The Mother of All Questions

by Rebecca Solnit

  The obsession about false rape accusations: a handy pullout section

  Of course, the old ideas are out in force, too. Pretty much every time someone raises the subject of rape in my hearing (or online reading), a man pops up to raise the “issue” of “false rape accusations.” Seriously, it’s almost inevitably the first thing out of some guy’s mouth; men appear obsessed with the subject, and it often becomes a convenient way of changing the focus from widespread female victims to exceedingly rare male victims. As a result, I’ve assembled this handy pullout guide to the subject in the hope that I never have to address it again.

  Rape is so common in our culture it’s fair to call it an epidemic. After all, what else could you call something that impacts nearly one in five women (and one in seventy-one men) directly and, as a threat, virtually all women, that is so pervasive it modifies how we live and think and move through the world for most of our lives? Actual instances in which women have untruthfully claimed a rape occurred simply to malign some guy are extremely uncommon. The most reliable studies suggest that about 2 percent of rape reports are false, which means that 98 percent are real. Even that statistic doesn’t mean that 2 percent are false rape accusations, because saying you were raped if you weren’t isn’t the same thing as claiming a specific person raped you when he didn’t. (No one sifts for the category of false rape accusation of an individual, by the way.) Still, those stats don’t stop men from bringing the subject up again and again and again. And again.

  Here’s what such accusations sound like in translation:

  Her: There’s an epidemic afflicting my people!

  Him: I’m worried about this incredibly rare disease I heard about (but didn’t research) that could possibly afflict a member of my tribe!

  Or maybe it sounds like this:

  Her: Your tribe does horrible things to mine, which is well documented.

  Him: Your tribe is full of malicious liars. I don’t really have evidence of that, but my feelings are more rational than your facts.

  Keep in mind, by the way, when you consider those figures on rape, that most rapes are not reported. Of the rapes that are, most are not prosecuted. Of those that are prosecuted, the great majority fail to achieve convictions. Bringing rape charges is generally not a fun and effective way to seek either revenge or justice, and falsely reporting a crime is itself a crime, something the police do not generally look kindly upon.

  Hundreds of thousands of rape kits collected by the police in this country were, we now know, never sent to crime labs for testing, and a few years back, various cities—New Orleans, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and St. Louis—were exposed for not even bothering to file police reports on tens of thousands of rape claims. This should help convince you that the system does not work that well for rape victims. And remember who the police are: an increasingly militarized, mostly male group with high rates of domestic violence and some notable rape charges of their own recently. In other words, they’re not always the most sympathetic people for women—particularly nonwhite women, sex workers, trans women, and other marginalized groups—to talk to about male sexual misconduct.

  People also often wonder why colleges adjudicate rape cases themselves rather than report them to the police, particularly since many of them don’t do it well. The reasons are numerous, including the fact that campuses are required under Title IX (a 1972 amendment to the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act) to ensure equal access to education for everyone. Sexual assault undermines that equality under the law. Then there’s the fact that the criminal justice system is broken when it comes to sexual violence and that many rape survivors regard dealing with the legal system as a second round of violation and humiliation. Sometimes charges are dropped simply because the victim can’t endure the process any longer. Appealing a guilty verdict on rape in the hope that the victim will be unable to endure another trial has become, I have been told, a tactic for overturning convictions.

  And now, back to those false rape accusations. In Men Explain Things to Me, I added this footnote:

  False accusations of rape are a reality, and a relatively rare one, though the stories of those convicted falsely are terrible. A British study by the Crown Prosecution Service released in 2013 noted that there were 5,651 prosecutions for rape in the period studied, versus only 35 prosecutions for false allegations of rape (or more than 160 rapes for every false allegation, well under 1 percent). And a 2000 U.S. Department of Justice report cited these estimates for the United States: 322,230 rapes annually, resulting in 55,424 reports to police, 26,271 arrests, and 7,007 convictions—or slightly more than 2 percent of rapes counted and 12 percent of rapes reported resulted in jail sentences.

  In other words, reporting a rape is not likely to get someone jailed, and though perhaps 2 percent of rape charges are false, only slightly more than 2 percent of all charges result in convictions. (Some estimates go as high as 3 percent.) In other words, there are an awful lot of unpunished rapists out there. And most rapists, when accused or charged, do not admit to committing rape. Which means we have a host of rapists out there who are also liars, and maybe the lies that abound are by men who have raped, not by women who have not been raped.

  Of course false-rape allegations have happened.¶ My friend Astra Taylor points out that the most dramatic examples in this country were when white men falsely accused Black men of assaulting white women. Which means that if you want to be indignant on the subject, you’ll need to summon up a more complicated picture of how power, blame, and mendacity actually work. There have been incidents—the infamous Scottsboro Boys gang-rape case of the 1930s, for example—where white women were also pressured by the authorities to lie in order to incriminate Black men. In the Scottsboro case, one of the accusers, seventeen-year-old Ruby Bates, later recanted and told the truth, despite the threats against her.

