Two weeks ago a man in France was arrested for raping his daughter. Sheâd gone to her school counselor and then the police, but they needed âhard evidence.â So, she videotaped her next assault. Her father was eventually arrested. His attorney explained, âThere was a period when he was unemployed and in the middle of a divorce. He insists that these acts did not stretch back further than three or four months. His daughter says longer. But everyone should be very careful in what they say.â Because, really, even despite her seeking help, her testimony, her bravery in setting up a webcam to film her father raping her, you really canât believe what the girl says, can you?
Everyone âknowsâ this. Even children.
Three years ago, in fly-on-the-wall fashion of parent drivers everywhere, I listened while a 14-year-old girl in the back seat of my car described how angry she was that her parents had stopped allowing her to walk home alone just because a girl in her neighborhood âclaimed she was raped.â When I asked her if there was any reason to think the girlâs story was not true, she said, âGirls lie about rape all the time.â She didnât know the person, she just assumed she was lyingâŚ
No one says, âYou canât trust women,â but distrust them we do. College students surveyed revealed that they think up to 50% of their female peers lie when they accuse someone of rape, despite wide-scale evidence and multi-country studies that show the incident of false rape reports to be in the 2%-8% range, pretty much the same as false claims for other crimes. As late as 2003, people jokingly (wink, wink) referred to Philadelphiaâs sex crimes unit as âthe lying bitch unit.â If an 11-year-old girl told an adult that her father took out a Craigslist ad to find someone to beat and rape her while he watched, as recently actually occurred, what do you think the response would be? Would she need to provide a videotape after the fact?
It goes way beyond sexual assault as well. Thatâs just the most likely and obvious demonstration of âwomen are born to lieâ myths. Womenâs credibility is questioned in the workplace, in courts, by law enforcement, in doctorsâ offices, and in our political system. People donât trust women to be bosses, or pilots, or employees. Pakistanâs controversial Hudood Ordinance still requires a female rape victim to procure four male witnesses to her rape or risk prosecution for adultery. In August, a survey of managers in the United States revealed that they overwhelmingly distrust women who request flextime. Itâs notable, of course, that women are trusted to be mothersâthe largest pool of undervalued, unpaid, economically crucial labor.
