0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

(MUSIC)

0:00:11
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is episode 43. And with me are Ben and Celestia. How are you guys doing?

CW: Good.

BR: Doing good.

0:00:33
PR: We’re doing this, all three of us are in our own homes right now, so Ben’s not in the studio. I came home from NAMM, which is a big music trade show slash conference, and I got what they call the NAMMthrax. But yeah, so my house is under quarantine. We’ve got sick kids, sick me, sick everyone. But we’re gonna do this remotely. But speaking of-

BR: Yeah, I was gonna show up at your house in a hazmat suit, but I realized the audio quality might suffer.

0:01:20
PR: We’d have to figure out a way to put a mic inside of it. But so today we’re going to be touching in on a bit more of a serious topic, but I think it’s going to be an interesting discussion. We’re going to be talking a little bit about the facts and data around people being believed in cases like assault and harassment. It’s going to be a pretty deep dive. We’re going to try to stick to a couple of smaller segments of it, which mostly have to do with statistics, as well as some of the police information and things like that.

0:01:52
CW: So if you’ve got small children, or if you yourself are sensitive to such topics, just be aware of that before you listen.

0:01:59
PR: Yeah, so just the definite trigger warning. We’re gonna keep it pretty data-driven. We’re not gonna be getting too much into opining about the things that are going on with claims of assault and harassment. We think that that’s probably better for a more opinionated podcast.

0:02:16
BR: If anything, we’re probably gonna put people to sleep with our statistics.

0:02:19
PR: Right, right.

0:02:20
CW: Way to sell the podcast, Ben.

0:02:22
PR: So I’m gonna plow through this despite being sick, but I think it’s gonna be a pretty interesting topic and speaking of sick bands Ben. I heard you got a sick band to talk about.

0:02:25
BR: I do I want to give a shout out to one of my favorite bands shriek back who as regular listeners know did this some of our theme music their UK band. They’re probably best known for their hit song Nemesis, which has the Freaks and Cannibals, I can’t do it, but anyway, when the dead come home, it has Parthenogenesis in the lyric, which I just love. They’re actually gearing up for a tour of the States. They’re a British band, and they haven’t toured in many years, and they’re trying to raise money to come to the States and do a handful of gigs, and they have a Kickstarter campaign, if anyone’s interested, it’s called Shriek Back Live in the U.S. I threw him some money and if you like the music maybe throw him a couple bucks we can see him here. And what’s on your plate Celestia? What do you have going on?

0:03:25
CW: Well there is something I am skeptical of this week and actually I was very skeptical of it when it happened but that was a while ago. I am no stranger to taking cruises. I’ve been on a number of them with my friends. And I don’t know if you guys have experienced this on cruises you’ve been on, but there’s a bit of woo that they push at you, especially at the spa.

BR: Oh yeah.

CW: And there’s often acupuncture and oils and strange things you can put on your cellulite and all sorts of stuff. And on the last cruise that I was on, I saw an ad for a free tongue analysis.

0:04:02
BR: Mm. A tongue analysis. I’m trying to figure out.

0:04:06
CW: Yeah. Now this, this is not going to be anything like the serious topic we’re about to discuss. This is, this is a very lighthearted topic. What do you guys think a tongue analysis even involves on a cruise ship?

PR: I think it’s, it would be something that teenagers offer to each other in high school. I’m, I’m pretty sure I may have one point or another.

0:04:29
CW: That’s a good way to get the Namthrax, Pascual.

0:04:35
BR: Maybe that’s why we can’t do this without a hazmat.

0:04:40
CW: What would you assume a tongue analysis was, Ben?

0:04:44
BR: I would probably lean towards something along the lines of phrenology, you know, the idea that the different bumps on the head reveal personality characteristics and a person’s future and things like that. That’s of course a long discredited pseudoscience for those who don’t know, but that would be my guess.

0:05:04
CW: Well, you’d be right on part of that. I went and sat in a little room in the spa and was visited by the acupuncturist on the ship who informed me of all the wonderful things acupuncture can do. And I was a little bit worried that she might be putting or might be attempting to put needles in my tongue, which I was grateful that that was not involved.

0:05:24
PR: I did that when I was a teenager. It was pretty cool.

0:05:27
CW: You metal people, you’re just, you’re hardcore. But I asked her, what does this involve? What is a tongue analysis for?” And she said, well, it’s to diagnose. And I’m like, you diagnose things? And I was trying, you know, I was playing the, uh, and I wasn’t really playing. I really had no idea what this thing involved.

BR: Insert record scratch here.

CW: Yeah, so, so she said, well, we confirm diagnoses this way. And I’m like, diagnoses of, of actual illnesses? Or, and she said well we basically use the tongue analysis we look at your tongue to verify whether or not certain things are wrong with your bodily systems and then she started just before she even looked at my tongue she started asking me questions about my own health do you feel a lack of energy? Are you sluggish? Any digestion problems? And she ticked off all these questions along a questionnaire asking me if I had any problems. And I, well, I felt pretty good. And I decided to just kind of tell her, no, I don’t have any problems. So yeah, no heart problems, no kidney problems, no digestion problems, no sleep problems. And I kind of sensed that she was getting a little irritated at me not giving her any leads whatsoever.

BR: How dare you enter my, how dare you sign up for my free tongue analysis? You’re not going to have big problems.

CW: Yes, yes. So then she then she looks at my tongue and it was just like, open your mouth and stick out your tongue. And she looked at it, she goes, wet and I said well it’s a little bit wet… and I said well it’s been in my mouth. And I said does a wet tongue indicate anything and she said no not not really. She said sometimes like if you have heart problems your tongue will be longer than it is flat and I that made absolutely no sense whatsoever. She’s like but I’m not really noticing any problems. Maybe a little bit of energy. Are you feeling rested and tired? Of course, I’m on a cruise ship, so I’m like, yeah, I’m pretty relaxed. I’m on a cruise. It’s a sea day. There’s really not much to do but try and waste 20 minutes of an acupuncturist’s time. She just seemed kind of at a loss because I had not given her any information. It was kind of like a medical cold reading. I even hate to use the word medical. It was a cold reading. She was waiting for information from me. And then she would look at my tongue and pretend that she had confirmed a diagnosis that I had already given her. But the problem was, yeah, I hadn’t given her anything. And so then towards the end, she did mention, oh, and you know, this, you know, acupuncture helps for this and that and the other, and if you find yourself having any digestive issues or this or that while you’re on the cruise, people believe that getting acupuncture on a cruise ship, again, that whole people believe thing is a marketing technique. People really, they say that when they get acupuncture treatments on a cruise ship, things resolve faster. You can solve a problem in three treatments rather than six or seven.” And I’m like, oh, okay. She’s like, like seasickness. I was like, you know, I’ve had seasickness before. And she locked on. Oh, you’ve had seasickness before? Well, you should probably come in for a treatment and do it right away. Do it before you get seasick.

0:09:07
BR: Hold on, hold on. So you should do this preventative treatment for something that you don’t have and you may not have.

0:09:18
CW: Yeah.

0:09:19
BR: Okay, all right, well, sure, that makes sense in a sort of twisted, wacky way.

0:09:23
CW: And then to seal the deal, she said, now if you do get seasick and then you come in, it’s practically too late, but you can still do it to alleviate it. She’s like, and if you get the treatment and then you get seasick later, that just means that you didn’t get it soon enough.

0:09:40
BR: That’s convenient.

0:09:41
CW: All the bases were covered. She’s a very nice, perky lady, but I would not trust her medical judgment.

