Who Invented Rape Culture?

[A PDF file of this (without the links) can be found here on my main website.]

The original title of this dissertation was Time For An Honest Symposium On False Allegations Of Rape. It came about after I read the December 2010 issue of VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN which contains an in-depth report, Symposium on False Allegations of Rape, pages 1318-95. This lengthy piece consists of a number of superficially scholarly articles, superficially being the operative word. VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN is a peer-reviewed journal, which should mean that before its contents are published they are read critically and fact checked. There is little if any evidence of critical reading here, and fact checking appears to have been thrown out of the window.

I had intended to write a damning critique of it and submit it half-heartedly to the journal. Had I done so it would of course have been rejected. For one thing I am not an accredited scholar, indeed many people would say I am not a scholar at all, but a quarter of a century and more researching in the British Library and some of the finest archives in the UK (read the world) is not a bad substitute for a university education, especially one that revolves around the pseudo-subject of gender studies.

Before proceeding it should not be necessary to state the obvious but for the avoidance of doubt, rape is always a serious criminal offence, when there is credible evidence of rape, it should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and should always result in a custodial sentence. Serial rape – ie that perpetrated by a man who targets women in pre-planned, calculated attacks – should warrant an exemplary sentence, oftentimes a life sentence.

Because rape is a serious crime, a high level of proof should be warranted, and there should be no special pleading in order to erode the rights of the accused.

Having said that, too many people writing on this subject – academics and others – fail to distinguish between research and advocacy. One mantra that is repeated day in, day out, and is repeated here also, is both that rape is a vastly under-reported crime and that false reports of rape are extremely rare. In support of this mantra, feminist authors in particular are fond of quoting statistics, many of which appear to have been conjured up out of thin air. To take just one example, Kat Banyard claims at least 100,000 women are raped every year in the UK, adding the rape conviction rape is 6.5 per cent. (1)

The reality is that no one knows how many rapes go unreported, obviously some do, but the figure of 100,000 annually for the UK alone has absolutely no basis in fact. In recent years there have been a number of surveys that peddle the claim that one woman in 5, one in 4 or even one in 3 has been or will be raped or sexually assaulted in her lifetime. These surveys are obviously based on small samples, and they have about the same credibility of those that claim millions of Americans believe they have been abducted by aliens.

These surveys are skewed by unrepresentative samples extrapolated to national or near global level, and include among other things loaded questions and semantic gymnastics. It may indeed be true that one woman in 5 or even one in 3 will be the victim of rape or sexual assault in her lifetime, but that manufactured statistic doesn’t sound quite so terrible when the word “or” and the phrase “sexual assault” are taken into consideration. Using that wonderful word “or”, the claim that one woman in a million will be raped and one in 3 will be sexually assaulted means more or less the same thing.

And if one includes leering in the definition of “sexual assault” as some of the more radical feminists imply, then there is probably hardly a person on this planet – female or male – who has not been the “victim” of some kind of sexual assault in her or his life. If this kind of rhetoric sounds facile, it is, but it is not mine; check out some of the garbage they peddle on sundry feminist websites, and you’ll understand. Returning to the journal, throughout this lengthy report it is simply assumed that rape is a vastly under-reported crime. I propose though to focus on one contribution/contributor to demonstrate just how loose a grip on reality such feminist “scholars” have.

Joanne Belknap contributes Rape: Too Hard to Report and Too Easy to Discredit Victims. Incredibly she has a PhD in criminology and is currently Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder where a truly great mind, the late Albert Bartlett, spent his entire academic career.

In her contribution to the rape symposium, Professor Belknap plays this stupid numbers game, she says at page 1335: “Although false allegations are 5% of all rapes reported to the police, the fact that at least 90% of rapes are never reported to the police” suggests “0.005% are false allegations”.

The Internet activist Angry Harry has done an interesting calculation based on this. Imagine a city in which 20 women are raped in a certain period. If only 10% of these victims report their rapes, then clearly 2 of them will turn up at the police station. But if only 5% of allegations are false, then one false accuser will turn up for those two, in other words 1 out of 3 recorded rape allegations will be bogus.

The % figure given by Joanne Belknap would mean that one rape allegation in 20,000 is bogus. That claim is not only prima facie absurd but shows a complete lack of understanding of human nature. Last year I published a timeline of false rape cases from the year 2000. I was careful to include only unambiguously false rape cases; this was done using limited resources with even more limited time, yet it gives the lie to this 1 in 20,000 nonsense. For example, in 2003, by October there were no fewer than 7 false rape cases in Dunedin, New Zealand, a city which has a population of less than 150,000.

