The Myth of False Accusal

If I wanted to get out of class on any given day without hurting my grade, I might tell my professor that my grandmother is very ill, or maybe that a pet had died. Regardless of the strength of my desire to miss a particular class, I would never tell this professor that a close relative had been brutally murdered over the weekend—or that I had been raped. Few people would. So why do most of my peers and elders believe that a false rape accusation is the easiest way for a young woman to torpedo the aspirations of a successful young man?

About once every three months, another prominent rape case splashes across the printed and digital pages of the most influential media outlets. Invariably, at least half of the opinion pieces on the incident will cast doubt on the veracity of the victim’s account. They will probably mention the 2006 Duke lacrosse scandal, a much-talked-of investigation in which a stripper’s accusation of rape was proven false only after it had already ruined the lives of the three charged male lacrosse players.

The case will also become a topic of conversation among my peers as well as among my parents and their friends. The majority of my male friends and relatives—mostly liberal and conventionally upstanding—will raise the possibility of a false accusation. As will most females.

And every three months, I will exhaust myself in the attempt to push back against this overwhelming and unwavering belief in the preponderance of false accusations.

In this first quarter of 2012, the cycle has already begun. The focus of allegations of assault presently serving as an object of close scrutiny and idle speculation is that of Patrick Witt, the Yale quarterback who was lionized for his decision to forfeit a Rhodes scholarship in order to play in the Harvard-Yale football game. Late last week, another, less heroic side of Witt surfaced in the media: in September, a female student had apparently lodged an informal complaint against Witt through Yale’s University-wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct. As it turns out, the Rhodes Committee had supposedly suspended his candidacy upon hearing of the accusation.

Since the victim understandably wishes to remain anonymous, the details of the alleged assault remain unknown. Because of this dearth of information, I will be the first to admit that no one is currently in any position to accuse Witt of rape. But why does this same dearth of information serve as grounds for most of my friends and acquaintances to accuse the young woman of fabricating the assault?

As a senior member of Response Peer Counseling, I have spent fifty-seven hours of the past three academic years in training about issues of sexual assault, abuse, dating, and other relationship issues. In my capacity as both a counselor and as a friend to my peers, I have heard countless stories of rape, almost-rape, and otherwise unlabeled situations of varying levels of violation and discomfort. I have even found myself questioning my own past experiences, unwilling and unable to categorize them.

Sexual assault is undoubtedly swampy terrain: with each step onto its viscous surface, you move farther from the certainty of solid land. Eventually, you can no longer find your way back. The more I learn and the more stories I hear, the more I am convinced that no umbrella definition of sexual assault can exist. Just as each person defines his or her sexuality for him or herself, each person defines sexual assault on a similarly personal level. I do not wish to encourage denial or repression but rather to acknowledge everyone’s right to comprehend a strange or difficult experience in the way that makes most sense for them. My experience has, however, provided me with one certainty: it is much more likely that a woman will undergo a traumatic experience, acknowledge it as such, and decline to report it for fear of ruining the life of a handsome, young Harvard man.

Therefore, we should not be asking the impossible question of “Did Witt assault this woman?” Instead, we should ask what kind of society we have constructed if false rape accusations are considered a likely and easy mode of retaliation. To me, this pervasive fear points to a world in which men are aware of an unearned cultural dominance. Since they know their authority has not been obtained but inherited, they fear losing it to a resentful woman, whose only tool in their eyes—one to be used for good or for evil—remains her sexuality.

Let us return for a moment to the classroom analogy. Imagine that I am absolutely desperate to miss a midterm. I consider any number of plausible excuses. Let’s say, I somehow alight upon, and then choose, a pretext as awful as murder of a relative. Not only would such a story emotionally disturb me, its teller, it might also merit a personal follow-up from the professor. Curiosity might even drive this professor to Google. Finding nothing like what I described, she or he would quickly become suspicious and start to question my story, which would then deflate as quickly as a punctured balloon beneath the pinprick of interrogation. I think I’d rather just take the midterm.

Emma Winsor Wood ’12 is a History and Literature concentrator in Mather House.