0:09:50
PR: I kind of never really thought about how similar something like reading a tongue or reading bumps on someone’s head relates to something like just general cold reading. I mean I get that you’re using a lot of the same tactics but I never really thought about how much they’re practically the exact same thing because there’s just nothing, you know, they’re just doing a whole different version of palm reading or a different version of standing in front of a crowd talking to dead people.

0:10:21
CW: Well yeah, it was even more blatant than cold reading because at of guesswork in cold reading. She practically asked me to just tell me what was wrong with me. Okay well I’m going to use the tongue analysis to confirm the diagnosis but tell me what’s bothering you, tell me what medical problems you have. And that’s essentially she’s just parroting back whatever I tell her and then saying she agrees with me based on the shape of my tongue.

0:10:50
PR: Like, even in that context, I have a hard time grasping how that benefits you in any real way. I mean, I get that she’s offering services that extend beyond that, but that reading in and of itself, it’s like, I don’t, I don’t, like, why do I need it if I know that’s what I have?

0:11:07
CW: It’s just like going to one of the art auctions there. It’s a free art auction, but there’s absolutely nothing in it for you unless you buy something, unless you want to buy something. Yeah, so it’s something to keep an eye out for next time you’re on a cruise, anybody out there, if you see a free tongue analysis or free whatever analysis, sometimes it’s just interesting to pop in and see what the wide world of medical woo, of alternate medical practices is up to.

0:11:34
BR: Well I have a quick question, so did she offer any sort of plausible mechanism behind the whole, was it meridians or chi?

0:11:47
CW: I asked her that. I said, how is that connected? I think I may have even used the word mechanism, which might have scared her. I said, Oh, well, itís just something that’s been proven over and over again through thousands of years of practitioning. I’ve studied in China. So basically, as a mechanism, she offered, I travel to China and it’s been done for thousands of years. That’s all she could really tell me.

BR: Boom! Mic drop, here we go!

CW: So I was left wanting, but needless to say I did not really sign up for any acupuncture and I’ll have you know I did not get seasick.

PR: So turning it down prevented the seasickness.

0:12:37
CW: Yes, luckily I didn’t turn it down too late. I was able to turn it down early.

PR: Before the seasickness. Yeah, that’s perfect.

(MUSIC)

CW: We’re going to head into our main topic right now and this is a little unusual for us. It’s a serious topic, one we’re going to treat with the respect that it’s due and I’m going to turn off my sarcasm and you’re not going to hear us mocking people for being willfully ignorant. It is a topic that’s important, and we feel that we can do some real good if we examine it under a critical lens, rather than shying away from anything that might not be a politically correct way of looking at current events and trends. We’re also going to narrow our focus, because we think that the most effective way to examine this particular aspect is to just look at one slice of the issue, rather than have a free-for-all, because this is such a broad topic, the whole idea of sexual harassment and assault and whether or not people are believed and how police treat women. It’s an enormous topic that one could do a 100-hour miniseries on. But this one slice that we’re looking at today has a few factors and angles. And as you know, we like to do a deep dive on a particular thing rather than gloss over details. I’m also calling to mind something that happened recently with Steven Pinker. Some of you may have heard the brouhaha over this, but Steven Pinker was recently at a panel, I think it was back in November, but it surfaced January of this year. It was a Spiked Magazine’s Unsafe Space Tour, and it was a panel he was on at Harvard for that event. There’s an eight minute segment out there and people are taking 30 seconds of the eight minute segment and completely misrepresenting him. I’m not going to quote him directly because you can really cherry pick the quote there but the gist of this whole talk was that a lot of intelligent and highly intelligent media savvy literate people are gravitating toward the alt-right, not as a whole, he doesn’t mean as a whole, but people who are intelligent and media savvy, if they are only exposed to certain truths via the alt-right, and they haven’t been inoculated by progressives and people on the left and people in the center, then they start feeling betrayed by the left and the center and progressives, and they start getting sucked into the alt-right. And so almost as a way to to disarm the alt-right and people who are who are definitely not for social progressivism, in order to disarm them, we should not shy away from facts, we should look at facts, we should represent them, we should expose them. And we should also look at how we don’t really want empty or false narratives in the name of a good cause. We want actual data, which can tell us how to proceed, and also maybe show us where progress has already taken place. So on that note, Ben, you’ve got some interesting statistics on the public’s belief about accusations.

0:15:53
BR: Yeah, and I appreciate that introduction. I did see something on the Pinker case, and I think it’s a good lesson in terms of how easy it is to cherry pick somebody, and you really need to be fair to them if you’re going to represent their comments. I looked into the question of whether people believe the accusations and accusers. As you guys know, the question of whether one believes claims is central to skepticism. Do you believe a given claim? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. and this applies to everything from advertising claims to bigfoot to chupacabras to psychics to miracle healings, political claims, claims across the board. And so I’ve always been fascinated by why people believe what they believe regardless of what their topic is. And over the past few months with all the accusations and claims of sexual misconduct including you know Kevin Spacey, George Takei, Harvey Weinstein, etc. One recurring theme that’s often come up is that the accusers are rarely believed. And the idea is that the general public is by default skeptical about sexual harassment or sexual assault claims.

0:17:03
CW: Just to clarify, you’re talking not about like her boss didn’t believe her or her, you know, a detective didn’t believe her. You’re talking about the public in general, if you ask the public, nobody believes this woman or a group of women etc.

0:17:19
BR: Yeah, I’m referring, I want to be very very clear about this. I’m specifically referring to the idea that the general public, say you know over 50% or most people, they, whatever you want to say, that they by default doubt the claims. So again, I’m not talking about whether police believe accusations and not talking about whether employers leave accusations or where the news media believe accusations. I’m referring very specifically to whether the general public as a whole believe or disbelieve accusers by default. So I’ve collected five examples of this. There’s many to choose from, but I’ll just pick five to sort of give you an idea. I have in front of me a article titled, Why Don’t We Believe Women’s Claims About Harvey Weinstein? By a woman named Olivia Power from Ball State University, October 22nd, 2017, and this is on the Odyssey Online. And Olivia Power says, it all goes back to society’s tendency to discount women’s voices. Specifically in cases of sexual harassment, subjects are not believed, she says. Then there’s one by Emily Crockett on Vox on October 17, 2017. The title is, Rape and Sexual Assault are Common, So Why Don’t We Believe Victims? And she writes that, victims still face massive amounts of public skepticism when they come forward. She writes, if a woman comes forward about being assaulted, Occam’s Razor suggests she’s probably telling the truth. But our tendency as a society is to assume the opposite. Here’s a piece from Elle magazine by Sadie Doyle on November 29, 2017, titled, Despite what you may have heard, believe women has never meant ignore facts. And Doyle comments on the public’s unprecedented willingness to hear out and support accusers rather than shame them, referring, of course, to the recent Me Too movement and all that. Then there is a piece in the New York Times, 6-21-17, page C1, by Susan Chira, and she quotes a sociologist at Northwestern University who says, quote, yes, lying happens, but the presumption is that she is always lying. And then finally, in the Atlantic, there’s a piece titled, Al Franken, That Photo, and Trusting Women by Megan Garber, November 17th, 2017. She talks about the idea behind the fact that women are liars, and she writes, quote, men lie too, of course, yet in general their lies have been treated as exceptions while women’s have been treated as rule.

0:19:53
CW: Yeah, that would all seem to, all those writers would seem to indicate that because of the rape culture, women are just not believed in the general public sphere. Is that correct?

