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[quote=Anonymous]please. throughout this whole discussion every time someone tried to talk about false rape accusations being a real issue it was quickly brushed aside. When asked to define what consent could consist of and how to prove it that was quickly brushed aside too.

Not everyone has time on DCUM to sift through 22 pages to find one instance. However it is pretty clear. If you want to talk about rape you have to admit that there is a growing problem of false rape accusations and it is not clear cut as "not giving consent".

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/06/02/why-do-high-profile-campus-rape-stories-keep-falling-apart/?hpid=z3

If you were to ask an average person today to name a prominent story about rape on college campuses, odds are pretty good that among the top four or five replies would be the Duke lacrosse case, the Rolling Stone cover story about Jackie and the University of Virginia, Columbia University “mattress girl” Emma Sulkowicz and one of the stories from “The Hunting Ground.” Yet in all of these stories, either the accusations were later shown to be a complete fabrication or at least serious questions were raised about them.

Each time a new high-profile story falls apart, a larger portion of the public becomes less likely to believe the next one. (It would be nice to think that we’d evaluate these stories on their own merits. But that isn’t how we tend to process contentious issues.) The anti-campus rape activists often claim that false accusations of sexual assault are practically nonexistent. (“Anti-campus rape activists” is a necessary but admittedly clumsy term. Every sane person is obviously opposed to campus rape. And even among activists who have made campus rape their issue, there is dissent and disagreement about strategy, priorities and reform.) But that so many of the accusations that they themselves have chosen as emblems of the cause have been proved false or debatable suggests that they’re either wrong about the frequency of false accusations or that the movement itself has had some extraordinarily bad luck.

Calculating the frequency of false rape accusations is even more difficult than studying the frequency of rape. Consequently, the researchers and activists who have tried have put this figure all over the map, from a fraction of a percent to as high as 40 percent. My own hunch is that they’re much more common than “almost never,” which activists claim, but nowhere nearly as common as their apparent occurrence in these high-profile cases. So why do anti-campus rape activists keep shooting themselves in the foot? Something else must be at play.

this isn’t an argument that college students (and anti-rape activists in particular) never get raped. Nor is it an argument that accusations should never be believed. Nor is it an argument that rape victims should be ashamed to come forward. It’s only to say that generally speaking, an alleged victim eager to generate publicity about what happened to her may require more verification than an alleged victim who is reluctant to come forward. All else being equal, reluctant witnesses are more persuasive than eager ones. (Of course, all else is rarely equal.)

Finally, it may be that activists deliberately seek out and champion the ambiguous cases to demonstrate their commitment to the cause

[b]But the “believe every accuser” approach to this issue is proving to be destructive to both goals. It’s obviously destructive to the men who have been wrongly accused and whose reputations and lives have been ruined. But it’s also destructive to actual victims of sexual assault. Every high-profile story that crumbles under scrutiny reinforces the perception that false accusations are common. And that only makes it more difficult to hold the real assailants accountable.[/b]
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