False accusation of rape

A false accusation of rape happens when a person states that they or another person have been raped when no rape has occurred. Although there are widely varying estimates of the prevalence of false accusation of rape, according to a 2013 book on forensic victimology, very few reliable scientific studies have been conducted.

Rates of false accusation are sometimes inflated or misrepresented due to conflation of false with designations such as unfounded. Designations such as unfounded allow law enforcement to close cases without arriving at a conclusion and are used to describe cases without enough evidence, as opposed to false cases where the accuser is not credible or eventually admits that the accusation is untrue.

Causes of false accusations of rape fall into two categories: deliberate deception (lies) and non-deliberate deception (such as false memories, facilitated communication, and "don't know").

An accuser may have several motivations to falsely claim they have been raped. There is disagreement on how many different categories these may be put into. Kanin (1994) listed three: revenge, producing an alibi, and getting sympathy/attention. Newman (2017) listed four: revenge, producing an alibi, personal gain, and mental illness.

According to De Zutter et al. (2017), Kanin's list is "valid but insufficient to explain all the different motives of complainants" and presents eight categories of motives: material gain, alibi, revenge, sympathy, attention, disturbed mental state, relabeling, or regret.

According to Hines and Douglas (2017), 73% of men who've experienced partner-initiated violence reported that their partner threatened to make false accusations. This is compared to 3% for men in the general population.

There are several ways in which an alleged victim can accidentally come to believe that they have been raped by the person(s) they accuse. These include:

Facilitated communication (FC) is a scientifically discredited technique that attempts to aid communication by people with autism or other communication disabilities who are non-verbal. The facilitator guides the disabled person's arm or hand and attempts to help them type on a keyboard or other device. Research indicates that the facilitator is the source of the messages obtained through FC, not the disabled person. However, the facilitator may believe they are not the source of the messages due to the ideomotor effect, which is the same effect that guides a Ouija board. There have been a number of accusations of sexual abuse made through facilitated communication. As of 1995, there were sixty known cases, with an unknown numbers of others settled without reaching public visibility.