0:20:04
BR: Yeah. And again, there I just happen to pick five of them. You can you can pick more on your own again. These these range from L magazine and the Atlantic in the New York Times to to blogs and elsewhere. So there there seems to be a general assumption that there’s a tendency to assume that victims are lying or mistaken and that the accused usually powerful men or celebrities, are probably innocent. So it’s not clear why that would be. Maybe it’s because of their celebrity status, maybe because people assume they wouldn’t do something like that. I mean, I can sort of, I can imagine a case in which you have a beloved actor who you’ve seen grow up on screen, you know, you’ve loved him movies for generations and now he’s accused of something horrible. And so I can see how on a superficial level, you might think, well, there would be this knee-jerk assumption that it must not be true. But as skeptics all know, the problem is usually the opposite. It’s not that people doubt claims that they hear. Instead, it’s that people usually believe them by default. In a world where a significant number of people believe in utterly implausible things, psychics, Bigfoot, tongue analyses, conspiracy theories, chemtrails…

0:21:14
CW: Our job would be a lot easier if the the general human being setting was to doubt things But yes, that’s not the way human beings are built.

BR: Right, right And so that’s that’s what I find interesting about this idea is, you know Why is it that we would tend to believe things except in this one very specific case of sexual misconduct. I noticed a couple weeks ago, you remember when that horrible story about the Turpin family, the 13 children that were found?

CW: Yeah, that’s not easily forgotten.

BR: Yeah, they were chained for years, apparently, in their home. And I was watching ABC Nightly News and David Muir said that claims were, quote, difficult to believe. And they kind of are. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s hard to imagine that parents would do such horrific things to their children, chaining them and abusing them for years on end and not…

0:22:11
CW: But that’s essentially, that sounds almost like a, just a turn of phrase, just a… He didn’t actually mean, literally, it’s difficult to believe, just that it’s so mind-bendingly cruel.

0:22:24
BR: Well, that’s, and that’s where I’m going with it. The fact is that no one really doubted the story. When the whole story came out, you didn’t see people saying, I don’t believe that at all. They look like perfectly good parents. No one said that. No matter how horrific and aberrant it was, no one really doubted it. It was, oh my God, this is a horrible thing, and no one really doubts it. So why would something as common as sexual harassment or assault be automatically doubted? That was what sort of intrigued me about this about this idea. So, you know as we touched on before in our everyday lives we tend to believe the information that we’re given even by strangers like all the time If a store clerk tells us there are out of our favorite coffee. We don’t doubt it. We typically automatically accept and believe what we’re told all the time. If a co-worker says that their aunt recently died, we believe it, right? There’s no, I’m sorry, my condolences, when did she pass, were you close? You don’t say, I don’t believe that at all. No one does.

0:23:31
CW: Can I just point out, I love how your two examples of unbelievable tragedies are the death of a loved one and running out of coffee.

0:23:38
BR: Well, see, I like to run the gamut on my examples. But no, I mean, just think about it. In our everyday lives, we believe information told to us by strangers all the time, routinely. We believe information in news reports and road signs and product labels. Even things that are horrific and rare and bizarre are routinely believed. And I think you can look at it from an evolutionary perspective, right? It’s evolutionarily adaptive. Our forefathers survived by assuming the information that came back from a hunting party, for example, about where the wild game was, was true, right? It’s evolutionarily adaptive for people to believe information given, right? If someone tells us, you know, don’t go down this road, it’s washed out, or there’s a band of killers down the road, you know what? All things considered, I’m going to believe it.

0:24:27
CW: Well, you know, to be fair, and to jump in here, I have a feeling a lot of the writers, a lot of the stories that I have read complaining about women not being believed, acknowledge that. They say, yeah, people are generally believed. Men are, a man coming back with a story about where the game can be found for his tribe in these, you know, Serengeti or whatever. Evolutionarily, it was wise to believe him. People believe many things, except they’ve put they’ve put women telling their stories of sexual assault and sexual harassment. They’ve put it in a special category for some reason, they believe that society has put these types of stories in a special category that for some reason are not believed by the general public So that is their complaint. They agree with what you’ve said But they also believe that due to rape culture women are not believed. So how do you reconcile that?

0:25:26
BR: Well, that’s that’s exactly it. I mean, why would it be and and and apparently it’s only these particular topics, right? I mean, yeah, if a woman says I grew up in Kansas, there’s no reason to not believe that. If a woman says I was a victim of identity fraud, of course you are. There’s no reason to disbelieve that, but according to all these news reports, there’s an asterisk next to reports physically about sexual misconduct. And so that’s what I find, that’s what I was trying to sort of tease out. Like why would that be? Of course, you know, when I began wondering why the public seemed to doubt people who accuse others of this misconduct, this is where Hyman’s categorical imperative comes in. The skeptical dictum named after Ray Hyman, psychologist at the University of Oregon, that I’ve quoted oftentimes and hopefully our listeners are familiar with it, and the idea is that before explaining how or why something is, you need to verify that it actually is, right? So before trying to figure out why is it that there’s a cancer cluster in an area of the city, or why is it that there was some unexplained event somewhere, the first thing you need to do is make sure that it is in fact true, that there is in fact a cancer cluster there, there actually was this mysterious phenomenon. Before you begin putting time and effort into trying to figure out why or how, the first established, is it a fact? So that’s when I began researching polls and surveys and trying to figure out why would there be this one niche exception in terms of claims. And as is sometimes the case when you look for facts, I found out that the evidence did not in fact support the claim. So I’m going to give you a couple examples here. I began looking for polls and research and surveys that asked the public, both men and women, whether they do in fact believe the women that have come forward with accusations against mostly powerful men, or in fact they believe the men, usually entertainers. And it was fascinating because in case after case after case, the opposite of what I had read and been told was true. Now to be clear, I’ve found, I think I’ve found six or seven polls. I’m not claiming that I scoured all the literature everywhere. There may be additional research and polls and data that I haven’t found that contradict this, and I’d be happy to look at it. I can only tell you that in all the cases that I’ve seen, in all the polls and surveys and research, when you actually ask people, do you believe the women, the answer is overwhelmingly yes. And so not only do most people, that is a statistical majority, that’s over 50%, I mean no one’s saying it’s 100%. You can argue whether it should be 100%, whether people should believe these claims, whether for example it would be healthy if 100% of people said yes, I believe these based upon just hearing about it.

0:28:26
CW: Well, you’ve also typically got two competing claims, because you’ve got the female accusers saying, this is what happened, this is what he did, and then oftentimes you have the male politician or executive or Hollywood producer or actor saying, no, no, I didn’t do these things.

0:28:45
BR: But keep in mind, it’s not just men. I mean, for example, in the case of Kevin Spacey, who’s one of the biggest names, and George Takei, there were men that accused these other men.

0:28:54
CW: True, yes. And there have been some women that have been accused of sexual harassment as well. But in any of these cases, you do have a he said, she said, or a he said, he said, or a she said, he said. So there are definitely two competing narratives. So if your public polls that you’ve come across state that over 50% of the public polled side with the accusers, then I think that’s more indicative of people believing accusers, then say if they had just heard other random claims about anything else that didn’t involve a competing person saying the opposite. Do you understand what I mean? Yeah, it’s not just a fact. It’s a fact with an opposite fact presented by another party.

BR: Or certainly an opposite claim.

CW: Yes, an opposite claim, yeah.

0:29:47
BR: Yeah, so let me just go through a couple of these. Again, I’ve done a fair amount of this research. I won’t go into all the polls. I’ll give everybody the references and citations on the website, but let me just go through a couple of these because it’s interesting. So there was a poll taken, do you believe the women’s sexual assault accusations against Bill Cosby? 61% of men and 53% of women believe Cosby’s accusers.

0:30:13
CW: More men were believing them.

BR: In fact, yeah, in fact, that was one thing that surprised me. In virtually every case, more men than women believe the accusers. So again, this is, it’s surprising, but it’s all right there. I mean, the data is right there in almost every, every case where somebody has been accused, the men believe the women more than the women believe the women.

