The Conspiracy Against Men
I know two men who were, I am fairly confident, falsely accused of rape. One of them was a wealthy young man accused by a desperate young woman who had stolen some credit cards and was on the run. The rape accusation was just one part of a larger fraud. The man wasn’t where she said he had been when the alleged rape took place, there was no evidence of rape beyond her testimony, and much else of what she said turned out to be false. He was never arrested or charged, and from the start the police assured him that all would be well.
The other man is a creep: narcissistic, charming, manipulative, and a liar. He is known to use all sorts of coercive methods to get sex, but not the sort that fall under the legal definition of rape. The women he has sex with (young, precocious, confident) are consenting; indeed, he’s the kind of man who makes women feel, at the time, that they are the ones seducing him—that they are the ones with all the agency and power, when in fact they have relatively little of it. (“She seduced me” is of course a defense commonly made by rapists—and by pedophiles.) When one of these women, years later—having learned of the man’s pattern, and seeing him for what he was—accused him of assault, it seemed to those who knew him that she might well have been seeking a legal remedy for what he put her through: for having been used, manipulated, and lied to. Maybe, on top of all that, he really did assault her. But the evidence suggested otherwise. He was never charged with rape, though he was, because of his reckless, unprofessional behavior, made to resign from his job. From what I hear, the man (now gainfully re-employed) goes on much as he did before, though more carefully and quietly, and with more plausible deniability. These days he self-styles as a feminist.
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I know many more than two women who have been raped. This is unsurprising. Many more women are raped than falsely accuse men of rape. With just one exception, none of the women I know pressed criminal charges or made a report to the police. One friend, when we were both in college, called me to tell me that a guy she knew, a friend of a friend, had, during an early evening group outing when they were fooling around on a pool table in an empty dorm social room, forced himself inside her. She had said no, resisted, finally pushed him off. The evening resumed. Neither she nor I considered going to the police. The purpose of the call was simply to acknowledge that this thing—we didn’t call it rape—had happened.
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Some men are falsely accused of rape; there is nothing to be gained by denying it. But false accusations are rare. The most detailed ever study of sexual assault reports, released by the UK Home Office in 2005, estimated that just 3 percent of 2,643 rape reports made over the course of fifteen years were “probably” or “possibly” false.1 Yet the British police had classified, in the same period, more than twice as many—8 percent—of these reports as false, based on its officers’ personal judgment.2 In 1996, the FBI also reported an 8 percent rate of “unfounded” or “false” forcible rape complaints, aggregated from police departments across the US.3 In both Britain and the US, the 8 percent figure was largely the result of police officers’ susceptibility to rape myths; in both countries, police officers were inclined to consider a report false if there hadn’t been a physical struggle, if no weapon had been involved, or if the accuser had had a prior relationship with the accused.4 In 2014, according to figures published in India, 53 percent of rape reports in Delhi from the previous year had been false, a statistic giddily seized on by Indian men’s rights activists. But the definition of “false” reports had been extended to cover all those cases that hadn’t reached court, never mind those that didn’t meet the legal standard for rape in India5—including marital rape, which 6 percent of married Indian women report having experienced.6
In the UK Home Office study, the police judged 216 of 2,643 complaints false. In those 216 cases, the complainants had named a total of thirty-nine suspects; six of these suspects were arrested, and charges were brought against two of them; in both cases, the charges were eventually dropped. So, in the final analysis, bearing in mind that the Home Office counted only a third as many false accusations as the police, just 0.23 percent of rape reports led to a false arrest, and only 0.07 percent of rape reports led to a man being falsely charged with rape; none resulted in wrongful conviction.7
I am not saying that false rape accusations are something to shrug at. They are not. An innocent man disbelieved, mistrusted, his reality twisted, his reputation stripped, his life potentially ruined by the manipulation of state power: this is a moral scandal. And, notice, it is a moral scandal that has much in common with the experience of rape victims, who in many cases face a conspiracy of disbelief, especially from police. Nonetheless, a false rape accusation, like a plane crash, is an objectively unusual event that occupies an outsized place in the public imagination. Why then does it carry its cultural charge? The answer cannot simply be that its victims are men: the number of men raped—largely by other men—easily overwhelms the number of men falsely accused of rape.8 Could it be not only that the victims of false rape accusations are usually men, but also that its assumed perpetrators are women?
