The World According to... Boring John

What do I know about rape?

Very little.

I'm a male and males don't tend to get raped they tend to do the raping! (Hmm, obviously I am not a rapist and I abhor rape.)

One thing I do know a little bit about is the perception of rape. I think a lot of men think that rape is much less prevalent than the 'figures suggest' and a lot of women think it is much, much more prevalent than the suggested figures. I'm in the second camp, here.

Rape is quite often the case of one person's word against another and is therefore very difficult to prove. It doesn't mean that no rape occurred, though. (Nor does it mean that no 'false claim' was made, either. Read on.)

That's why it annoys me when false claims of rape get so much prevalence in the news (see this Judge jails 'wicked liar' article in The Guardian, for an example). What we have here is evidence that women do occasionally make up false rape claims, but it's not countered by the fact (I say fact loosely, obviously, as we're in the land of perception, here!) that men rape women an awful lot more times than women make up false claims about rape.

We rarely see reports of rape convictions, but the convictions of 'false rape claims' make headline news.

This uneven reporting, to me, simply confirms the fact (to many, especially me) that most rape either doesn't really happen or it isn't really rape. (Not really rape? That's something else I know little about other than men and women seem to have very different views on what rape actually is.)

If it frustrates me, how must women whose lives are affected by it, feel?

What do I know?

Nothing. Much.