0:30:36
CW: And that, wow, that’s interesting. And that was all the polls that you came across or just all the ones for Bill Cosby.

BR: No, no, that it’s across the board. I’ll go through some more. So, uh, in the case of, uh, Roy Moore, who I think as of the date still has not conceded that he lost.

0:30:51
CW: Oh, geez.

0:30:52
BR: 56% of men and 57% of women believed Moore’s accusers. Now, in this case, it was about equal, I mean, probably a statistical dead heat. But, again, over half believed Moore’s accusers. The question was about John Conyers, the politician. 63% of men and 53% of women believed his accusers. Against Charlie Rose, 71% of men and 66% of women believed his accusers. Al Franken, 68% of men and 56% of women believed Franken’s accusers. Harvey Weinstein, 70% of men and 50% of women believed his accusers.

CW: How many was percentage again for Harvey Weinstein?

CW: 70% of men and 55% of women.

CW: That’s so frustrating.

BR: Almost three quarters of the men who heard about Weinstein’s claim, about the accusations against Weinstein, believe them. And a little over half of women believe them.

CW: That’s a little depressing actually. Women are, well I’m sure.

0:31:55
BR: Well we got some more, we got some more. Let’s talk about Donald Trump.

0:32:00
CW: Oh boy.

0:32:02
BR: 45% of men and 44% of women believe Trump’s accusers. And in both these cases, it’s interesting because there’s also the balance here. Now, keep in mind that this, you need to parse this out because of course, as you know, 45% of men and 44% of women are under the majority. It’s under 15%. But here’s the distinction. The other categories were either disbelieving it, not sure, or don’t have enough information to say. And this is where the rubber hits the road. If you ask, now and see this is interesting, right? Let me go back to Harvey Weinstein. If you ask people whether the accusers are lying, 2% of men and 4% of women say yes. So 98% of men, according to this poll, this is a CNN poll, 98% of men believe Harvey Weinstein’s accusers and 96% of women believe his accusers. In the case of Trump, you have 23% of men and 14% of women disbelieve the accusers. So if the question is, do you doubt that the accusations are true, which is not the same as saying you believe, you know, you have to be careful you phrase it but but again in the case of President Trump 45% of men 44% believe his accusers and and even though again that that’s those numbers aren’t perhaps as high as you might expect but keep in mind that the other options were don’t have enough information and in most cases that’s probably a fair response, especially in the early days and weeks of news reports. It is not anti-woman or anti-feminist to say, I don’t have enough information to know.

0:33:48
CW: Yeah, there’s a big difference between being agnostic about it and saying, no, I believe this person is lying. And that’s very heartening to know that the numbers are so low for the specific question of do you think these women are lying?

0:34:01
PR: It would be interesting to see how that would play out, like if you gave a group of people several unknown cases between, you know, let’s just say people who were anonymous, like they didn’t know who they were and how they would believe that given the story that’s being told because I think the big issue with looking at these cases and then using them as a litmus for how people treat victims is that not every person perpetrating is a famous person and what’s going to come into account is people’s perception of that person specifically. So it almost does a disservice to the victims to be presented with these huge public cases where maybe statistically it’s encouraging that people aren’t doubting the accusers and that’s good, but the narrative that’s being sold on the internet kind of poisons the well there.

0:35:02
CW: Yeah, there’s definitely a case of, in an effort to publicize and to advocate for victims, I think in a lot of ways journalists and advocates are making it seem like much more of an uphill battle which can be daunting to any potential victims that want to come forward. Things have definitely been changing with the Me Too movement. With the accusers being named Person of the Year for the cover of Time, there’s definitely a swing away from victim blaming and silencing, but I’m still seeing lots and lots of reports harping on the fact that women just aren’t believed. And looking at the numbers, it looks like there’s really good signs that women are believed.

0:35:50
BR: Yeah, and again, I want to be crystal clear. I want to be very clear about this. So, you know, I did not research whether police or juries believe the accusers. That’s a different topic. Didn’t look into that. That’s not what I looked at. I very specifically was looking for evidence that most people, say over 50 percent, of the public doubt accusers because that is the claim, right? Investigation begins with a claim. The claim I’m researching is, do most people in general, by default, doubt accusers? And the evidence I’m finding so far is no. To Pascual’s point, I mean, he certainly raises a good point about the issue of lesser known cases, because of course, there’s a bit of a research bias here, because in all these cases, these are well-known public figures, you know, Al Franken, John Conyers, you know, Weinstein, etc. So I would assume, I’m just guessing, but I would assume that the numbers for whether the average person believes a lower profile case would probably be hired, right? Because you don’t have that built-in celebrity, right? So if all you know about Al Franken is, you know, Saturday Night Live and this and that, I mean, there’s a built-in sort of halo of, you know, oh, he’s a good guy, he’s been on TV, you know, I bought his albums. But if it’s the average person down the street who you don’t know anything about I would guess it’s probably more likely to people say yeah he’s… because he you don’t have that that sort of halo about you and keep in mind that again with with research here, is that you can’t do these sorts of polls and research on anonymous people right?

0:37:30
CW: Yeah, there’s no public opinion on whether or not Joe Smith really sexually assaulted, you know, Mary Jane in Waukegan, Idaho. There’s exactly there’s no public opinion on that because there’s no public knowledge of it.

0:37:42
PR: Yeah, yeah.

BR: So, you know, keep in mind that in all these cases, there’s been no jury trial. Well, I mean, there was one case, for example, in Bill Cosby that ended in a mis-trial. But the the most honest, accurate answer is probably I don’t know or I don’t have enough information to say. And so in all cases with investigations and public opinion, in virtually all these cases, there has not been, there’s little evidence to go on. There has, it’s basically news stories and the accusations. So it’s not as if the the people that are responding to this are informed by hard facts, testimony given under oath, emails, photographs, well in the case of Al Franken.

CW: Physical evidence is pretty scant, yeah.

BR: CW: Yeah, and so, and I’m not saying that it should or shouldn’t be that way, I’m just saying that when you’re asking people’s opinion on this, by definition you’re going by rumors and stories and sensational stories. One thing that I looked at was whether this is a recent phenomenon, right, because most of the polls that I just discussed were fairly recent. In fact, many of them were from October and November 2017. But I looked at older polls, for example, ones about Bill Cosby, and what you find is that in the case of Bill Cosby, again, this is pre-Me Too, this is pre-Times Up. There was a poll taken July 8th to 9th, 2015. 57% of people, men and women, believed the accusations against Cosby. 61% of men and 53% of women believe the accusations. There was another poll done in November 2014. 56% of people believe the accusers against Bill Cosby. And there was even one poll on debate.org and I don’t claim this is you know this is not a high profile polling station but 100% of the people that chimed in said they believed Cosby’s accusers. So again, this tendency to believe the accusers is not a product of a recent revolution in believing women. This has been going on for years.

0:39:57
CW: That’s kind of good news.

0:39:59
BR: It is good news. So the question then comes up would be you know, well hold on here. So why? Why do so many people believe that the accusers are widely doubted once you sort of start digging into the research and the data? All these news reports are saying that the women are routinely disbelieved the polls and data that I found and again, I There may be data. I haven’t found research I haven’t found I can just tell you that in the research that I have found is consistent and clear. Most people believe the accusers, and in fact, more men than women believe the accusers. And so the question is, well, why do people think that? And the answer that I can come up with is because that’s what they’re told by the news media and social media, right? I gave you five examples a little while ago of high-profile journalists and sociologists and other people that are explicitly telling women and telling the general public that women aren’t believed.