Similarly Professor Belknap’s claim that 95% of college women do not report their “rape victimization to the police” is based on what evidence, exactly? There are though clues in her article that indicate evidence is the last thing Professor Belknap would ever accept to substantiate an allegation of false rape, in particular her summary acceptance of the Tawana Brawley and Duke Lacrosse hoaxes as real rapes. These two cases are not only in the public domain but have been subjected to intense scrutiny by journalists and academics as well as by the legal authorities. The bulk of the rest of this article will deal with these.

On page 1337, she says of the Tawana Brawley case: “...given the defendants were largely from the criminal legal system, from the small town where Ms. Brawley lived, it certainly seems feasible that evidence tampering could have occurred. It seems particularly unlikely that the police officer who killed himself shortly after Ms. Brawley reported would have done so if he had not abused her”.

While of the Duke Lacrosse case she writes: “I am also unconvinced that the complainant in the Duke case was not raped at the lacrosse team party”.

First, some historical context. There are three such incidents in American history from the 1930s to date that stand out as unique: the 1931 case of the Scottsboro Boys; the 1987 Tawana Brawley case; and the 2006 Duke Lacrosse case. All three were what are classified as “hate crime hoaxes”. Usually these involve pointing the finger of suspicion at a member or members of another race, although they are not necessarily racially motivated. Indeed, it is my belief that none of the above cases were. In addition to the “hate crime” element, all three of the above included a sexual element in the hoax.

Of the three, the Scottsboro case – which will not be discussed here – was uniquely wicked because the victims, nine young Negro males who were railroaded by the lies of one white woman (2) faced the death penalty, if not by judicial execution then by lynching.

There is another thing these three hoaxes all have in common, this is, as stated of Tawana Brawley and Duke Lacrosse, they have been extensively researched and documented beyond all meaning of the word, and while a reasonable person may question the innocence of O.J. Simpson or Casey Anthony, or the guilt of Michael Stone or Omar Benguit, no reasonable person can in all honesty claim that the Scottsboro Boys, those accused by Tawana Brawley, or the Duke Lacrosse defendants were in fact guilty. These were all manufactured crimes. Period. Furthermore, for Professor Belknap to dismiss the latter two summarily as real crimes rather than hoaxes is an act of acute intellectual dishonesty that is inexcusable. She is not an ordinary member of the public who is entitled to make snap judgments based on superficial knowledge. She was participating in what was ostensibly a symposium to further human knowledge and quite likely to shape academic and even social policy.

Let us then deal with these cases, the Tawana Brawley hoax first. In November 1987, Miss Brawley, then 15 years old, was found apparently unconscious in a garbage bag near her former home in New York State. She had been smeared with faeces, her clothing had been burned as well as torn, and on her torso written in black letters were the legend KKK, the dreaded N word – capitalised with its correct spelling – and the word “Bitch”. Brawley claimed she had been raped by six white men. And held captive for four days.

In 1987, there were small branches of the Ku Klux Klan even in the UK, but the heyday of this once notorious organisation was long past, and its meetings even in the Deep South attracted more mirth than fear. Furthermore, although Klansmen have been responsible for real crimes in the past – including murders – did they ever carry out an attack of this nature on any black person? And would any Klansman much less a gang of six rape a black woman, be she of age or a teen?

The story was treated by the media initially as a genuine rape, but was quickly exposed as a hoax, although some black activists – Al Sharpton in particular – made capital out of it. It is important to note that the Tawana Brawley case was played out as a “hate crime”, ie anti-black rather than as a mere rape, the fact that the non-victim was black being far more important than any perceived sexual motive.

Incidentally, hoaxes of this nature are surprisingly common, although seldom so outrageous. In 2013, a hate crime hoax of a strikingly similar nature was perpetrated at Winnsboro in the Deep South. Indeed, the Sharmeka Moffitt case was even more outrageous than the Tawana Brawley case because the non-victim actually set herself on fire. Again, it was quickly established that neither the Ku Klux Klan nor run-of-the-mill racists were responsible.

In spite of they’re being perpetrated mostly by blacks (and occasionally by Jews), arguably the two most outrageous hate crime hoaxes in American history are the crimes of Charles Stuart and Susan Smith. In 1989, Stuart murdered his heavily pregnant wife then shot himself in the back and phoned the police to report the couple had been the victim of an attempted carjacking. The case generated both enormous sympathy for Stuart and racial tensions in the city, Boston. Months later the truth came out, but before he could be arrested, Stuart committed suicide by throwing himself in the river.