  Then there’s the Central Park jogger case of 1989 in which the police coerced false confessions from, and the judicial system (including a woman prosecutor) convicted and jailed, five innocent African American and Latino teens. The white victim, who had been beaten nearly to death, had no memory of the incident and was not a witness against them. In 2002, the real assailant confessed and the five were exonerated, but only after their youths were spent in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. Even in 2016 Donald Trump was proclaiming the guilt of these innocent men. Convicting the innocent tends to result from corruption and misconduct in the justice system, not just a lone accuser. Of course, there are exceptions. My point is that they are rare.

  The false-rape-allegation obsession apparently arises from a number of things, including the delusion that they are common and the enduring slander that women are naturally duplicitous, manipulative, and unreliable. The constant mention of the issue suggests that there’s a weird kind of male confidence that comes from a sense of having more credibility than women. And now that’s changing. Maybe by confidence I mean entitlement. Maybe what these feminist guys are saying is: men are finally going to be held accountable and that frightens them. Maybe it’s good for them to be frightened—or at least accountable.

  What makes a planet inhabitable

  The situation as it has long existed needs to be described bluntly. Let’s just say that a significant number of men hate women, whether the stranger harassed in the street, the Twitter user threatened into silence online, or the wife who’s beaten. Some men believe they are entitled to humiliate, punish, silence, violate, and even annihilate women. As a consequence, women face a startling amount of everyday violence and an atmosphere of menace, as well as a host of smaller insults and aggressions meant to keep us down. It’s not surprising, then, that the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies some men’s rights groups as hate groups.

  In this context, consider what we mean by rape culture. It’s hate. Those sports-team and fraternity rapes are predicated on the idea that violating the rights, dignity, and body of another human being is a cool thing to do. Such group acts are based on a preda
tory-

  monster notion of what masculinity is, one to which many men don’t subscribe but one that affects us all. It’s also a problem that men are capable of rectifying in ways women are not.

  The other evening, I left a talk on what makes a planet inhabitable—temperature, atmosphere, distance from a star—by an astrophysicist I know. I’d thought about asking a young man, a friend of a friend of mine, to accompany me to my car in the very dark park outside the California Academy of Sciences, but the astrophysicist and I fell to talking and walked to the car together without even questioning the necessity of it, and then I drove her to her car.

  A couple of weeks earlier, I joined Emma Sulkowicz and a group of young women who were carrying a mattress between classes at Columbia University. As mentioned earlier, Sulkowicz is an art major who reported being raped and received nothing that resembled justice either from the campus authorities or the New York Police Department. In response, she is bearing witness to her plight with a performance-art piece that consists of carrying a dorm-room mattress with her whenever she’s on campus, wherever she’s going.

  The media response has been tremendous.** A documentary film team was along that day, and the middle-aged camerawoman remarked to me that, if campus consent standards had existed when she was young, if the right of women to say no and the obligation of men to respect women’s decisions had been recognized, her life would have been utterly different. I thought about it for a moment and realized: so would mine. So much of my energy between the ages of twelve and thirty was given over just to surviving predatory men. The revelation that humiliation, harm, and maybe even death was liable to be inflicted on me by complete strangers and casual acquaintances because of my gender and that I had to be on watch all the time to avoid such a fate—well, that’s part of what made me a feminist.

  I care passionately about the inhabitability of our planet from an environmental perspective, but until it’s fully inhabitable by women who can walk freely down the street without the constant fear of trouble and danger, we will labor under practical and psychological burdens that impair our full powers. Which is why, as someone who thinks climate is the most important thing in the world right now, I’m still writing about feminism and women’s rights. And celebrating the men who have made changing the world slightly more possible or are now part of the great changes under way.

  * * *

  ¶ Since I wrote this essay, Rolling Stone published and retracted a story on rape at the University of Virginia. The article focused on one alleged victim, whose statements were not fact-checked and were not accurate. The mainstream media and the Twittersphere become obsessed with the case and gave the victim and her falsehoods massive coverage, in such a way as to suggest that false rape charges were the major problem at UVA, a school under federal investigation and charged with mishandling dozens of incidents of sexual assault dating back many years. In 2004, the Charlottesville Hook had reported, “In the same span, 60 UVA students reported they’d been sexually assaulted, many by fellow students. Yet, according to various sources in the UVA administration, not one sexual offender has been expelled or even suspended from the school in the past five years.” But after the Rolling Stone debacle, dozens of news stories gave the impression there was only one rape story at UVA and it was false.

  ** After I wrote that, Sulkowicz was subjected to massive attacks on social media, in the men’s rights movement, and elsewhere. In 2016, a search on her name turns up “Emma Sulkowicz” as the first result, “Emma Sulkowicz liar” as the second result. Posters were put up around the Columbia campus calling her a “pretty little liar” and a Twitter account called @fakerape went after her until it was suspended.

