Are people really falsely accused that often? Is it something the court will believe if you and your attorney submit a defense that states you’ve been falsely accused?
There have been many studies looking into this when it comes to sexual assault, child abuse, or domestic violence. The truth is that it can be easy to make false claims that put another person’s life in the balance between a normal lifestyle and one where they’ve been criminalized.
Stop Abusive and Violent Environments, an organization against abuse and violence, commissioned a survey in 2011. The national survey found that close to one in ten of the people that they had talked to claimed they had been falsely accused of abusing another person. Around two times the amount of people who had been accused of violence were accused of child abuse than those accused of sexual assault or domestic abuse.
Who was accusing these individuals? According to the survey, it was most likely to be a woman making a claim against a man. Close to seven out of 10 of those who submitted a false allegation were female, while around 75 percent of those who had been falsely accused were men. While that’s the case, this does show that females are also accused of these crimes when they haven’t been committed by them.
What is also important to understand is that over a fourth of the cases that came up had false accusations reported during child custody disputes. These claims could have been made for many reasons from trying to get sole custody of a child to restricting the other parent’s access to his or her child.
Source: Stop Abusive and Violent Environments, “Survey Summary,” accessed Oct. 08, 2015