The case of Susan Smith was equally shocking; in October 1994, the young South Carolina mother of two claimed to have been carjacked by a black man, saying he drove off with her sons on the back seat of her car. The following month she led the authorities to the lake where she had dumped the car with the boys still inside. (3)

Although the Tawana Brawley case did not involve harming a third party, it garnered worldwide publicity. One would have expected a genuine victim to have cooperated fully with the police investigation, and even if she had been too shocked (or whatever) to do so, what about her family? They did not, although race-hustlers (Al Sharpton and others) descended on the family, making allegation after allegation, although no evidence was ever forthcoming.

On January 26, 1988, the Governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, appointed Attorney General Robert Abrams Special Prosecutor for the case. On February 29, a special Grand Jury was empanelled which heard from over 180 witnesses, received 250 exhibits, and generated 6,000 pages of evidence. The resulting report (4) was made available to the public, and certainly would have been available to Joanne Belknap if she had deigned to seek it out. Instead, she preferred to ignore it and in her article relied on innuendo about a cover up. She does though quote another feminist academic, Patricia J. Williams, thus, on page 1338, “After Tawana Brawley, who will believe the next black woman who says she was raped by white men?”

>The answer to that question is probably very few as according to FBI statistics – which being based on actual convictions are far more reliable than feminist statistics – white on black rape is virtually unknown in contemporary America.

Incidentally, talking of Professor Williams, this is the same Patricia J. Williams who wrote of Tawana Brawley in the same book that “This much is certainly worth the conviction that Tawana Brawley has been the victim of some unspeakable crime. No matter how she got there. No matter who did it to her—and even if she did it to herself. Her condition was clearly the expression of some crime against her, some tremendous violence, some great violation that challenges comprehension. And it is this much that I grieve about. The rest of the story is lost, or irrelevant in the worst of all possible ways”. (5) There is really no arguing with that kind of twisted logic. She too simply assumes Brawley was raped; at page 176 she claims when Brawley was conveyed to the hospital she was unconscious, and alludes to “her rape”.

How can we be so certain the Tawana Brawley case was a hoax? The following is extracted from the report of the Grand Jury (see note 4 below):

Tawana Brawley was seen to climb into the garbage bag in which she was found. The person who saw this found her behavior so odd that she phoned the sheriff. At the hospital, no evidence was found to indicate Tawana Brawley had been raped, nor did she claim she had been at that time. She had no meaningful physical injuries, and was discharged that same night. There was no evidence that she had spent much time in a wooded area as claimed. She showed no signs of exposure, malnourishment or dehydration. She was also examined by a gynaecologist.

According to forensic pathologist Dr Justin Uku: “The absence of any of the factors I mentioned before on the body would seem to discount that such an assault took place.” (Page 47).

Dr Ezra Griffith of Yale University School of Medicine diagnosed here as “malingering her complaints” of unresponsiveness, (page 54). There is a lot more where that came from, so for Professor Belknap to dismiss the whole thing as a cover up is absurd. There is only one cover up here, that is of the Tawana Brawley hate crime hoax.

The more recent Duke Lacrosse case has been subjected to similar scrutiny, and indeed it beggars belief that it was ever reported in the mainstream media as anything stronger than an alleged rape. The most convenient source of information about the case is the book Race To Injustice... (6). The following is extracted from that book. The Lacrosse team booked two exotic dancers (strippers if you will); Kim Roberts turned up sober, but Crystal Gail Mangum did not. She arrived at around 23.40 on March 13, 2006. Worse, Mangum was said to have taken a powerful muscle relaxant and could hardly stand up. The “show” started at midnight and finished at 5 past because of this. Mangum was so drunk she had to he carried to the car.

There were “words” between Miss Roberts and at least one of the team, and racial insults were used on both sides. This was perhaps a little unfair to her, but it was understandable because they had paid $800. Kim Roberts was accused by Mangum of stealing her money and her phone. This may be true, Roberts is a convicted felon, but whether or not that was the case, she drove Mangum to the hospital where the “victim” told doctors she had been raped vaginally. Then she said she had been raped vaginally, anally and orally, cleaned up and taken back to the car. One should always allow for a genuine rape victim to be confused or shocked, especially if she is under the influence of both alcohol and drugs, as was Mangum, so the inconsistency here is not fatal to her account of the evening. Other factors are though.

