Tag Archives: Rape

News

How often are accusations of rape or sexual assault false?

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Zerlina Maxwell "automatically believe rape claims"
Should we “automatically believe rape claims” like Jackie’s UVA rape claim?

The purpose of this post is to make the case that claims of rape and sexual assault should be made to the police, investigated by the police, and then proceed to trial. We should not punish men for charges that are made outside of the criminal justice system. Let’s take a look at some previous cases and studies to see why not.

Here’s one reported by the far-left Newsweek:

Rolling Stone‘s disastrous and discredited campus rape story now has a price tag.

The magazine has settled a defamation lawsuit filed by the University of Virginia fraternity at the center of the 2014 blockbuster feature by Sabrina Erdely, which was retracted after key details in the story were called into question. According to reports, Rolling Stone will pay a settlement amounting to $1.65 million.

The article, which was published in late fall 2014, described an alleged brutal gang rape of a student named “Jackie” at a UVA fraternity. The story drew wide attention and triggered a police investigation, but it was officially retracted in April 2015 after Jackie’s claims were called into question.

Why did she lie?

The Washington Examiner reports:

Documents have shown that Jackie likely made up the gang rape to try and win the affection of fellow student Ryan Duffin. She had tried other lies to get his sympathy, including pretending to have a terminal illness. When that didn’t work, she tried to make him jealous by inventing an attractive man who would constantly say she had a crush on someone else and he didn’t understand why.

When that didn’t work, she went on a fake date with the fake man, and then claimed she had been gang raped. That didn’t win his affection either, and the two eventually stopped talking.

She lied, because she wanted to get affection and sympathy from a boy she liked.

Here’s another featuring a student at Hofstra University, reported by the NY Post:

The Hofstra freshman who had a raunchy restroom romp and then cried rape made up the twisted tale because she didn’t want her schoolmates — particularly her new boyfriend — to think she was easy, the beau told The Post yesterday.

“I think she needs a psychologist. She probably felt like, ‘They’ll think I’m a slut,’ ” her boyfriend, who asked not to be identified, told The Post.

Danmell Ndonye, 18, who had accused five men of gang rape, admitted the truth only when prosecutors confronted her after learning of a cellphone video that captured the whole sordid episode and showed she had willingly participated, officials said.

She lied because she didn’t want her boyfriend (and others) to think that she was a slut.

Although she made a false rape accusation, she never received any jail time. In fact, she was never even charged.

Another, reported by the Associated Press:

Nikki Yovino, 20, of South Setauket, New York, was sentenced Thursday in Bridgeport Superior Court. She agreed to serve the jail time when she pleaded guilty in June, just before jury selection was to begin, to misdemeanor charges of falsely reporting an incident and interfering with police.

Yovino was attending Sacred Heart University in Fairfield when she reported being raped by two school football players at an off-campus party in Bridgeport in October 2016. But police said she later admitted making up the allegations so she wouldn’t ruin a relationship with another student.

[…]Both players remained unidentified until Thursday, when Malik St. Hilaire came forward to speak at the sentencing and confront Yovino. The Connecticut Post reported Yovino rolled her eyes and smirked as St. Hilaire talked about how the allegations affected his life.

She lied, because she didn’t want to ruin a relationship with her boyfriend. And of course there are cases where the woman just wants to get revenge on men for sex she consented to, but that later made her feel bad, as in the Duke University lacrosse case. False accusations of rape or sexual assault are used by people to get attention and sympathy, or to get an alibi when they’ve done something wrong, etc.

Clearly, there are cases where people lie about rape and sexual assault. That’s why we need to get the police involved, and not punish anyone except in the ordinary way that laws and courts punish. Let’s take a look at some studies to see how often false charges are made.

What do the studies show?

A Fox News article from a prominent equity feminist, Wendy McElroy cites several studies, here’s one:

[…][The] study conducted by Eugene J. Kanin of Purdue University… examined 109 rape complaints registered in a Midwestern city from 1978 to 1987.