Except that, very often, it is men who falsely accuse other men of raping women. This is a thing almost universally misunderstood about false rape accusations. When we think of a false rape accusation we picture a scorned or greedy woman, lying to the authorities. But many, perhaps most, wrongful convictions of rape result from false accusations levied against men by other men: by cops and prosecutors, overwhelmingly male, intent on pinning an actual rape on the wrong suspect. In the US, which has the world’s highest incarceration rate, 147 men were exonerated for sexual assault on the basis of false accusations or perjury between 1989 and 2020.9 (In that same period, 755 people—five times as many—were found to have been falsely accused, and wrongly convicted, of murder.10) Fewer than half of these men were deliberately framed by their alleged victims. Meanwhile, over half of their cases involved “official misconduct”: a category that applies when the police coach false victim or witness identifications, charge a suspect despite the victim’s failure to identify him as the attacker, suppress evidence or induce false confessions.
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There is no general conspiracy against men. But there is a conspiracy against certain classes of men. Of the 147 men who were exonerated of sexual assault on the basis of a false accusation or perjury in the US between 1989 and 2020, 85 were non-white and 62 white. Of those 85 non-white men, 76 were black, which means that black men make up 52 percent of those convicted of rape on the basis of false accusations or perjury. Yet black men make up only about 14 percent of the US male population, and 27 percent of men convicted of rape.11 A black man serving time for sexual assault is 3.5 times more likely to be innocent than a white man convicted of sexual assault.12 He is also very likely to be poor— not just because black people in the US are disproportionately poor, but because most incarcerated Americans, of all races, are poor.13
The National Registry of Exonerations, which lists the men and women wrongly imprisoned in the US since 1989, does not detail the long history of false rape accusations against black men which bypassed the legal system altogether. In particular, it does not record the deployment of the false rape accusation in the Jim Crow period as, in Ida B. Wells’s words, “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized.”14 It does not take into account the 150 black men who were lynched between 1892 and 1894 for alleged rape or attempted rape of white women—a charge that included known consensual affairs between black men and white women—as chronicled in Wells’s remarkable A Red Record.15 It does not mention the case of William Brooks of Galesline, Arkansas, who was lynched on May 23, 1894, for asking a white woman to marry him, or tell us anything about the “unknown Negro” whom Wells reports having been lynched in West Texas earlier that month for the crime of “writing letter to white woman.” In 2007, Carolyn Bryant admitted that she had lied, fifty-two years earlier, when she said that a fourteen-year-old black boy named Emmett Till had grabbed and sexually propositioned her—a lie that spurred Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his brother to abduct, bludgeon, shoot, and kill Till.16 Roy Bryant and his brother were acquitted of murder, despite the overwhelming evidence against them; four months later, they were paid $3,000 for the story of how they did it by Look magazine. There is no registry that details the uses of false rape accusations as a tactic of colonial rule: in India, in Australia, in South Africa, in Palestine.17
It might seem surprising, then, that false rape accusations are, today, a predominantly wealthy white male preoccupation. But it isn’t surprising—not really. The anxiety about false rape accusations is purportedly about injustice (innocent people being harmed), but actually it is about gender, about innocent men being harmed by malignant women. It is an anxiety, too, about race and class: about the possibility that the law might treat wealthy white men as it routinely treats poor black and brown men. For poor men, and women, of color, the white woman’s false rape accusation is just one element in a matrix of vulnerability to state power.18 But false rape accusations are a unique instance of middle-class and wealthy white men’s vulnerability to the injustices routinely perpetrated by the carceral state against poor people of color. Well-off white men instinctively and correctly trust that the legal justice system will take care of them: will not plant drugs on them, will not gun them down and later claim to have seen a weapon, will not harass them for walking in a neighborhood where they “don’t belong,” will give them a pass for carrying that gram of cocaine or bag of weed. But in the case of rape, well-off white men worry that the growing demand that women be believed will cut against their right to be shielded from the prejudices of the law.19
That representation is, of course, false: even in the case of rape, the state is on the side of wealthy white men. But what matters— in the sense of what is ideologically efficacious—is not the reality, but the misrepresentation. In the false rape accusation, wealthy white men misperceive their vulnerability to women and to the state.
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In 2016, the Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky sentenced a twenty-year-old Stanford swimmer, Brock Turner, to six months in county jail (of which he served three) on three felony counts of sexual assault against Chanel Miller. In a letter to the judge, Brock Turner’s father, Dan A. Turner, wrote:
Brock’s life has been deeply altered forever by the events of Jan 17th and 18th. He will never be his happy go lucky self with that easygoing personality and welcoming smile … You can see this in his face, the way he walks, his weakened voice, his lack of appetite. Brock always enjoyed certain types of food and is a very good cook himself. I was always excited to buy him a big ribeye steak to grill or to get his favorite snack for him. I had to make sure to hide some of my favorite pretzels or chips because I knew they wouldn’t be around long after Brock walked in from a long swim practice. Now he barely consumes any food and eats only to exist. These verdicts have broken and shattered him and our family in so many ways. His life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life.20
The myopic focus on his son’s well-being—wasn’t Miller’s life also “deeply altered forever”?—is striking. Even more so is the (presumably inadvertent) sexual pun: “20 minutes of action”—healthy, adolescent fun. Should Brock, Dan Turner seems to want to ask, be punished for that? Then there is the food. Brock no longer loves his steak? You no longer have to hide the pretzels or chips from Brock? This is the way one talks about a golden retriever, not an adult human. But in a sense Dan Turner is talking about an animal, a perfectly bred specimen of wealthy white American boyhood: “happy go lucky,” “easygoing,” sporty, friendly, and endowed with a healthy appetite and glistening coat. And, like an animal, Brock is imagined to exist outside the moral order. These red-blooded, white-skinned, all-American boys—and the all-American girls who date them and marry them (but are never, ever sexually assaulted by them)—are good kids, the best kids, our kids.
