Black men being jailed for assualts they didn’t commit is primarily about racism, not about the rate of false accusations in general. The fact that 1 in 16 women have actually been raped as their first sexual experience is very relevant because it demonstrates how pervasive rape and sexual assault actually are.
I’ll quote it for you again since you seem to have missed it the first time. Hardly any men (even Black men) ever go to prison for rapes they have not committed. Conversely, rape and sexual assault do go rampantly unreported and unpunished or under-punished when it is reported.
Furthermore, in the most detailed study ever conducted of sexual assault reports to police, undertaken for the British Home Office in the early 2000s, out of 216 complaints that were classified as false, only 126 had even gotten to the stage where the accuser lodged a formal complaint. Only 39 complainants named a suspect. Only six cases led to an arrest, and only two led to charges being brought before they were ultimately deemed false. (Here, as elsewhere, it has to be assumed that some unknown percentage of the cases classified as false actually involved real rapes; what they don’t involve is countless innocent men’s lives being ruined.)
Go check out the new hashtag on Twitter #WhyIDidn’tReport for 37 thousand more examples from both men and women about why they didn’t say something at the time or how their report was brushed off or quietly dropped. When interviewed for the Amber Wyatt story, former Fort Worth Police Department sergeant, Cheryl Johnson, said it was common practice to not pursue cases or for grand juries not to indict, despite strong evidence of a crime.
“We had cases where there were photographs and confessions from the suspects that were no-billed,” Johnson told me in 2015 in the tidy living room of her Fort Worth home. One case in particular stuck with her: A man admitted to giving a woman drugs that would render her unconscious — and then raping her after she had passed out and photographing the act. The victim was sent the photographs of her own rape, which she turned over to police. Still, the grand jury decided not to indict.
From Brock Turner to Brett Kavanaugh, to a spate of more recent cases of young White adult men being convicted of raping 14-year-olds who none-the-less were not sentenced to time in jail, there is still a pernicious idea that this is some kind of boys-will-be-boys antics that ought to be excused. He only raped one girl. That shouldn’t have to ruin his entire life. He doesn’t need to go on the sex-offender list. It makes me want to go on a crime spree of my own!
Meanwhile, young men of color are not afforded the same leniency. Their futures are not seen to be as inherently promising.
“Alec Cook, a 22-year-old former University of Wisconsin-Madison student was handed a light-weight three year prison sentence by Judge Stephen Ehlke for raping three female students.
Cook pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting three women, as well as stalking and choking two others, WGN 9 reported.
However, when it came to the case of a 16-year-old black teen, Adore Thomas, the same judge issued a heavy-handed sentence of 20 years for sexually assaulting one woman.”
I do not want to see anyone be punished for something that they have not done, but that almost never happens. The realities are exactly the opposite. About 1 in 6 women will be raped and 1 in 3 have experienced some kind of sexual violence. We have a culture that largely turns a blind eye to that and allows it to happen. Rape culture is pervasive. False accusations that end in a man’s life being ruined are not.
