PEOPLE DON'T LIE
A favourite statement regularly heard repeated in recent months is that “people don't lie about abuse.” This is sometimes modified to "people don't often lie." I've said this myself and believed it to be true. However, I was so shocked by the statistics offered in defence of this claim that (after pulling myself off the floor) I resolved to never say it again.
We're told that only "a tiny fraction” of abuse claims are misleading and that the “overwhelming preponderance", or "97%, are factual". Even despite my new doubts, I actually think the number is probably better than that. But who cares what I think? Let's go with what the experts, such as Time Magazine's "Silence Breakers" (Tarana Burke, Rose McGowan, Alyssa Milano, and others) tell us.
Okay, so a mere 3% of accusations are false. Now, while it's also true that inappropriate and even violent behaviour happens to all genders everywhere, to make this far more sporting and the number as small as possible – more in favour of the claim I now disagree with – let's cut out one entire gender from the pending equation. Better still, let's not look at billions of people across the whole planet (where surely this is an issue as well) but just focus on the female half of the US population, or roughly 163 million people.
Now, I personally believe that it's likely all women experience unwanted sexual conduct but, again, let's make the number much smaller still – to even more strongly favour the claim I now believe to be wholly ridiculous. In fact, let's ignore many women in this calculation. Let's remove more than half of the above 163 million and then on top of that round down as well. We'll do this to account for women who don't think people would ever believe their account and so would never come forward. And let's also exclude those women for whom an event or series of them happened so long ago that any solid details are at best foggy or where evidence will have long since evaporated. We'll also scratch those women who have moved on and have forgiven or just don't give a damn anymore. I actually think this cohort of all the above cases is probably the overwhelming majority but let's just say we're looking at roughly half of all American women.
Okay, now we have a relatively small and clean number to work with: 80 million. Pretending that all abuse stops today and forevermore, this is our population of women possibly coming forward with a story of past abuse. (Yes, your own experience and mine, and what we hear daily in the media, tells us the number of those women who've experienced something on the very broad spectrum from inappropriate behaviour to brutal violence – just in the United States – has to be closer to twice this figure.) But even here, with only 80 million, at only 3% we would expect false claims in the realm of 2.4 million. And that's just if each person had only one such claim, which is highly unlikely.
Because we hear big numbers in all different scenarios all the time, such a number is pretty meaningless without context or comparison. So, let's actually consider the figure. What does this number, 2.4 million, really represent? Well, for scale, the US state and federal prison population (considered by just about everyone to be an out-of-control for-profit system in a nation that incarcerates more people per capita than anywhere else in the world) is a paltry 1.5 million. Just let it sink in a moment. What does that mean? If “virtually no one gives a false claim” (and you eliminate most of the potential claims) you would expect a falsely accused population nearly double that of the current US prison population. Does that still sound as infinitesimal and irrelevant as is widely broadcast?
And, it seems worth asking, explicitly, in what sense then could 3% (or even 0.3%) be interpreted as a small number? I don't know how it's even possible to form that thought in light of the evidence these folks have themselves submitted. You'd have to have no number sense whatsoever while also failing to imagine those falsely accused as human beings. How else?
Of course, even putting the numbers in this perspective still doesn't get us to what we're talking about. We have to keep in mind that this 2.4 million estimate (give or take a million or two) is still misleading because, of course, the aforementioned 3% is what we find within our old, stuffy, sexist, patriarchal, adversarial legal system – where false claims are sought out and uncovered, where the presumption of innocence is a ruling philosophy, and where there is some evidentiary criteria and threshold to be met. We don't live in that world any longer. Where we currently reside, mere accusations rule and there is no need to establish intent or even look for evidence. Guilt is the default finding, triggered by only by accusation, and then validated by the volume of public outcry on Twitter. In 2017 we've established as a social norm an extrajudicial apparatus based on what? That's right: The wisdom of the crowd coupled with the honour system. Fucking brilliant! A nine hundred year leap backward. And why have we done this? Because individual lives are a small price to pay for the quenching of collective rage.
So, I don't know what you imagine when you hear "believe all survivors" but it now lands on me like "let's knowingly mislabel millions of people as abusers or rapists." And what's amazing about all of this is that the same people who go on social media to highlight the plight of the falsely accused and wrongly imprisoned, or are keen to talk about prison and bail reform, are often the same folks being so vocal on this issue at the moment and sporting "believe all women" t-shirts or carrying "survivors don't lie" signs.
