Misc. Thoughts on Rape and "False Allegations" in our Country

I've bandied about this overarching topic a lot, visiting the realms of extremism on both sides, and a lot of the ground in between. I've been called a good feminist, a misogynist, a misandrist, and plenty of other things. I can't pretend that I have any good answers or that I'm any more "right" about this topic, but I still have a few thoughts floating about.

My personal take on it is that there are two main conversations people are trying to have which come from two fundamentally different positions. This, I think, comes down to a single sticking point: Who you want to protect.

Namely, whether you're more interested in protecting the 2-8% of men who, according to our best statistics, have false rape allegations brought against them , or if you're more concerned with protecting the 92-98% of women who were raped. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm running with a viewpoint of the rate of false rape allegations similar to the one taken in this article. It gets its statistics from what might be the best source we have (though that does NOT make it free from bias and error).

There is an extent to which I believe that "innocent before proven guilty" is a good thing in our society. Without it, we might return to the red scare- witch hunts. However, if we strictly adhere to it, we cannot punish crimes for which intent/consent is the main distinguishing factor from an otherwise legal act. This includes rape, bullying, harassment, verbal/emotional assault. These are problems that -primarily- affect women (and other minorities). Given that, it's likely they were, in part, developed as a means of subjugating certain people. In that event, it should come as no surprise that feminism is fighting back on the side of the 92-98%. They're fighting back against the underlying subjugation; not just the individual crime.

We, as males, have to accept that we don't know what it's like living with that subjugation. We don't know what it's like to be in fear of those things (usually) negatively impacting our lives specifically. And we don't know what it's like to know that the people enacting those crimes against us are probably not going to ever be punished for it.

I do not have a good answer to this problem. We either have to lay down our stringent attachment to "innocent until proven guilty" for that particular type of crime that I mentioned, or else we have to continue letting people subjugate women (and others) until we develop the perfect lie detector that we can use to punish those who commit these crimes.

I am personally in the former camp. I think in order to prove that we want women to be on equal footing, we have to sacrifice some of the things that make us secure- as a show of good faith. Some innocent people will get caught in the crossfire, but far more guilty people will be caught, and being a woman will be at least a little less dangerous.

However, I can understand where the people in the latter camp are coming from- even if I don't agree with them. It's easy for educated, middle class, white males to be bothered by philosophical inconsistencies present in our legal system. Unfortunately, what a lot of us either don't understand or refuse to accept is that the inconsistencies are already present, just swinging in the other direction. It's a scary prospect to give up power and put your trust in a demographic not to abuse a rule that could very easily be abused. But, that's what males have been doing this whole time.

Would this increase the rate of false rape allegations? It's hard to argue that it wouldn't. But that might just be the price we have to pay for making an already oppressed people feel safer.