Of these, 45 were ultimately classified by the police as “false.” Also based on police records, Kanin determined that 50 percent of the rapes reported at two major universities were “false.”

[…][E]ven a skeptic like me must credit a DNA exclusion rate of 20 percent that remained constant over several years when conducted by FBI labs. This is especially true when 20 percent more were found to be questionable.

False accusations are not rare. They are common.

So, there’s only a 41 percent conviction rate. DNA testing exonerates 20% of men, and makes the guilt another 20% of men “questionable”. A total of 59 percent of cases didn’t result in a conviction.

In false rape cases, men can spend years in jail, until the women finally admits she made the whole thing up. There are campus cases where only the accused’s witnesses are consulted, only evidence confirming guilt is considered, the charges and evidence are hidden from the accused, the accused is denied legal representation, the accused is denied cross-examined of the accuser, etc.

A double standard

So, that’s how men accused of sexual assault and rape are treated, but what about women?

Consider this case where a female teacher got zero jail time for sexually assaulting an underage male student.  Or this case from the UK where a married mother of two was convicted of producing child pornography, but also received no jail time. It’s not just that men are being denied due process when they are accused of something. It’s that women ARE NOT being punished when they ARE found guilty of something. There just seems to be a widespread view that women are never responsible for their bad choices, and that men are always to blame for everything. What are women learning from this about how they should treat men in their own lives? Should we expect men to have friendships with women and pursue relationships with women in this cultural climate?

News

Is the Roman Catholic church serious about stopping child abuse?

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A conflict of worldviews
A conflict of worldviews

At the risk of alienating my Catholic readers, I feel that I have to say something about the recent news story about the Catholic Church leaders abusing children of both sexes, and then covering it up. Let’s start with a news article, then a reaction from a Catholic person I respect, then I’ll give my thoughts about it.

Here’s a news story from ABC News:

Sexual assault survivors shared their stories after a Pennsylvania grand jury report accused hundreds of Roman Catholic priests of assaulting children.

Speaking at a news conference Tuesday, several of them detailed heart-wrenching accounts of alleged sexual abuse against 301 priests across six of the state’s eight dioceses.

[…]Pennsylvania’s attorney general released the scathing report that revealed the results of a two-year investigation into hundreds of sexual abuse allegations. The probe found that at least 1,000 children had been abused at the hands of Catholic clergy members, dating back to the 1940s.

“Predators in every diocese weaponized the Catholic faith and used it as a tool of their abuse,” Attorney General Josh Shapiro said Tuesday. “Priests were raping little boys and girls and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing, they hid it all. For decades.”

[…]The investigation was based on official documents and secret archives from the church, according to the report. High-level church leaders allegedly covered up the abuse for years, fostering a “circle of secrecy,” Shapiro said.

“The cover up was sophisticated and, all the while, church leadership kept records of the abuse and the cover-up,” Shapiro said Tuesday. “They sought to do the same things that senior church leaders and the diocese we investigated have done for decades: bury the sexual abuse by priests upon children and cover it up forever. Shamefully.”

The key concern about this is the cover-up. The Roman Catholic church was more concerned with covering up for the abuse and rapes. That was their priority. They were concerned about defending the reputation of the corrupt child abusers. They were not concerned about the victims. And they were not concerned about what the Bible teaches about sexual immorality. Or what the Bible teaches about anything, really.

Matt Walsh, a conservative Catholic, had this to say in a post from June 2018, at the Daily Wire:

I’m taking some heat on Twitter today because I said that the real problem in the Catholic Church isn’t pedophilia but gay priests. As the statistics clearly show, the vast majority of predators in the clergy were homosexual and the vast majority were not pedophiles. The same study that reported those figures did try to absolve gay priests by claiming that their homosexuality had nothing to do with anything. But this is an assumption — I think a plainly absurd and unprovable assumption — that is not born out by their own statistics.