0:40:57
CW: Now, do you think, do you guys suspect that the effort by these journalists and some of the activist-minded folks who are beating this drum saying women are never believed, do you think that they’re aware of these statistics and they just think that, well, having about 40% of people that don’t really believe the accuser, that’s huge. Do they think that the percentage of people who disbelieve a report should be shrunk down to zero and women should be believed by 100% of the public all the time? Is that the goal, you think? Or are they just unaware that, in fact, most people do believe the accusers in these high profile cases.

0:41:40
PR: At least from my perspective, and kind of like what we talked about with our Black Santa debacle a couple years ago. It’s a situation where, and this is just me kind of throwing a guess out there, but it seems like, again, when you go into the comment sections of things and when you’re exposed to a certain bubble of social media or a certain segment of the population that’s being amplified by being funneled into a certain mouthpiece, that stuff seems really obvious and it seems like you know nobody believes them you know because you see whole whole conversations of people throwing doubt out there on the internet. And –

CW: The misogynists are just louder?

PR: Yeah and I think you know I think it’s partially that and I think it’s partially just that when it depending on where you’re looking for your reactions you end up finding very concentrated threads of it because my own social media tends to be pretty strongly left-leaning across the board and so when any kind of report comes out about that stuff it’s very strongly in favor of believing the victim. On the other hand, if you go to a news piece on certain news websites and you look at the comments under the reports, you’ll see a lot of people saying some horrible things or just doubting the victim. It’s sort of a thing where a lot of it just gets concentrated into areas where a journalist or just a blogger or someone online, if they look in that one place, then yeah, it’s gonna seem like the sky’s falling. And I think that contributes to it a lot because I really think that the internet is not a good place to judge how people really feel about things. I mean, I know on one hand, people kind of drop their sensor a little bit. But on the other hand, again, people are just opinions and people are just concentrated into these, they’re funneled into comment threads and message boards and websites that very specifically amplify their voice. So I think it’s really not, it’s not useful to use the internet itself to gauge that because you can, just like Google, you can find anything that’ll confirm any opinion you have.

0:44:05
CW: An organized poll is definitely a better source than running through the comment section of Breitbart Daily Stormer.

0:44:13
PR: Right, right.

0:44:14
BR: Well, you know, it goes back to another skeptical dictum, right? The plural of anecdote isn’t data. And what you see in these trolls and comments and all these a-holes are anecdotes, they’re stories. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t somebody actually behind them who has some nasty, obnoxious opinion, but it just means that to get an accurate picture of pretty much anything, you need to sample. You need to have a wide number of people or opinions or subjects, a high end to be counted. That way the outliers won’t be so prominent. And what Pascual was talking about was what we would call negativity bias. And it’s the tendency to focus on the negative. And we all do this, it’s a psychological thing. And this is why, for example, if we get three compliments in one day, and one nasty comment, we remember the nasty comment.

0:45:14
PR: That’s right.

0:45:15
CW: And journalists often believe they are doing a service to the world by focusing on the negative because that’s what they want to fight.

0:45:23
PR: Right.

0:45:24
BR: Absolutely. Yeah, I think part of it is, you know, there’s an activism, which I applaud. I mean, to be crystal clear, I think it’s wonderful that for the most part, these people are believed. That’s encouraging. That’s good news. And that should be reported. But what’s interesting is that there’s a couple of things to answer your question. First one, as Pascual mentioned, there’s a negativity bias to the exclusion of the broader number of people that’s actually more representative of the general public. The second part is a sort of more activist angle, which you touched on, Celestia, and it’s sort of this notion that one is too many. And yeah, that’s true. I mean, one murder is too many, one sexual assault is too many. Absolutely. Again, I was very, very specific in the topic I was looking at. The question I asked was, is it really true that most people, again, over 50%, the majority, however you wanna put it, disbelieve accusers that that was specific was looking at and the answer to it appears to be no. Now you can you can certainly make the argument that it is still bad that the numbers are aren’t higher. You could, as you mentioned it could be well I you know someone could say I wish it was 80% or 100% or whatever.

0:46:44
CW: See, I don’t think I’d want to live in a world where accusations came out and 100% of the public automatically believed that. Because you should have some agnosticism about it. You should look for some evidence. You should wait until investigations have happened before you just say, oh, so and so said somebody did something, so they did. I believe everything completely. In the case of Cosby and Weinstein, they’ve got women lined up and it’s very believable when you see that many women agreeing and having the same modus operandi and the same situation on the other hand, you know David Copperfield out here in Vegas. He was accused. It was a big brouhaha and it was found that the woman apparently made a habit of making false accusations and it wrecked him for quite a while and people still kind of look at him sideways just because he’s kind of creepy, so to speak, but he’s a magician, half of them are creepy. And the FBI investigated and found that her claim was among the 2% of claims that you can actually prove are a false claim. And so as long as there’s some instances of that, I’m not going to completely swallow everything. I don’t want 100% of society to completely swallow every accusation we hear all the time.

0:48:05
PR: Totally.

CW: There’s danger in that.

PR: Totally.

BR: There’s absolutely danger in that and and again partly because because in virtually all these cases as I mentioned before but it’s worth repeating these cases have not been adjudicated. No no virtually no one has been found guilty. No one has had due process. No one has gone through a trial. No one has seen any evidence. I’m not saying that that means that their the accusations are false. I’m just saying that the normal process by which we validate or discredit claims has not happened so far. We’ve had accusers, we have counter complaints, we have denials, this and that. In some cases we’ve had people admitting it. But again, the process of looking at the evidence, that precise process which is so valued to scientists and skeptics has not occurred in virtually all these cases. Anyway, and just to touch on the third, because when I was talking about why it is that it’s not more widely believed, part of it is, I think, is that people don’t know. I actually posted some of these poll data a few weeks back on Facebook, and people were shocked. They were like, what? I was like, yeah, here’s the data. Look at it yourself. And people were just surprised and what I realized as I’ve gone through looking at news reports the the polls and research and surveys that show that for the most part accusers are believed does not appear in news reports.

0:49:26
CW: Yeah, it would make for much less of an impact if you began a story saying, you know when somebody accuses a celebrity of sexual misconduct, they’re usually believed.

0:49:40
BR: That’s not going to sell the story.

0:49:42
CW: No.

0:49:43
BR: So anyway, I just want to wrap up by just sort of pointing out that, you know, I think the real problem here, to my mind, is that this myth could very likely do real harm to real victims. You know, women who have been assaulted or harassed should not be told the lie that they will face automatic skepticism from the public. The fact is they probably will be believed. It won’t be everybody. I mean, there’s a normal bell curve distribution, right? There will be some people that will believe any accusation, and there will be other people that doubt any accusation. There’s always going to be people on either end. But by and large, for the most part, most people, the data shows, do in fact believe the accusers. And that’s good news. That is positive, and it’s irresponsible for reputable news media and experts to discourage real victims from coming forward. The message to anyone who’s been victimized should be that they will be believed and of course that’s good. I mean all victims when they come forward should be believed certainly enough to start an investigation and to to move forward with those sorts of things. So you know it’s just frustrating to me that the general public and women specifically are being misled and told well don’t you know yeah I guess you’d come forward if you want to but you know most people doubt you. No, no they won’t and that’s what skeptics do. We investigate and debug harmful myths and misinformation and I believe this is this is a prominent one.

