Bogus Rape Cases: An Analysis
Written by Ms Nikita Kumari
Bogus rape case simply means that every case registered under the head of Rape (Indian Penal Code, 1860) holds the false complaint of rape and fabricated story of a victim which is totally a false allegation.
The term ‘false allegation’, when applied to rape and assault, may be a difficult concept for forensic doctors and therefore the police to grasp. Reliable evidence about how prevalent these allegations are is tough to get. A false accusation of rape is the reporting of a rape where no rape has occurred.
The public speaking was given at the 6th Cross-Channel Conference in Clinical forensic pathology held in Southampton, May 14–16th, 1998. Rape allegations made to police or campus authority are estimated to be false approximately 2% to 10% of the time.
However, thanks to the varying definitions of a “false accusation”, the truth percentage remains unknown. Some studies in Europe and the United States have indicated rates between two and six per cent. Studies in other countries have reported their own rates at anywhere from 1.5% (Denmark) to 10% (Canada).
Rates of false accusations are sometimes inflated or misrepresented due to conflation with terms such as unfounded. These designations, which allow law enforcement to close cases without arriving at a conclusion, are used to describe reports without enough evidence, as opposed to cases where the accuser is not credible or says that the account is untrue.
With the cooperation of the police agency of a little metropolitan community, 45 consecutive, disposed, false rape allegations covering a 9-year period were studied. These false rape allegations constitute 41% of the entire forcible rape cases reported during this era.
These false allegations appear to serve three major functions for the complainants: providing an alibi, seeking revenge, and obtaining sympathy and a spotlight. False rape allegations aren’t the consequence of a gender-linked aberration, as frequently claimed, but reflect impulsive and desperate efforts to deal with personal and social stress situations.
A study was conducted to check whether it’s possible to create a model to differentiate true and false allegations of rape that supported the idea of fabricated rape. The theory is predicated on the principle that a false complainant of rape has not been raped and has got to fabricate a story while the story of a real victim is based on recollections of the event.
Consequently, false complainants will behave as liars do, construct their story supported their own sexual experiences and on mental representations, beliefs of how such a criminal offence would happen. To test the idea and to create a model to discriminate between true and false allegations of rape, a police sample of true and false allegations was studied.
A total of 129, 72 true and 57 false, allegations of rape fulfilled the stringent criteria of the present study, among others on ground truth. Fifty-four allegations of rape, 27 true and 27 false, were wont to build a prediction model supported the idea of bounded rationality by Gigerenzer (2002).
The remaining 75 cases, 45 true and 30 false, were blindly categorized as either true or false based on the model. The model was ready to predict the true nature of the bulk of allegations with an accuracy rate of 91 %. Thus, it seems possible to discriminate to a substantial extent between true and false allegations of rape.
False allegations of rape are a drag for all parties involved. In false allegations of rape, the perpetrator-victim relationship is reversed. The dire consequences of a false allegation of rape are best illustrated by the case of Gary Dotson. He was the primary DNA exoneree within the USA (Gross et al. 2005). He became the victim of a false allegation made by Kathleen Crowell Webb and spent 10 years in and out of prison as a consequence.
Webb made such a compelling allegation that even when she recanted her allegation and told the reality, not everyone believed that the rape had never occurred (Taylor 1987). It was not until the arrival of adequate DNA testing that Gary Dotson was fully vindicated (Gross et al. 2005).
In cases where nobody is accused directly, no innocent suspects are targeted, false allegations still end in dissipation of limited police resources and cause public distress. False allegations also raise unnecessary suspicion towards true rape victims. It might, therefore, be helpful to detect false complainants, as soon as possible, before they will cause harm.
Menace of false rape cases on the pretext of 1 or other has been rising since the new amendment in rape law in 2013 in India. The fact is clear from the study of court judgments delivered by the fast-track courts constituted across the country including Delhi and news items appearing within the media. There is a need to put an early check on this rising menace which may destroy the fabric of society and misuse of law for various motives.
A news item published on the YouTube website is an eye-opener, it reads as “25 false rape cases in Punjab within a week after the Delhi Gang rape case. Many times, it seems that the story of the complaint is matched any previous rape case.
Where the era faces rape approximately after every week in different areas there are some cheap people who registered a false case of rape for their own benefit. And the dark part of this is when the woman has to take their right given to them seriously many of them use their right to mislead the law.
A woman who isn’t raped will presumably associate rape with not wanting. False complainants will therefore believe that rape resembles unwanted sex and can use their own unwanted sexual experiences to fabricate their rape story. The rape experiences the ladies described didn’t resemble the consensual sexual experiences described by an equivalent woman.
Thus, within the case when a lady constructs a rape story supported her own consensual experiences, the story won’t resemble a real story of rape.
Keywords: Bogus Rape Cases: An Analysis, Bogus Rape Cases, Bogus Rape Cases in India
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