fiction.

The recent Crown Prosecution Service study found that the cultural idea that false rape allegations are prevalent is itself false; it reports that over a 17-month period there were 5,651 prosecutions for rape but only 35 for false rape allegations. And in the cases involving people under 18, almost 40% of the claims originated with their parents, which reduces the number of false allegations from "victims" even more. The recent Steubenville rape trial, where an unconscious teenager's assault was recorded and celebrated by bystanders, had a postscript: the arrest of two girls who threatened the victim after the guilty verdict came down. It brought a number of disturbing truths to the surface. Including the fact that, when the world is not on the side of the victim, other women will play along with rape culture in order to feel safe. This is one of the effects of perpetuating the fiction that women lie about rape – we end up attacking ourselves.



Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk. Follow Eva on Twitter @EvaWiseman