PR: Yeah, I agree and it’s interesting because I tend to lean a little more in favor of things like the Me Too movement and I do actually really support these ideas. The reason I do and the reason I liked how the Me Too movement started was that it was It was people who previously hadn’t said anything for whatever reason feeling empowered to do so. And I think that it’s important to keep that in mind because what this bad reporting is doing is working completely against the spirit of what Me Too means. something they should feel empowered to report this and to tell authorities and to make sure that people know that this happened. You know, harping on the idea that no one believes you is very counter to that and they should be very careful how they spin that and how hard they push that idea, especially in a world where, you know, there are a lot of statistical issues with assault. You know, the majority of sexual assaults, according to the Bureau of Justice statistics, majority are not reported. And there’s a number of reasons for that. And that’s a completely different statistic from what we’re talking about. It’s a statistic about people not wanting to say something or feeling that maybe it wasn’t what they thought it was or that there’s guilt or embarrassment, something like that. But again, the fear of not being believed probably drives a lot of that. And then there’s other issues like the harassment in the workplace. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission did a study on that and they found that something like 75% of workplace harassment claims and sexual assault claims are met with some level of retaliation and that’s a scary statistic too. And these are statistics that get completely overlooked when we spend all day talking about no one believes you, no one believes you, especially when it’s coming from the side that’s trying to promote victims being believed. And I just think that this idea is really beginning to obscure the more important numbers that we should really be focused on on fixing.

0:53:41
CW: Well, yeah, it’s it’s it’s resource allocation. If we have real, verified statistical issues that are stifling women from coming forward that are, you know, throwing victims under the bus, we should look at that. However, if we have the sky is falling reporting that is overblowing a Problem that isn’t actually the size of the problem that they’re claiming it is and that that doesn’t help anybody.

0:54:07
PR: No, no, definitely.

BR: And Celestia you’ve done a bit of research on your own. What what angle did you look at?

0:54:13
CW: Well, I dove into the the idea that police are likely to disbelieve you if you go in and report a sexual assault because that that is a very Dangerous topic. It’s a it’s a horrific thought. I mean, I, personally, if I were to, I have, luckily, I’ve never had any sexual assaults. I’ve, I’ve been groped once or twice, but nothing I couldn’t take care of myself. But I have never had to go into the police department to report a rape. And from everything you hear, women are faced with tremendous scrutiny and detectives that don’t believe them when they go into report a rape. And so I looked into some information on that. I’ll pull from two main sources here. One is the National Institute of Justice Visiting Fellowship, Police Investigation of Rape, Roadblocks and Solutions. It was written by a fellow named Martin D. Schwartz back in 2010. It’s a very thorough 75-page report involving a large group of, I think he talked to 50, it was over 50 sexual assault detectives and an even larger number of first responders. And then I’ve also got false reports moving beyond the issue to successfully investigate and prosecute non-stranger sexual assault. This is written by Dr. Kimberly A. Lonsway, Sergeant Joanne Archambault, and Dr. David Lysak, and it’s in The Voice, which is a publication subtitled Helping Prosecutors Give Victims a Voice. Now, the idea that most rape complaints are ignored, or thought to be false by police, it’s certainly less true today than it was decades or even a century ago when women were practically second class citizens and couldn’t vote, and just nobody trusts. We’re talking about the days of, you know, even domestic abuse, people would blame the wife for asking for it. So we have a long history to overcome here, and I wanted to look at how far we have come, and whether or not it’s true that you have, again, a majority thing. We’re not saying that, oh, getting to that 51% of people believing you is a victory. It’s not. But if we have journalists framing it as you have a 95% chance of the police disbelieving you, then that’s wrong. That’s just not true. And it’s a dangerous untruth. Now, as a skeptic per se was the tendency to inflate dangers and especially the tendency to inflate dangers when information is presented to women. Anti-vaxxers dishonestly inflate the dangers of vaccines and they aim that fear at women, at mothers, and it works. Companies pushing organic foods aim an inflated sense of danger from chemicals at women and it works. And I’m looking at this and I’m seeing the same sort of pattern, a danger that is being inflated and aimed squarely at women. And that’s the danger that if you report a sexual assault, the police will not believe you. They’ll laugh at you. They’ll shame you. You have a minuscule chance of getting a detective who actually listens. Now, if there’s some truth to that, I want to know how much truth there is. I want to be armed with the facts and not just facts, but strategy. Some of what I’m gonna say here might seem offensive or like victim blaming if somebody really wants to take it that way. But, you know, screw that, I don’t care. If women are thinking twice about going to the police because they have been fed the idea that there’s no way they will ever be believed, then this is important. It’s vital to know whether or not you have a chance at being believed, how big that chance is, and what you can do to maximize that chance if you find yourself in that difficult position. And I found out some useful things. Now looking at these reports here, they cite a bunch of other literature and there’s very mixed opinions in people who study this and write about it. Some say that any changes have been superficial, that police have just learned how to answer questionnaires a bit more politically correctly. You know, when when somebody asks a police officer, did the woman deserve to be raped because she was wearing a because she was scantily clad and hanging out at a bar? The police officer is, of course, going to say no. But there are people who question the legitimacy of questionnaires like that. And Martin Schwartz was able to kind of formulate questions in a way that I thought was pretty clever and able to get to the heart of how likely it is that police will believe a victim. And so we’re going to go into that. But one of the first things I came across was the use of polygraphs on rape victims. Now, if you went somewhere to report a crime and they asked you to take a lie detector test or a polygraph test, whether or not it detects lies is a whole other episode But if you were asked to be hooked up to a polygraph machine to tell the officer how you were victimized Would that make you feel like you were not believed?

BR: Yes, I would I would feel insulted and I would I would assume that that’s my that my story was immediately doubted if I was asked to do that.

CW: Yeah, and it can be very intimidating. I have been hooked up to a polygraph machine before back when I applied for a job at a police department. It’s an intimidating experience even if you know it’s mostly bullshit. They’re registering your heart rate and your anxiety level and your blood pressure. Many things that are going to be thrown way out of whack if you’re discussing something traumatic, like a rape. And even just finding out that polygraphs were used on rape victims was horrendous to me. And I went down that rabbit hole and looked up stuff from that. And the good news is, well, okay, here’s an article I found. I’m going to ask you guys to guess what year this is from. They decided to ban use of polygraphs on a person who is complaining of a rape. I’m gonna quote here, “‘Passage of the new polygraph law “‘is one important step toward creating a new climate “‘of respectful treatment for victims of sexual violence,’ “‘said Maude Easter, the executive director “‘of the New York State Coalition Against Sexual Assault. “‘Polygraph tests have symbolized the climate “‘in which victims do not come forward “‘because they do not expect to be believed.’” Now I want you guys to guess what year that’s from.

1:00:49
PR: See, the way you’re framing it, I’m thinking it’s a lot earlier than I would expect, but but –

BR: 72?

PR: I would say I would go somewhere maybe in the 80s, maybe 85.

1:01:01
CW: Well, I guess I overshot that. It’s actually from 1996. So about 22 years ago, Mayor David Dinkins launched that new practice of, in New York at least, not allowing polygraphs to be used on rape victims. And a report from 2009, some 15 years later, from the National Sexual Violence Research Center, it comes down pretty hard on the use of polygraphs, saying that it undermines the best practices. The Violence Against Women Act of 2005 mentions that this is not a good idea to use a polygraph on rape victims. And before that act in 2005, it was actually pretty common. It still varies greatly by state, but there’s a large number of states that forbid it outright and there are some states that say it’s voluntary, you can bring it up, but you can’t force a rape victim to take a polygraph. Now, as unreliable as they are, what I’m reading from the police side of things is that it’s a way to present evidence in a case and help somebody get convicted in a situation where you rarely have any corroborating witnesses. It’s often something that happens with nobody else watching. And so when it’s a he said, she said, the police have tried to use polygraphs to make the case more believable. But it’s of course had a very problematic effect on victims who feel victimized again when they’re asked to get hooked up to this thing. So I think it’s good and again quite frankly the use of polygraphs is unreliable and does not work the way people think it works and can be faked and there’s all sorts of problems so I’m as a skeptic I’m just glad to see that they’re doing away with that.