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That Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was one such all-American kid was his ultimate defense against Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations that he had sexually assaulted her when they were both in high school. Ford, Kavanaugh said, “did not travel in the same social circles” as he and his friends.21 In the summer of 1982, Brett—only child of Martha and Everett Edward Kavanaugh Jr.—was spending time with his friends from Georgetown Prep, among the US’s most expensive private schools (and alma mater of Neil Gorsuch and two of Robert Kennedy’s sons), together with students of the neighboring Catholic girls’ schools: Stone Ridge, Holy Child, Visitation, Immaculata, Holy Cross. The group—Tobin, Mark, P.J., Squi, Bernie, Matt, Becky, Denise, Lori, Jenny, Pat, Amy, Julie, Kristin, Karen, Suzanne, Maura, Megan, Nicki—spent that summer going to the beach, training for football, lifting weights, drinking beers, attending church on Sundays, and generally having the best time of their lives. Sixty-five women who knew Kavanaugh in high school signed a letter defending him after Ford’s allegation was made public. “Friends for a lifetime,” Kavanaugh said of these women, “built on a foundation of talking through school and life starting at age 14.”
Ford was, in an objective sense, part of Kavanaugh’s social and economic order. She was white and rich, and—assuming she remembers correctly, and do you believe she doesn’t?—she hung out with Brett and his friends at least once. But Ford’s allegations make her an exile from the social world of healthy white girls and boys, who occasionally do things (in Kavanaugh’s words) that are “goofy” and “embarrassing”—but never criminal. In their senior yearbook, Kavanaugh and his friends used the phrase “Renate Alumnius [sic]” to describe themselves—an allusion to Renate Schroeder, one of the sixty-five “friends for a lifetime” who signed the letter attesting to Kavanaugh’s having “always treated women with decency and respect.” Questioned about the phrase, Kavanaugh said that it “was clumsily intended to show affection, and that she was one of us,” and that it was “not related to sex.” Schroeder, who learned of the yearbook smear after signing the letter, said in a statement to the Times that it was “horrible, hurtful and simply untrue.” “I can’t begin to comprehend what goes through the minds of 17-year-old boys who write such things,” she said. “I pray their daughters are never treated this way.”22 After Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Christine Blasey Ford’s father, Ralph, gave a warm handshake to Ed Kavanaugh, Brett Kavanaugh’s father, at the Burning Tree Club in Bethesda, where they both play golf. “I’m glad Brett was confirmed,” Ralph Blasey apparently said, one Republican dad to another.23
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What if Brett Kavanaugh hadn’t been white? It’s a hard counterfactual to evaluate, because the world would have to be very different for a black or brown boy to grow up not only with the sort of financial and social privilege Brett had—the wealthy family, elite school, the legacy at Yale—but moreover to have a phalanx of similarly privileged peers who would have his back come hell or high water. The solidarity on show from the people who knew Kavanaugh when young—what Kavanaugh calls “friendship”—was the solidarity of rich white people. We can’t imagine a black or brown Kavanaugh without inverting America’s racial and economic rules.
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For many women of color, the mainstream feminist injunction “Believe women” and its online correlate #IBelieveHer raise more questions than they settle. Whom are we to believe, the white woman who says she was raped, or the black or brown woman who insists that her son is being set up? Carolyn Bryant or Mamie Till?
Defenders of “men’s rights” like to say that “Believe women” violates the presumption of innocence. But this is a category error. The presumption of innocence is a legal principle: it answers to our sense that it is worse, all else being equal, for the law to wrongly punish than to wrongly exonerate. It is for this reason that in most legal systems the burden of proof rests with the accuser, not the accused. “Believe women” is not an injunction to abandon this legal principle, at least in most cases, but a political response to what we suspect will be its uneven application. Under the law, people accused of crimes are presumed innocent, but some—we know— are presumed more innocent than others. Against this prejudicial enforcement of the presumption of innocence, “Believe women” operates as a corrective norm, a gesture of support for those people—women—whom the law tends to treat as if they were lying.