  One Year after Seven Deaths

  (2015)

  In 1988 the photographer Richard Misrach found a couple of Playboy magazines that had been used for target practice near the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, where more than a thousand US and British nuclear weapons had been detonated. As he looked, a breeze ruffled the pages of the magazine to a picture of Ray Charles singing. Every page of the magazine had a starry constellation of bullet holes—jagged, with rips going into the paper beyond the hole—scattered across it. Misrach recalls that Ray Charles’s “ecstasy was transformed into a scream by a bullet that had ripped through the magazine. I realized that the women on the covers of both magazines were the intended targets, but that the violence that was directed specifically at the women symbolically penetrated every layer of our society. Every aspect of our society . . . was riddled with violence.”

  I thought of his big color photographs of male and female celebrities, landscapes, products, movie scenes, all ripped through by bullets, and of his comment, when I began to contemplate, again, the Isla Vista massacre a year ago today. On the evening of May 23, 2014, a twenty-two-year-old went on a rampage that left six dead and injured many more, grazed by bullets or slammed into by his car, before he killed himself with his handgun.

  The weather was balmy that night in Isla Vista, a coastal development next to the University of California–Santa Barbara, full of pizza and burrito shops with gimmicky names, fraternity and sorority houses, apartment buildings. Students were out skateboarding, bicycling, walking around with friends in shorts and T-shirts and swimsuits. The killer, whose name should not be remembered, who should not be glorified as the Columbine killers were, had no friends, though he had lived there for nearly three years. He had long planned a bloodbath as revenge on a world he thought owed him sex, adoration, friendship, success. His hatred was particularly directed at women and girls and the men who enjoyed their company.

  The autobiography the young man, who grew up on the edge of the Hollywood movie industry, posted online that day is notable for its shallowness and its entitlement. Those are harsh words, but there’s no other way to describe his utter lack of empathy, imagination, and engagement with the life of others. He’s often described as mentally ill, but he seems instead to be someone who was exceptionally susceptible to the madness of the society around him, our society at its worst.

  His misogyny was our culture’s misogyny. His sad dream of becoming wealthy, admired, and sexually successful by winning the lottery was a banal, widely marketed dream. His preoccupation with brand-name products and status symbols was exactly what the advertising industry tries to inject into our minds. His fantasy of attaining power and status at the point of a gun is the fantasy sold to us by the gun lobby and the action movies in which some invulnerable superman unerringly shoots down the bad guys, a god made a god by his gun. “My first act of preparation was the purchase [of] my first handgun,” he wrote about his long-planned rampage. “After I picked up the handgun, I brought it back to my room and felt a new sense of power. I was now armed. Who’s the alpha male now, bitches? I thought to myself, regarding all of the girls who’ve looked down on me in the past.”

  That day, as he had planned, he stabbed to death three young men in his apartment, apparently ambushing them one at a time. Two were his roommates, one a visitor: Weihan Wang, age twenty, Chen Hong, also twenty, and George Chen, nineteen. He then set out with his guns for the sorority he thought had the most beautiful women and banged on the door, hoping to go in and massacre them all—“full of hot, beautiful blonde girls; the kind of girls I’ve always desired but was never able to have because they all look down on me. They are all spoiled, heartless, wicked bitches.” Alarmed by the angry, persistent pounding on the sorority’s front door, no one opened it. The killer instead shot three women out front, twenty-two-year-old Katherine Cooper, nineteen-year-old Veronica Weiss, and a third woman who survived, aided by passersby and then sheriff’s deputies. Back in his car, he swerved to hit passersby, hurling some with the impact, smashing others, missing others with his car, and spraying others with more bullets. He injured fourteen people, in addition to the six he killed.

  The last person he murdered before he took his own life was Christopher Michaels-Martinez, who was out with his friends and the last one
to enter the convenience store where they took shelter. On May 23, 2014, at about 9:30 p.m., a bullet, says the sheriff’s report “entered the left side of the chest and exited the right side of the chest, puncturing the liver and right ventricle of the heart.” Christopher Michaels-Martinez, an athletic twenty-year-old English major out with his friends, died immediately on the floor of the convenience store, despite the attempts of a nineteen-year-old woman to help him. She recalled a few days later, at the impromptu memorial of candles and flowers in the sidewalk outside the store, “I was giving him CPR, looked down, and recognized his face. He was the first person I met at freshman orientation.”

  “I would give the rest of my days for one more day with Christopher,” Richard Martinez, Christopher’s father, told me a couple of weeks ago. “But that’s not gonna happen. So instead I do this”—this being his gun-control advocacy work with Everytown for Gun Safety. “I don’t want any other parents to go through losing a child as beloved as our son was. I feel this is about saving lives.” Six other people young people died that night too. All of them had families; all of them must have had grief akin to Richard Martinez’s. And the young man’s mother. And cousins, friends, a girlfriend, fellow students.

  And his uncle, Alan Martinez, a San Francisco architect who’s a friend of mine, who loved his nephew, recalls discussing Cicero, the Alhambra, AIDS, Buddhism, and everything else under the sun with the boy. There’s a photograph of uncle and nephew lying on their backs on a green California hillside, both laughing at the same joke or just the joy of the moment. And then there was the press conference the day after, where Alan stood at Richard’s side and Richard said, in a voice thick with anguish, “Not one more,” which became the slogan for his campaign for gun control.