1:02:47
PR: Yeah, I think it’s something that we definitely need to stop using. It’s kind of interesting to me that, you know, the argument in favor of it in the utility in convicting someone, it’s still, it’s like, well, you’re still using a flawed device, a flawed system of determining truth. So it’s, you know, that could work. That could also work to convict someone who didn’t do it. And so in general, it just seems like it kind of silly that we still use them. I think nowadays, if I’m not mistaken, a lot of jurisdictions just maybe will allow polygraph as evidence, but would never require it as part of the case. But even as evidence, I’m highly skeptical of anyone using it in either direction. And I’m glad they’ve stopped the act of trying to you know make people use it especially as victims but hopefully it just goes goes away altogether.

BR: What else did you find Celestia?

1:03:51
CW: There is a huge problem of rapes going unreported which circles back to women being afraid that police will not believe them. Estimates vary between 5% to 36% of victims actually report their rape or their assault. Now, reasons for this are not just women being afraid that they won’t be believed. There’s guilt, there’s confusion, and victims themselves also fall prey to some of the myths about rape, meaning some of them don’t realize that they’ve been raped, which is horrific, but they’re human beings. They’re susceptible to the same wrong ideas as police and all sorts of other people. Marital rape where a wife is taken advantage of by the husband or instances of an ex-boyfriend raping a woman. It blows my mind, but but according to Schwartz, some of these women undergoing this don’t really view it as a rape so they don’t bother reporting it they might be scarred by it, but they don’t view it as anything that they can get justice about. And then one of the major problems I found with women not being believed when they go to the police is that, and this is going to sound, again, don’t quote me out of context here, is the fact that many victims do lie. And I want to parse the difference between a lying victim and a false report. A false report means the rape did not happen. And most estimates, most estimates, are around two to eight percent of reported rapes are false reports. Now that’s horrific to me. If somebody accuses me of a crime and around two to eight percent of that type of accusation is a complete fabricated accusation, that’s horrifying to me. Nobody wants to be accused of something that didn’t happen. But the other type of lying I’m talking about is something that Schwartz calls impression management. And this is women and girls changing aspects of the story, so that they appear to be more believable, which is a really vicious circle. If you go into a police department and you lie about several things around a sexual assault, like, oh, you don’t really want to tell the officer that you had consumed six alcoholic beverages and you went home with the guy willingly. Instead, you say that you were stone cold sober and a van pulled up to you and abducted you forcibly. Once it comes out that part of your story is not true, that can make the whole case crumble. And that was something that detectives really reported to Schwartz as being a major problem. Women changing their stories back and forth, trying to sound believable, trying to gloss over aspects of their story that might make them look less than angelic, which is unfortunate because nobody is a perfect human being. But for some reason, women think that they have to be perfect when they go into report a rape. One of the detectives, here let me quote from the Schwartz report here, quote, one said that he had learned to take notes on initial reports in a shorthand that was undecipherable even to cryptologists. Thus, if his files were obtained by defense attorneys, they would be unable to read them. When he got to what he considered would be the truth, he would type it up to be his final report. So, see the problem there is that defense attorneys can get a hold of all the notes that a detective takes, and if the woman’s story has changed several times, or if she was caught in an obvious lie, one of the detectives said that the best forensic tool around was the credit card, because often you had women saying well I had I had two drinks and then you find out from her credit card statement, she had 11 drinks and it was not a round that she bought for her friends. They were 11 of the same mixed drink purchased about 10 minutes apart. That’s a problem that that pokes holes in things and even if the detective is pretty sure a rape occurred, they might end up classifying the case as unfounded simply because they realize with the way that the story has been told to them, they’re never going to get a conviction. So that’s a tragedy. And part of the tragedy is that women are led to believe these myths about rape, that number one, that you won’t be believed. And that’s the real, that’s the real bizarre tragedy here, that a lot of these women are and I’m saying women here, but we’re also talking there are some men who are raped, they – a lot of the detectives that Schwartz talked to didn’t report dealing with any male victims of rape, but there were a few. But rape victims themselves fall prey to the rape myths, meaning okay. You weren’t really raped unless they used a weapon. So they fabricate a weapon or you weren’t really you weren’t really raped unless you fought back really hard. And so they fabricate. Oh, I fought back really hard. Meanwhile. There’s not like a scratch on them. So Fabricating details around the event to try and seem more believable is actually what makes the story less believable which yeah, that was a revelation to me. I’ve got you know, and again, this is this is going to sound like victim blaming I apologize if it comes off as victim blaming. I don’t mean this to be victim blaming but rather victim preparation and nobody wants to prepare to be a victim of a crime but if there’s one thing we should be teaching, you know High school girls and college girls and women of you know women of all ages is if you are assaulted tell the complete truth from the beginning. That is what will help you be believed. In fact, at the end of one of Schwartz’s conclusions, he says, I’m quoting from Schwartz again, the most difficult recommendation I took away from this study was not in policing. Given the way that police act, it may be even more important to train college women and high school girls in what to do when raped. And then earlier he said one problem is that there needs to be some educational mechanism to convince potential rape victims to tell the complete truth immediately to avoid having the cases dropped. So impression management is one pretty big problem.

1:10:17
PR: Yeah, I can imagine that. I think maybe this is part of the education side of things. You know, you have to keep in mind that the prosecutor is the one who’s in charge of painting a picture of the person and the situation and they know how to do that with enough strength to have a case and it’s important to be as straightforward about your situation as possible. Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand there probably are some situations where it can be, it may be hard to be believed, like in the instance of perhaps like a prostitute who’s sexually assaulted. It’s kind of a tricky thing as a sex worker, you go into a situation where a boundary has been crossed, but you were first off engaging in an illegal act, and second off already put in a situation where people have maybe an inaccurate impression of what you do, but nonetheless people think that you put yourself in a situation where that’s just part of the deal. And I think it’s important just for people to understand that even if you’re in that kind of situation, no matter what you do, you don’t deserve to be sexually assaulted. And I think a lot of it, you have to understand that when you come forward with this, it has to be true and it has to be as factual as possible. And just make sure you give any prosecuting attorney the ammunition they need to build the case and allow them to make the more dramatic case, you know.

1:12:05
CW: Yeah, and of course this study also is filled with recommendations to police in terms of how they question somebody, and this falls back to whether or not victims are believed when they go into the police department to get to report their rape. Police officers are trained to question people. That’s what they do, and when a woman is telling a story that is traumatic for her. She’s going to be disorganized She’s going to be you know, very distraught or sometimes not. There’s there’s no real picture of how a woman should behave after a rape. Sometimes they’re they’re frighteningly calm about it and sometimes they’re hysterical. There’s there’s no real Red flag as to this woman is lying because she’s emotionally a certain way, because people react differently. But when the story varies, when you say, okay, I was walking home and I got picked up from here, and da-da-da, and then three minutes later you’re saying something that contradicts that, if the officer interrupts and is like, well, wait a second, that’s not what you just said, then of course the victim is going to feel pressured and feel like they don’t believe her. And so there’s been a real movement in police departments to retrain officers that deal with sexual crimes to not interrogate victims, to find holes in their story, but rather to assist them in saying, look, I’m just trying to get all the facts straight so that we can present a clear case here. And if you’re mistaken about one thing, we want to get the story right when I do up the report.

