Lately, I was reading through this thread on Sexual Harassment, and a few of the comments got me thinking about the classic debate on sexual violence. Proponents of enhanced sexual violence laws often sympathize with the perspective of the truthful victim. Opponents of enhanced sexual violence laws argue that that the offender can be wrongly accused: In reality though, a majority of sexual violence (e.g. rape) situations occur in the absence of witnesses without any incriminating evidence. An overwhelming number of cases go without being reported, and many victims delay going to the police immediately for a variety of complicated reasons (e.g. shock; most offenders are friends/acquaintances, such as in "date rape"). In the rare situation a case is brought to court, it often boils down to his testimony versus hers. The lack of witnesses or evidence results in the presumption of innocence unless proven guilty. The result is automatic acquittal regardless of the truth of the matter. + + + Here are two infographics on the reported statistics of sexual violence, particularly rape: + + + We can see from the infographic that both true cases of rape and false accusations of rape exist. This observation is sort of obvious to nearly anybody. In the language of statistics, the cases can be broken down into four categories: True positives: True rapists jailed as rapists False positives: Innocents jailed as rapists False negatives: True rapists that walk free True negatives: Innocents that walk free The ratio between the four can be mathematically determined by sensitivity and specificity. Any decision-making process, including a courtroom of law, has a calculable sensitivity and specificity. A jury that is 100% sensitive at detecting rapists will always incriminate true rapists, but there might be cases of innocents who are unjustly incriminated for a crime they didn't perform. A jury that is 100% specific at detecting rapists will never incriminate an innocent person, but there may be true rapists that end up walking free. The modern justice system is generally more specific than sensitive. Additionally, for practical limitations, it is realistically impossible to have both 100% specificity and 100% sensitivity. Rather, sensitivity and specificity are often regarded as a trade off. It is possible to increase the sensitivity of a test at the expense of specificity, and vis versa. + + + The objective of this poll is to determine if people's attitudes towards an ideal sexual violence justice system lean towards sensitivity or specificity. Consider the following scenario: It is the year 2300 and the "Magical Girl of Love and Justice" has come to Earth with an incredible device called the Oracle. The Oracle is a crystal orb that magically determines if someone is guilty of the crime of rape. If someone places their hand on the orb, it will turn Green for Innocent or Red for Guilty. However, the Oracle is not 100% sensitive or 100% specific. The Magical Girl has a few different versions of the orb that have various degrees of sensitivity and specificity. The World Government is very interested in the magical device and has verified its level of accuracy on a panel of convicted criminals. In the future, the World Government would like to utilize this device whenever someone accuses another person of a case of sexual violence, particularly in situations where there is no evidence or witnesses. A Red (Guilty) Orb will be sufficient to send the accused to prison. A Green (Innocent) Orb will result in an automatic acquittal of the accused. The World Government has submitted a democratic vote to the world population to determine which orb to utilize during sexual violence accusations. Alternatively, citizens may vote to reject the utilization of magic orbs during the justice process. What is your opinion on this subject?
100% specific is the only acceptable system. The moment you start imprisoning innocent people everything goes downhill.
It is basically the ages-old question of taking the risk of letting a criminal free or the risk of sending an innocent man to jail. I would say risking having a criminal go free is the lesser evil here, and is usually the approach taken in the justice system (corruption not withstanding) and the reason circumstantial evidence does not hold up in court. A serial criminal will have more chances of being caught again than a incarcerated innocent of making it out, not to mention the permanent losses he might suffer in professional and personal areas and the time he will never get back. So Orb F? From what I understand an innocent will always pass the test and a criminal might pass it too.
The problem with sexual violence is one of culture and power in society. It's not going to be solved through the justice system and the orbs unfortunately are not going to improve it. I guess we could use it as a preliminary qualifier with either 100% sensitivity or 100% specificity, but then you're introducing more bias into the system.
It either happened or it didn't how someone feels is irrelevant there are plenty of people who feel violated from a innocent hug or kiss on the cheek neither of which are rape
Anything with the words "magic' and "girl" together is an instant no for me. Hell, no, are we going to those BAD ENDINGS again.