And the problem goes beyond sex abuse of minors. As Rod Dreher has been reporting, and liberal publications agree, homosexuality runs rampant in the modern priesthood. Sexual activity between priests, and between priests and seminarians, is not uncommon. I think it is rather difficult to separate these facts from the fact that teen boys were so often sexually victimized. Is it just a coincidence that gay priests exist in such large numbers, protected by gay cabals within the Church, and at the same time there happen to be a bunch of priests molesting pubescent boys? Are these two realities entirely separate from one another?

Take the case of the scummy Cardinal McCarrick. He has been accused of preying upon young boys. But most of the stories that have come out about him revolve around his sexual exploits with seminarians. Grown men, in other words. Yet we are told that the fact of his homosexuality is irrelevant. How could it be? If he were not a homosexual, he would not have molested boys. Who could dispute this? I’m not claiming that all homosexuals molest boys. I am claiming that only homosexuals molest boys. A non-homosexual, by definition, is not attracted to males.

Just to be clear, the Bible’s teaching on sexual activity is that no one is allowed to engage in sexual activity outside of natural marriage. Period.

I don’t feel comfortable listing the details of what the Catholic leaders did, but you can read about it on the Pennsylvania attorney general’s web site. The important thing here is that none of the men who did these things, or covered it up after, really expect to meet God face-to-face on the Day of Judgment. Everything they did to those children and young people was for their own pleasure and gratification. They certainly were not working for God, or advancing his interests. On the contrary, they put themselves first, and pushed young people away from God.

If I could summarize God’s agenda for his human creations, it would be that we all not do anything that would push anyone away from a two-way relationship with God. That goes for everybody including atheists, by the way. Nobody, regardless of religion, should do anything that pushes anyone away from God. So do these Roman Catholics work for God? To work for God, minimally, is to put your own desires on hold, and perform actions that advance God’s agenda. God’s agenda, minimally, is that people come to have accurate beliefs about his existence and character. It’s OK to be offensive to others by telling them the truth gently and respectfully. But it’s not OK to harm them in a way that pushes them away from God, just because you want to gratify your own selfish desires.

Here’s a thought about the search for truth and meaning. If you want to have a comprehensive worldview that answers the big questions, like cosmic origins, objective moral obligations, life after death, etc. then it’s probably not a good idea to look to people in an organization to tell you what is true or not. Especially when the organization relies on feelings, mysticism, rituals, etc. An organization is interested in protecting the organization. When the Jehovah’s Witnesses get caught lying about their failed end-of-the-world predictions, they cover it up. When the Mormons get caught lying about cosmology and archaeology, they cover it up. Organizations protect the organization. A much better plan, it seems to me, is to develop your own worldview, starting with the evidence from science and history. That’s what I did, and I’m an evangelical Protestant Christian.

News

Why did European countries import millions of unskilled Muslim immigrants?

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Muslim populations in Europe
Muslim populations in Europe

As you can see in the right column of the blog, I am currently reading a book recommended to me that Dina, my wise advisor. The book is amazing. I want to put it in the hands of all the naive, leftist Christian leaders and Republicans who favor amnesty, and not building a border wall. If I can’t convince you to read the book right now, at least take a look at this review of it in The Federalist.

Excerpt:

The Strange Death of Europe” is a polemical but perceptive book culled from Murray’s extended sojourns across Europe’s frontiers – from the Italian island of Lampedusa, a flyspeck in the Mediterranean closer to the shores of North Africa than it is to Sicily, and to Greek islands that sit within sight of the Turkish coastline. These places have borne the brunt of the recent exodus from the Middle East and North Africa, but the author has also ventured to the remote suburbs of Scandinavia and Germany and France where many of these ­migrants end up. The resulting portrait is not a happy one.

[…]The distinguishing feature of modern Europe is its persistent ennui, shown in the inability or unwillingness “to reproduce itself, fight for itself or even take its own side in an argument.” What’s more, Europeans seem less stirred to face these unpleasant facts than they are fearful of interpreting them too precisely.