1:13:40
BR: I would assume that that you know as with all professions and careers that probably the more exterior the police officer the more likely it is that they would they would believe a victim

1:13:48
CW: Yes, in fact, that is that is one thing. I should absolutely get to I know we’re running out of time is What Schwartz did is in order you know rather than? It’s he it’s very tricky if you ask somebody do women usually lie about rape, they’re not going to give you a yes. They said the questionnaire that he gave to the police, they all answered, everybody across the board answered the questions the correct way. They’ve been taught a certain procedure and they follow that procedure and they know how to take a test about procedure. Should a woman’s attire influence whether or not you think she’s lying about rape? No, of course not. And they know how to answer that. So one thing he did was he asked everybody the question, what percentage of the rape cases you see would you estimate are false reports? And again, as to the actual number of instances of false reports, a lot of the literature points to two to eight percent. So if an officer is estimating far above that, you can assume he or she is the type of officer that typically doesn’t believe women who come in. And that did change in terms of experience. And unfortunately for officers who it was their first year or they only had one to three years of experience, 59% of them estimated really high, like they estimated 40 to 80 percent of their cases of rape cases were false reports and that’s really disheartening. What is more heartening is that once officers attained eight years or more, most of them believed that the number of false, the number of false reports was more like 10 percent or under, which is, which jives pretty well with the actual number that that’s people who study this find. So what that tells me is that yeah, there’s a chance that that you might be facing some officers that are skeptical of your story, but not if the officer has experience. And hopefully on the sex crimes unit, you will be talking to a detective who has some experience. In fact, one of the things that this report said was that people on the sex crimes unit tended to have more experience. Another thing that I think just people should be aware of is that he asked this question to first responding officers. Now, when you call the police, you have a first responder. It might be a campus police if you’re in a college, or just a police officer coming to your home in a squad car or wherever you have to be assisted, the police officer goes there. Now these are not detectives, these are first responding police officers. Now they had a much higher instances of being of in terms of the percentage of false reports they estimated than what detectives actually report.

BR: Which makes sense if they’re not police detectives there I mean you could be anybody from a campus security guard to an ambulance you know driver I mean not not to knock any of them but then they’re not they’re not trained in investigating crimes necessarily.

1:17:01
CW: Yes, and that’s something that’s important to remember because a lot of the detect the detectives reported frustration at the fact that a bad experience with a first responder had caused a woman not to file a police report or press charges. Or just the first responders can really foul up a case. They can say things that will sometimes completely poison a case. There was one instance where the girl said he was wearing a plaid shirt and the first responder said, oh, like a red plaid shirt? And she said, yeah, and you don’t do that when you’re questioning somebody.

BR: Leading questions.

CW: Yeah, it’s a leading question and it turned out to be a blue shirt and that went against the case when it came to prosecuting it. In other words, another thing we should be telling women is when you are reporting a rape, don’t put all of your faith in the responding officer. Talk to a detective. a seasoned sex crimes detective is going to be far more likely to believe you, far more likely to know how to ask the right questions. And again, with the officers who have had more than eight years of experience, the majority of them, 57% of them, it’s not a huge majority, but it’s a pretty good majority. The majority of them, 57% believed that the incidences of false reports were 10% or lower, which means they probably have a pretty good idea of how many women are actually raped and they probably have a pretty open mind as to whether or not they’re dealing with somebody who is making stuff up or reporting a real crime. So rather than being afraid of going to the police, just go to the police. Again, this is not victim blaming. I’m engaging not in victim blaming, but in victim preparation. Understand that you will likely be believed more often than not. It’s not stacked against you. It’s more stacked against you than it should be. And things are hopefully getting better. There’s a constant effort to train officers with how to deal with sex crimes. And there are many community organizations that do that. So there’s always ways to improve. But don’t just assume that you’re not going to be believed if you go to the police. Don’t assume that the first responder is an indicator of how all the police will act. The first responder might be an A-hole who is two months out of the cadet training program. Talk to a detective in the sex crimes unit. They are far more likely to know how to treat you and to know that you are telling the truth. Ask how long your detective has been working in the sex crime unit. And don’t employ impression management. Be completely forthright. If you were raped while you were doing cocaine with some guy, then mention that. Don’t lie about it. And also recognize your own stereotypes and myths about rape so that you don’t, that doesn’t color your own experience or cause you to withhold things because you feel like it’s your fault and for crying out loud if you’re offered a polygraph don’t take one.

1:20:02
BR: Yeah, all that’s great advice. I’m really glad that you dug deep into that .That’s I think we’ve we’ve covered quite a few rape myths and assault myths that I I’m frankly surprised at and it’s I There are some disheartening news here but overall I think the the the overall picture is generally positive, you know? And I do worry that the constant negativity and the constant harping on the fact that women are gonna be routinely disbelieved does harm. And I hope that we’ve managed to dispel at least a little bit of that. I can speak with a little bit of experience in terms of the first responders. I volunteer at a local domestic violence shelter and our prime directive is we believe the women by default. There’s a lot of overlap between domestic abuse and sexual assault, particularly among minority women. And the first thing in the door is we believe you, period. Followed quickly by it’s not your fault and then we’re here to help. And so I work with people who deal with that. I think that I worry that this overall notion that police aren’t going to believe you or the public isn’t going to believe you. And we’ve said this before, but it can really do harm and discourage people. And people should assume that they’ll be treated with respect. And if they’re not, then they need to address that.

1:21:35
CW: Yeah. And there’s going to be outliers. There’s no way to predict exactly how the officer you deal with at a police precinct in some, you know, someplace in the United States. There’s no way to predict with absolute clarity exactly what’s going to happen. You might get the biggest jerk of all jerks in all of jerkdom working at the police department that you have to deal with. Just like you might get the most terrible barista or cashier or any other human being, because there are some human beings that are terrible. But yeah, the notion the notion that police just automatically won’t believe you or don’t believe you when you go in to report a sexual assault, I found that that’s – I Wish it was I wish it was absolutely 100% not true, but it’s just not as true as you might be led to believe.

BR: And that’s important for for all of us to remember and hopefully we’ve managed to And that’s important for all of us to remember. And hopefully we’ve managed to burst a few dangerous myths on the show. And this has been really interesting. I thank you all for participating.

1:22:39
CW: Yeah, thanks for helping me tackle this, guys.

(MUSIC)

PR: And that about does it for us this week. That was a really heavy topic and I’m really glad we tackled it. I hope that our listeners feel that we gave it a good shake and we didn’t come off as being dismissive of anything. I think it did, I don’t know, I thought it was very well researched. You guys did a great job.

1:23:13
CW: And we should also point out that none of us are none of us are certified licensed experts in You know sexual assault trauma or anything like that. We are just three skeptics who did a deep dive into some research and some statistics You know to find out whether or not some fears are founded or not.

PR: Yeah, definitely. But on a lighter note, we’re going to be back next week with a very interesting topic. It’s the Loretto Staircase Miracle. The Loretto Staircase is a spiral staircase in a church in downtown Santa Fe, the town I hail from. There’s a whole miracle surrounding it, or claim to a miracle surrounding it. Ben’s going to talk a little bit about the investigations he’s done into it.

BR: Absolutely. I’m looking forward to it. It’s a fun, interesting story mixed with folklore and miracles and mysteries. And tune in next time.

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Ooh, okay.

1:24:10
Awesome. Well, until next week, we’ll see ya. Bye.

1:24:14
Take care.

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Squaring the Strange is a production of Chronos Creative LLC. Copyright 2017. Theme music by Shriek Back. Additional music by Memory, Guitared and Feathered, and Pasquale Romero. Content producer, Celestia Ward. Audio engineering, producing, and editing provided by Pasquale Romero at Acronis Creative Studios. Additional support provided by Ashley Romero, and of course, our listeners and patrons. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of Swearing the Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Acronis Creative, Center for Inquiry, our necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Acronis Creative, Center for Inquiry, our

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