October 15, 1975: The first edition of Susan Brownmiller’s hysterical Against Our Will... is published.
This toxic book (which I read in the early 1980s) is often said to be the source for the spurious claim that only 2% of rape allegations are false. For another 2% claim, see entry for Lipstick at April 2, 1976, (below). It is also said to see the first appearance in print of the phrase “date rape”.
This file contains the relevant quote and citation, pages 366, 444-5 from the UK Edition, which was published by Secker & Warburg, in December 1975 according to ...Books In Print.
For a critique of the above statistic, see the April 2000 article by Edward Greer.
Still on the subject of the 2%, the article below was published in Pipe Dream, December 4, 1973, page 7. This is the student newspaper of Binghamton University, New York. (Yes, Binghamton without a P. While researching this entry in August 2020, I found an article on the University website to the effect that it was to change its name to Binghampton University. The date of that article is April 1, 2018).
Humour and human error aside, I found the article below in 2020 while researching the on-line NYS Historic Newspapers archive. As the reader will see, it says Lieutenant Julia E. Tucker of a specialist rape squad in New York City is said to have claimed only about 2% of rape allegations were unfounded.
I do not dispute the accuracy of the quote, only the veracity of the statistic. It is far from unlikely that this is the same source cited by Brownmiller, eg one police officer tells another who tells another...
Frankly, this claim is bunk, and in the decades since it was made, the number of false allegations of rape and every other crime have risen dramatically. This is one of the downsides of virtually everyone on the planet having both a voice and a social media account to echo it.
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