The book analyzes how the secular left “argued” for more immigration of low-skilled Muslims from countries that do not accept Western views on things like the respectful treatment of women.

The never-slacking thirst among Europe’s political class for more immigration has rested on two flawed assumptions, one economic and the other normative (and usually in that order). The economic assumption cites the benefits of immigration without accounting for its costs, and seldom acknowledges that benefits accrue chiefly to the migrants themselves and to highly compensated native inhabitants. Most of the rest of society is left to foot the bill for this immense regressive redistribution of wealth from the poor (who are squeezed out of the labor force) to the rich (who benefit from cheap labor).

Any public concerns about the financial downsides of this immigration – from increased pressure on housing markets to depressed wages – have been swept aside in deference to Europe’s dwindling fertility rates. (In a classic instance of one erroneous public policy begetting another, Murray shrewdly notes that the political left encouraged a “one-child policy” in order to attain an “optimum global population” only later to demand mass immigration in order to lift birthrates back to replacement levels.) The problem of Europe’s birth dearth is very real. The working-age population of Western Europe peaked in 2012 at 308 million – and is set to decline to 265 million by 2060.

So how will immigration schemes alleviate Europe’s fertility-driven strain on the welfare state? It is not clear that they will. Advocates of the rejuvenating effects of immigration are seldom obliged to spell out the wisdom of importing the poor and dispossessed of the world who generally lack the skills required for success in an advanced market economy. Can these migrants reliably be expected to contribute more in taxes than they consume in state aid? (They wouldn’t be alone in their dependence on government largesse: plenty of native workers, too, are struggling mightily to cope with the creative destruction unleashed by the march of globalization and technology.)

When advocates of open borders are pressed on these points, they generally repair to the normative argument. It has been claimed that when a flood of migrants started to pile up at Europe’s frontiers in 2015, the issue ceased to be economic and instead became moral: tending to the needs of beleaguered strangers. Thus Europe’s longstanding debate over immigration suddenly transformed into a contest between head and heart, and in a stampede of sanctimony it was decided that soft-heartedness was better hard-headedness.

What was amazing to me, is that people from these Islamic countries were able to just walk in to Europe and claim asylum. This put them on an immediate path to citizenship. Since there were so many people coming, their claims were not vetted. The immigrants would destroy their own identity documents after arriving in Europe, and then claim to be coming from whatever nation had a war going on, e.g. from Syria. Even if they could not speak any Syrian, they would still be let in and put on a path to citizenship! Incredible.

I have to include this:

After the 7/7 bombings in London, polls revealed that 68 percent of British Muslims believe that British citizens who “insult Islam” should be arrested and prosecuted.

See, no problem at all integrating into Western civilization. It’s not like their just going to start raping and murdering 14-year-old Jewish girls, or start up underage sex-trafficking rings. But the people making the immigration policy don’t care about public safety. They want to appear compassionate. And they do it by spending other people’s money and by risking other people’s safety. There is no concern for the money and safety of taxpayers, the important thing is that the politicians feel good about themselves. They’re better than the people who they stick with the bill. Or the people they stick with the machete. I know that compassionate leftists like Russell Moore want me to think that they are good people, but I don’t. Because I always think of the victims of their compassion. Anyone who votes for more immigration without oversight and accountability is responsible for the harm.

For me, the most interesting part of the book was not about why secular leftist politicians decided to open up the borders, how many Muslim immigrants commit crimes against their welcoming hosts, how European activists subvert the law to welcome in more immigrants (including lying about their own rapes at the hands of Muslim refugees, to cover for the rapist), or how the police cover up crimes committed by Muslim refugees and immigrants. The most interesting part was how anyone who tries to make public safety or fiscal arguments against the mass importation of low-skilled Muslims was vilified. Careers were ended. Reputations were ruined. And then the Muslims themselves would launch lawsuits or take more violent, and even murderous, measures to silence their critics.