HoodaThunk?

Wendy McElroy at Fox News has an opinion column up that asks the question of whether the accused in a rape investigation shouldn’t be entitled to the same protections as the accuser:

I believe that neither party should be named until a public trial begins; at that point, the names of all parties should become public record. The demand for transparency in judicial proceedings does not reflect indifference to victims.

Quite the contrary. ‘The right to a public trial’ is one of the most basic guarantees of justice and nothing expresses concern for victims better than ensuring judicial fairness.

Moreover, maintaining the privacy of only one party to a public procedure encourages unbalanced reporting in the media, which is fair to no one.

She’s got a point, here. The obvious underlying message in this treatment is that women who accuse men of rape never lie about it. Or almost never, since we can point to a well-known case where that happened in the Tawana Brawley episode. McElroy addresses this point head-on.

In contrast, I believe false accusations are common. How common? No one knows for sure. False accusations are not tracked or routinely punished as other crimes.

Feminists often claim that 2 percent percent of all reports are false.

Another widely quoted figure comes from a study conducted by Eugene Kanin of Purdue University, who examined 109 rape complaints registered in a Midwestern city from 1978 to 1987. The police finally classified 45 of them — or approximately 41 percent — as false.

My question is this: if these statistics vary as wildly as they obviously do, and knowing what the truth is is so vital to determining the proper course of action, why isn’t there some effort being made to capture this data? Additionally, since we obviously don’t know the truth of the matter, shouldn’t we err to the side of caution and take McElroy’s advice?