I have never heard anyone claim “oh, so-and-so’s bike wasn’t really stolen, they just made that up for attention” or “you shouldn’t prosecute bike thieves because false bike-theft allegations can really hurt people” or “if you’ve ever had your bike stolen then some people just won’t want to date you anymore” or anything else that would make me scared to tell someone that my bike had been stolen.
Of course you haven’t, because those things don’t happen / aren’t true. Nobody makes up “my bike was stolen” for attention; false bike-theft allegations can’t hurt people because it’s almost impossible to make them in the first place (how would you ever know who stole your bike unless you saw them run off with it, which pretty much never happens?), having your bike stolen doesn’t have any effect on anyone’s willingness to date you, etc.
If such claims were instead sometimes true, then they would sometimes be made.
For rape, they are sometimes true. So, they are sometimes made.
If you can come up with some way to test this, then I will bet large-to-me amounts of money that people make up “my thing got stolen” at vastly higher rates than they make up rape. Like, telling your teacher/employer that you were late because your bike was stolen seems like an excuse you can get away with making once per few months. Getting a friend to borrow your bike so you can bum $50 off your parents for a new bike seems like something teenagers regularly attempt—like, I literally saw this sort of scam run by the other kids in high school and discussed on school buses. Putting a GoFundMe on the internet, asking for money to replace your bike because it was stolen and you can’t work without it, seems like it would get a sympathetic response in some circles. If I was going to make up a crime for attention, theft just seems way easier....?
None of those scenarios seem like “for attention”.
(I’ve also never personally heard of any such things happening as you describe, while I certainly have heard multiple credible stories of “she claimed to be raped / sexually assaulted, which claim was manifestly false”.)
Wow, without context, that’s a really weird claim that makes me not want to engage with you. It’s really common for people with misogynist beliefs to declare a rape allegation “manifestly false” even when it’s true, because they have a lot of false beliefs around sexual assault or around the psychology of trauma. Without knowing anything about your situation, it makes me update much more strongly towards believing you’re a misogynist and/or believing you have bad epistemics than towards any object-level belief.
I’ve been involved in investigating lots of misconduct cases in another community, and have basically never encountered an allegation that was manifestly false; even in cases where I thought a claim was false, it was ambiguous and always incredibly difficult to make a call. Importantly it was (and should be) painful to make those calls, full of anxiety that we got it wrong and the awareness of how badly it would hurt somebody to disbelieve a true allegation; I can’t imagine being so confident in that conclusion that I’d then go online and use “I’ve heard multiple stories about this” as though it were solid evidence for the frequency of false allegations. I expect I’m exposed to something like 100x more stories about sexual misconduct than the average person, but I only know of one allegation that I’d say I know for sure was false; I’d be really surprised if someone knew of more without having held a similar investigatory position in a community. It strikes me as much more likely that people with very poor epistemic hygiene are repeating secondhand “false allegation” stories with much more confidence than is warranted.
I figured I’d write something rather than just not replying, on the off-chance that you’re not aware of this; I don’t intend to be rude, just to be clear about why I won’t engage further. Have a nice day.
I want to mention that regardless of who is right in this discussion, I decided to upvote and agree this comment strongly, for the following reason: I definitely want to flag that this part of your comment below is very important, since this context is really important for people that don’t grok sexual assault to notice, and in particular we have good reason to believe that the biases are self-serving.
It’s really common for people with misogynist beliefs to declare a rape allegation “manifestly false” even when it’s true, because they have a lot of false beliefs around sexual assault or around the psychology of trauma.
Wow, without context, that’s a really weird claim that makes me not want to engage with you.
With context, presumably, it wouldn’t be such a weird claim, yes? If so, then why assume there’s no such context?
Anyway, here’s an example. (This wasn’t “rape”, I don’t think, but merely “sexual harassment / assault”, but it’s close enough to establish the principle. I know of other examples that were “rape”, but I can’t easily link them / they’re not related to this community / etc.)
This is without getting into the publicly known and much-discussed examples like this one. (Surely you can’t have missed all the media attention that one received…?)
It strikes me as much more likely that people with very poor epistemic hygiene are repeating secondhand “false allegation” stories with much more confidence than is warranted.
Of course you haven’t, because those things don’t happen / aren’t true. Nobody makes up “my bike was stolen” for attention; false bike-theft allegations can’t hurt people because it’s almost impossible to make them in the first place (how would you ever know who stole your bike unless you saw them run off with it, which pretty much never happens?), having your bike stolen doesn’t have any effect on anyone’s willingness to date you, etc.
If such claims were instead sometimes true, then they would sometimes be made.
For rape, they are sometimes true. So, they are sometimes made.
What else could we possibly expect or want?
If you can come up with some way to test this, then I will bet large-to-me amounts of money that people make up “my thing got stolen” at vastly higher rates than they make up rape. Like, telling your teacher/employer that you were late because your bike was stolen seems like an excuse you can get away with making once per few months. Getting a friend to borrow your bike so you can bum $50 off your parents for a new bike seems like something teenagers regularly attempt—like, I literally saw this sort of scam run by the other kids in high school and discussed on school buses. Putting a GoFundMe on the internet, asking for money to replace your bike because it was stolen and you can’t work without it, seems like it would get a sympathetic response in some circles. If I was going to make up a crime for attention, theft just seems way easier....?
None of those scenarios seem like “for attention”.
(I’ve also never personally heard of any such things happening as you describe, while I certainly have heard multiple credible stories of “she claimed to be raped / sexually assaulted, which claim was manifestly false”.)
Wow, without context, that’s a really weird claim that makes me not want to engage with you. It’s really common for people with misogynist beliefs to declare a rape allegation “manifestly false” even when it’s true, because they have a lot of false beliefs around sexual assault or around the psychology of trauma. Without knowing anything about your situation, it makes me update much more strongly towards believing you’re a misogynist and/or believing you have bad epistemics than towards any object-level belief.
I’ve been involved in investigating lots of misconduct cases in another community, and have basically never encountered an allegation that was manifestly false; even in cases where I thought a claim was false, it was ambiguous and always incredibly difficult to make a call. Importantly it was (and should be) painful to make those calls, full of anxiety that we got it wrong and the awareness of how badly it would hurt somebody to disbelieve a true allegation; I can’t imagine being so confident in that conclusion that I’d then go online and use “I’ve heard multiple stories about this” as though it were solid evidence for the frequency of false allegations. I expect I’m exposed to something like 100x more stories about sexual misconduct than the average person, but I only know of one allegation that I’d say I know for sure was false; I’d be really surprised if someone knew of more without having held a similar investigatory position in a community. It strikes me as much more likely that people with very poor epistemic hygiene are repeating secondhand “false allegation” stories with much more confidence than is warranted.
I figured I’d write something rather than just not replying, on the off-chance that you’re not aware of this; I don’t intend to be rude, just to be clear about why I won’t engage further. Have a nice day.
I want to mention that regardless of who is right in this discussion, I decided to upvote and agree this comment strongly, for the following reason: I definitely want to flag that this part of your comment below is very important, since this context is really important for people that don’t grok sexual assault to notice, and in particular we have good reason to believe that the biases are self-serving.
With context, presumably, it wouldn’t be such a weird claim, yes? If so, then why assume there’s no such context?
Anyway, here’s an example. (This wasn’t “rape”, I don’t think, but merely “sexual harassment / assault”, but it’s close enough to establish the principle. I know of other examples that were “rape”, but I can’t easily link them / they’re not related to this community / etc.)
This is without getting into the publicly known and much-discussed examples like this one. (Surely you can’t have missed all the media attention that one received…?)
Hardly applies to the above examples!