Kim Roberts said the sexual assault claims were a “crock”; as there had been a certain amount of friction between her and at least one of the lacrosse players, this claim is not only credible but comes from the one witness who had no dog in the fight.

No semen, blood or saliva was found after Mangum was tested, and apparently no male DNA; as a result of this, DA Mike Nifong ordered a second, more sensitive DNA test.

On April 6, Mangum made a witness statement in which she claimed she had been raped in a bathroom by 3 members of the team – vaginally and orally - and had been hit in the face. The enhanced DNA test revealed no match for any of the lacrosse players, but there was evidence of male DNA from 4 unidentified men on the rectal swabs and on her undergarments.

Rather than there being any cover up or fabrication of evidence here to exculpate three guilty men, Nifong wilfully misled the media and attempted to mislead the courts too. The evidence indicates he did this because he was up for re-election, and wanted to be seen by blacks as the “good” white candidate clamping down on those wicked crackers who had raped a black girl. Whether or not that was the case, his scandalous behaviour would cost him his job, his freedom and his solvency. He filed for bankruptcy in January 2008 after being sued by his victims.

Like the Tawana Brawley hoax, all this is a matter of public record, and is so thoroughly documented that to attempt to dismiss it summarily is an act of total and utter venality, certainly for an academic of Professor Belknap’s “stature” in a peer-reviewed journal.

For the record, this was not the first false rape allegation Mangum had made; she made one ten years earlier, in 1996, when she was 18 years old. In April 2011, she was arrested after stabbing her lover Reginald Daye, who later died in hospital. In November 2013, she was convicted of second degree murder and ordered to serve 14 years 2 months to 18 years in prison. Enough said about this “victim”.

This was after the publication of this issue of the magazine and the Belknap article, but it is clear she has elected consciously to rubber stamp the most unreliable type of “evidence” - hearsay and anonymous surveys – in order to bolster the widely held but erroneous belief that rape is endemic in American society, more so on its campuses than anywhere else, a claim that is self-evident nonsense. And she has done this while summarily dismissing irrefutable evidence of pernicious rape hoaxes.

Before the very real problems of rape and sexual assault can be tackled in the United States or anywhere else, it is necessary to gauge the true extent of these crimes, that means an honest and open discussion, not the fantasy that is currently being peddled throughout the halls of academe, and brainwashing generations of young women.

Now let us attempt to answer the title of this article: who invented rape culture? Exactly who first coined this vacuous phrase is not known for certain, but it can be traced to the so-called second wave of feminism in the 1970s. More important is who is perpetuating this nonsense today? The answer is brainwashed women throughout the Western world, including and especially on the campuses of North America, and most especially by feminist academics.

These lies – and that is what we must call them – have had nothing but a detrimental effect on social policy, because good social policy cannot be based on lies. What can be done to remedy these lies is beyond the scope of this dissertation, but remember, you read it hear first, so don’t blame me if these fanatics succeed in tearing up the constitution and undermining what is left of the social order in the United States, as they have already done in Sweden and are attempting to elsewhere.

 

Notes And References

 

(1) The Equality Illusion: The Truth about Women and Men Today by Kat Banyard, published by Faber & Faber, London, (2011), page 2. The exact quote from this paperback edition is: “At least 100,000 women are raped each year in the UK and the rape conviction rate is 6.5 per cent.”

(2) Although initially Ruby Bates also claimed to have been gang-raped, she recanted; Victoria Price never did, and it is clear that but for her wantonness, the whole disgraceful incident and years of misery that followed would never have happened.

(3) Both the Stuart case and the Smith case have also been extensively documented. The interested reader/viewer will find documentary footage of both on-line, including of course on YouTube. The Stuart case was also the subject of an excellent dramatisation, Goodnight Sweet Wife: A Murder In Boston.

(4) REPORT OF THE GRAND JURY OF THE SUPREME COURT STATE OF NEW YORKCOUNTY OF DUTCHESS PURSUANT TO CRIMINAL PROCEDURE LAW SECTION 190.85SUBDIVISION (1)(b). This is its verbatim title. The report begins “Dear New Yorker” and contains an error in the first sentence, alluding to January 26, 1987 rather than January 26, 1988, but this can be forgiven as it is exhaustive beyond all meaning of the word.

(5) The Alchemy Of Race And Rights by Patricia J. Williams, published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, (1991), page 169.

(6) Race to Injustice: LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE DUKE LACROSSE RAPE CASE, Edited by Michael L. Seigel, published by Carolina Academic Press, Durham, North Carolina, (2009).