What we do know is this: False reports are rare, ranging from 2 to 10 percent of all reported sexual assaults. This figure comes from a
commonly cited 2010 study, published in the peer-reviewed international journal
Violence Against Women. This meta-analysis evaluated more than 20 previous studies and concluded that most misrepresent the rate of false reporting by not accounting for police departments' mistakes. (The researchers also conducted their own study, based on 10 years of reports at a single university—rare for a field that relies on Federal Bureau of Investigation data—putting the rate of false reporting at just under 6 percent.) "The greater the scrutiny applied to police classifications, the lower the rate of false reporting detected," study author David Lisak writes. "Cumulatively, these findings contradict the still widely promulgated stereotype that false rape allegations are a common occurrence."
Why is there so much disagreement? For one, researchers relying on federal data often conflate "unfounded" reports—when law enforcement labels an accusation false or "baseless"—with entirely false ones. The FBI's broad label of "unfounded" includes accusations that have been investigated and dismissed as not meeting legal criteria, without being proven false. This confusion results in inflated numbers, the kind Kavanaugh's defenders cite—such as
one debunked study that puts prevalence at 41 percent.
Drawing from the last published Uniform Crime Reporting data on "unfounded" reports in 1996, the
FBI says the unfounded rate for "forcible rape," at 8 percent, is higher than the average for all other crimes measured, at 2 percent. However, the agency has since modified its guidelines to narrow this definition. Criminal justice professor Philip Rumney, writing in the
Cambridge Law Journal in 2006, questions
these numbers, which come from law enforcement agencies across the United States: "Among such a large number of agencies there is likely to be a significant variation in recording practice," he writes, citing the Philadelphia Police Department, which "
dumped cases," labeling them "unfounded," in order to "reduce workload" for nearly two decades.
This was no isolated incident. As Lisak explains, FBI data is often unreliable:
Despite these guidelines, numerous studies have discovered that the misclassification of cases by law enforcement agencies is routine. Cases in which the victim is unable or unwilling to cooperate, in which evidence is lacking, in which the victim makes inconsistent statements, or in which the victim was heavily intoxicated frequently get classified as 'unfounded' or 'no-crimed.'
Even agencies that do not deliberately mislabel accusations make mistakes: Officials often misclassify accusations that have been delayed, or dismiss contradictions in a victim's statement as falsehoods—even though these inconsistencies are often the "artifact of police interviewing techniques," as researchers write in one
2012 study. According to the
National Sexual Violence Resource Center, police departments are urged, but not required, to exclude reports such as these from their count; research shows that they often do not.
In the end, reports labeled "false"
can be very dangerous—but for victims of sexual assault, not the "young men of America." Misconceptions about false reporting contribute to underreporting, a very real and widespread phenomenon. If you believed police, pundits, and the president will dismiss your account without proving it false, why would you report it?
