[Coffee.]

Originally Posted by Cosmo

There are citations at the bottom of all Wikipedia articles. They are valid. I also don't believe rates of rape have significantly changed in the past 10 years.

I'm not saying it's bad because it's wikipedia, I'm saying they are bad because they do not have an exact country in which we are talking about. From our own standpoint, we are talking about first world countries with higher court systems. Looking at these statistics, they are taken from countries around the world, some of them with much higher rates of accusation against rape victims. Many countries see being raped as a crime. I would just like to see SPECIFIC statistics for countries that we are more talking about, such as the UK, the US, Australia, ext.

Originally Posted by Cosmo

It's their responsibility to stop the criminal doing the same thing again.

Actually, no. It's up to the individual person not to rape somebody. How about instead of rapists having to feel terrible about not reporting, somebody blames the rapist for not coming forward? I don't want to hear that they don't have conciouses, we don't blame murder victims for being murdered. What about somebody who was robbed of their garden gnome and didn't report it, then their nextdoor neighbor was robbed of their garden gnome and the person came forward afterwards. Is it their fault too?

With this, I have to bring up another point. In many sexual assault cases, the victim as screamed, and people have heard it and not done anything. Then when asked about it later, have confessed to hear them scream. As sad as it is for not reporting, should they be the victim?

There is only one person who should be blamed in a rape case: The rapist.

Originally Posted by Cosmo

Accusations are meaningless without evidence, they cannot and should not be presumed to be true. ...if they have no evidence then we have no reason to believe.

There shouldn't be charges, but why can't we just believe the victim and help get her help? Is jailing the person the only thing to come of an accusation? We shouldn't automatically assume just because she has no evidence he/she has no evidence that they are lying, rather, we should do our best to help the person.

Originally Posted by Cosmo

All rapists who are proven to be so are convicted.

Not so much. There are many laws that protect rapists. I've heard of cases (I'll try to find sources) of people using things such as "I used a condom, she had time to pull away" or "There's no way he could have been able to take off her jeans, jeans are too hard to take off, she must have had to taken them off herself" and gotten away with it. Coercion and cases where consent is not given are still instances of trauma, instances of rape, but are not given the same attention because it wasn't a guy coming out of the bushes, are are often not convicted.

Originally Posted by Cosmo

I did not automatically believe she was lying and I did not give the incident lower priority.

Woman accuses rich man of raping -> Only goes to court for money -> Just wants money -> Lying. Automatic accusation, did not think through other options.