"One Howard County woman needed an excuse for being late to work. Another feared she had become pregnant the first time she had sex. A third cut scratches on her thighs with a razor blade and bottle cap.
In the past two years, those and 31 other women told police in the suburban Maryland county they had been raped, but as authorities looked into each complaint, they found no evidence to support it. In some cases, women told police they had concocted their stories; other times, police found no evidence of rape, and ruled the complaints unfounded...
In Howard County, one of the few Washington area jurisdictions to make its investgative files readily accessible to the public, police records suggest a variety of possible reasons for unfounded claims. Some women said they wanted to exact revenge on former boyfriends, while others told police they were trying to hide sexual relationships from their parents or husbands, according to records...
Several other cases involved interracial accusations, often against fictitious men.
In May 1990, for example, a 23-year-old black woman said a white man had abducted her from a supermarket parking lot in Silver Spring, raped her at gunpoint and told her, "You black girls think you're pretty. . . . Tell all of your black girlfriends that they're not pretty."
Yet she later told police she had come home during the wee hours and needed an excuse for her angry parents. She said she slashed her thigh with a razor blade and a bottle cap "to make the rape more believable," the police report said.
In another case, a white teenager described in some detail how she exchanged racial epithets with nonexistent black attackers...
In 1985, Kathryn Hargis Tucci, a Laurel woman who was 19 at the time, filed a sexual assault complaint against a former boyfriend, who served 13 months in jail for the offense. Later, Tucci recanted, and was tried for filing a false report. An Anne Arundel County judge sentenced her to community service in a rape crisis center.
Tucci said in an interview with a Washington Post reporter that several traumatic incidents preceded her false report. "I've buried those bones a long time ago," she said. "I had several deaths in my family that year." She declined to elaborate further.
In 1990, six Howard women were arrested on charges of filing false rape reports, and one was prosecuted, a 29-year-old who said a newspaper delivery man had raped her at gunpoint. Later the woman said she had lied because she needed an excuse for having been late to work, according to police.
A year earlier, the same woman had been charged with filing a false rape report in Anne Arundel County; in the Howard case, a judge ordered her to get psychiatric help.
"Our philosophy is that a woman who would file a false rape report needs counseling, not jail time," Davis said. "...
In Howard, police said 11 of 35 rape reports in 1991 were unfounded, compared with 25 false claims in a total 2,053 reported burglaries, robberies and auto thefts. Alexandria police said 10 of 53 reported rapes in 1991 were unfounded, compared with 147 false claims in a total 2,948 reported burglaries, robberies and auto thefts...
In Prince George's, for example, police said 248 of 826 allegations of rape in 1990-91 were unfounded. Maj. James Ross, the former head of the department's criminal investigations division, said he thinks Prince George's percentage of false reports is due at least in part to frequent cases of sex-for-drugs transactions gone sour.
"Sometimes a woman will have sex with the guy, and then he doesn't give her the drugs," Ross said. "Then she'll call us and say she's been raped."...
In the Virginia suburbs, Fairfax had the highest percentage of unfounded reports, dismissing 109 of 276 cases over the past two years. Unlike other area jurisdictions, Fairfax includes among its unfounded cases those in which the accuser declines to go forward with prosecution."
http://www.scribd.com/doc/166976050/Out-of-1842-Rape-Reports-in-7-Counties-439-Were-False-Reports-in-1992
Out of 1842 Rape Reports in 7 Counties 439 Were False Reports in 1992 by diligentpurpose
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