I'm looking at the poll responses and I'm starting to realize that maybe I made it too linear. I think reality is a bit closer to to diminishing returns. As in, the closer you get to 100% specificity, the specificity drops enormously. Maybe I should have done something like (1-N)^2 relation, like: 0.01% sensitivity 99.9% specificity 0.25% sensitivity 99.5% specificity 1% sensitivity 99% specificity 4% sensitivity 98% specificity 9% sensitivity 97% specificity 16% sensitivity 96% specificity 25% sensitivity 95% specificity 36% sensitivity 94% specificity 49% sensitivity 93% specificity 64% sensitivity 92% specificity 81% sensitivity 91% specificity 100% sensitivity 90% specificity I feel like this might have been more of an interesting poll...
Off topic but, I just wanna say that, being a female sucks. Both males and females get killed but females not only get killed, they get raped as well, I'm not saying that males don't get raped I'm just saying that the VAST majority of rape victims are female. I, as a man, never feared getting sexually abused by some random guy on the street.
It's not that current judicial systems are incompetent. But current systems are already tuned for being as close to 100% specificity as possible, hence "innocent until proven guilty" and "evidence beyond all reasonable doubt" being the paradigms of most modern judicial systems. However, what is ignored is the effect of race, gender,s class and wealth that the system suffers from. The well to do get to walk free more often than not. Members of the race/caste/ethnicity that's in power in that region enjoy favorable judgements more so than they should from a purely statistical perspective. More black males are falsey convicted of crimes and given longer sentences while white males tend to get off easier in the United States. Sometimes such cases of affluenza are easily rectified. Sometimes they aren't. Look at the case of Brock Turner the rapist. He nearly got next to nothing thanks to his wealth, background and gender. Or George Zimmerman, who got acquitted by a jury of his peers because he was white in a Conservative area. The system is fine, the people aren't.
If not applicable, get a 100% orb and use it a dozen times per case. Should be pretty damnably accurate then.
A foundation of Western Law is that it's better for guilty people to go free than for an innocent person to be punished. Blackstone's ratio. Also as I've heard it the 2% of reported rapes being false accusations are provably false cases. As in the accuser admitted they lied or were caught in a lie so that's probably not an accurate number of how many false accusations there are. It would likely be at least 2%.
Bruh, I'm pretty sure that if they went to police, MOST are for dictionary-definition of rape ie there was a sexual intercourse that was definitely unwanted. The "it either happened or didn't happen" attitude your giving is damn annoying. What, you think most people go to report this kind of things to police for their "feelings"? Holy shit. Any sane woman knows CLEAR difference between harassment and rape, and believe me when I say MOST don't take the said difference lightly. Did OP mention how there's a ton more cases that we're never even reported because of "feelings"? In conclusion, I'm just triggered how such a sensitive and controversial topic are getting summed in one sentence. It shouldn't even be summed up at all.
I am afraid it will leads to "me too" hunting There's many false accusations but by the power of majority it become false positives
I like this response! Although in essence, if you're saying that people aren't good -- the converse of what you're saying is that we should have trial-by-robot instead of trial-by-jury? Breaking the orbs isn't allowed! If we use your statistic, this is entirely computable! If there are 1000 cases (1000 pairs of individuals), assume 20 are false accusations. Orb F (60%-100%) results in: True positives: 588 rapists jailed True negatives: 20 innocents walk free False positives: 0 innocents jailed False negatives: 392 rapists walk free Orb A (100%-60%) results in: True positives: 980 rapists jailed True negatives: 12 innocents walk free False positives: 8 innocents jailed False negatives: 0 rapists walk free Using the 100% specificity orb, a total of 608 cases were judged justly and 392 cases were judged injustly. Using the 100% sensitivity orb, a total of 992 cases were judged justly and 8 cases were judged injustly. From a utilitarian perspective, technically Orb A is quantitatively the most "just" if you weigh the perspectives of victims and perpetrators perfectly equivalently. However, as Vincent said, most of us value a justice system that ensures that innocent people will not be punished, however rare they are.
Let me first tell you that without the evidence(s) of rape there is no rape. First, it requires to be established if the victim is actually raped according to the premises set by law. This requires medical evidence. Second, whether the accused is really the offender or not. This requires forensic evidence and/or witness(s).