The dismissal of “Believe women” as an abandonment of the presumption of innocence is a category error in a second sense. The presumption of innocence does not tell us what to believe. It tells us how guilt is to be established by the law: that is, by a process that deliberately stacks the deck in favor of the accused. Harvey Weinstein had a right to the presumption of innocence when he stood trial. But for those of us not serving on his jury, there was no duty to presume him innocent or to “suspend judgment” before the verdict was in. On the contrary: the evidence, including the compelling, consistent, and detailed accounts of more than a hundred women, made it extremely likely that Weinstein was guilty of assault and harassment. What’s more, we know that men who have the kind of power that Weinstein had are all too liable to abuse it. The law must address each individual on a case-by-case basis—it must start from the assumption that Weinstein is no more likely to be an abuser than a ninety-year-old grandmother—but the norms of the law do not set the norms of rational belief. Rational belief is proportionate to the evidence: the strong statistical evidence that men like Weinstein tend to abuse their power, and the compelling testimonial evidence of the women who accused him of doing so. To be sure, new evidence can surface in a trial, and what previously seemed like good evidence can be discredited. (Equally, wealth and power can make good evidence disappear.) But the outcome of a trial does not determine what we should believe. Had Weinstein been acquitted on all charges, should we have concluded that his accusers were lying?
Some commentators, including some feminists,24 insist that in cases like Weinstein’s we can “never really know” whether someone is guilty of a sex crime, even when all the evidence suggests he is. One can, as a philosophical matter, take such a view. But one would have to be consistent in its application. If you can “never really know” whether Weinstein is a criminal or the victim of an elaborate setup, then you likewise cannot know the same about, say, Bernie Madoff. The question, from a feminist perspective, is why sex crimes elicit such selective skepticism. And the answer that feminists should give is that the vast majority of sex crimes are perpetrated by men against women. Sometimes, the injunction to “Believe women” is simply the injunction to form our beliefs in the ordinary way: in accordance with the facts.
That said, “Believe women” is a blunt tool. It carries with it the implicit injunction “Don’t believe him.” But this zero-sum logic— she’s telling the truth, he’s lying—presumes that nothing but sex difference is at work in the assessment of rape allegations. Especially when factors other than gender—race, class, religion, immigration status, sexuality—come into play, it is far from clear to whom we owe a gesture of epistemic solidarity. At Colgate University, an elite liberal arts college in upstate New York, only 4.2 percent of the student body was black during the 2013–14 academic year; and yet 50 percent of accusations of sexual violation that year were against black students.25 Does “Believe women” serve justice at Colgate?
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Black feminists have long tried to complicate white feminist accounts of rape. Shulamith Firestone’s hugely ambitious The Dialectic of Sex (1970) falters critically in its treatment of race and rape.26 For Firestone, the rape of white women by black men is the result of a natural Oedipal urge to destroy the white father and take and subjugate what is his. “Whether innocently or consciously,” Angela Davis wrote in her 1981 classic Women, Race & Class, Firestone’s pronouncements “have facilitated the resurrection of the timeworn myth of the Black rapist.” What’s more, Davis went on,
The fictional image of the Black man as rapist has always strengthened its inseparable companion: the image of the Black woman as chronically promiscuous. For once the notion is accepted that Black men harbor irresistible and animal-like sexual urges, the entire race is invested with bestiality.27
On the evening of December 16, 2012, in Delhi, a twenty-three-year-old woman named Jyoti Singh, who came to be known to the Indian public as Nirbhaya (“fearless one”), was raped and tortured on a bus by six men, including the driver. Thirteen days later she died, having suffered brain damage, pneumonia, cardiac arrest, and complications related to the attack, in which the assailants penetrated her vagina with a rusty iron rod. Soon after the attack, a friend’s father brought it up with me at a dinner. “But Indians are such civilized people,” he said. I wanted to tell him that there is no civilization under patriarchy.
Non-Indian commentators, looking on, tended to see Singh’s murder as a symptom of a failed culture: of India’s sexual repression, its illiteracy, its conservatism. It is undeniable that the specificities of history and culture inflect how a society regulates sexual violence. The realities of caste, religion and poverty, and too the long legacy of British colonialism, shape India’s regime of sexual violence, just as the realities of racial and class inequality, together with the legacies of chattel slavery and empire, shape the corresponding regimes in the US or UK. But the brutality of the attack on Jyoti Singh was cited by non-Indians as a way of disavowing any commonality between the sexual cultures of India and their own countries. Soon after the murder, the British journalist Libby Purves explained that “murderous, hyena-like male contempt [for women] is a norm” in India.28 A first question: why is it that when white men rape they are violating a norm, but when brown men rape they are conforming to one? A second question: if Indian men are hyenas, what does that make Indian women?
Copyright © 2021 by Amia Srinivasan