The thing is, though, that whilst false reports do happen – and I’m in no way trying to downplay the tragedy and horrific consequences for victims of that, such as in the case of this thread’s OP – that’s far rarer than the much more common case of women being ignored, put off, and scoffed at when they try to report actual sex crimes.

I was groomed as a child and nobody would listen to me. Then I was kidnapped and raped for months – when I finally escaped and found the police, I was sent to a juvenile detention centre for being delinquent. Finally, after much therapy as an adult, I again tried to report my crime, and the first officer basically said I was wasting their time, and implied it was my fault.(e: I do have an open case now with a sergeant who takes me seriously, but that took some climbing of the hierarchy to find.)

This is extremely common, and part of why many, many women don’t even bother to report these crimes.

The ‘believe women’ thing is because of this, and reacting to such stories with ‘well actually I knew a woman who made up charges’, whilst true and horrible, feeds those who want to believe women are likely to make this shit up when it’s so common that 1 in 6 women will experience assault, and many are afraid to report it. That can be generalised, because it’s shockingly common.

e: people make up and falsely report all sorts of crimes – burglary is a big one. Lots of people make up burglaries when they’re in dire straits and realise they can get more for insurance than selling their things. Or arson. But when someone reports a burglary or arson, you don’t see others jumping in to say ‘well actually, my ex said I burgled her for insurance purposes.’ That absolutely happens, but it’s uncommon and irrelevant to burglary victims’ crimes. We all can see that has nothing at all to do with real burglaries. That’s a whole different crime.

Sorry, /rant, but this is personal to me.

e2: I was on a fast track for uni at a very young age, and this derailed my entire life. It wasn’t a brief but terrible thing; it ruined my whole future before I was 15. So I’m sorry for having a bit less empathy about this. Instead, my trajectory was bowling alley janitor to ‘accountant’, to short-order cook, to telemarketer, to delivery driver, to cook, to restaurant manager, to erotic dancer (no sex), to residential property manager, to cashier (retail), to assistant manager, to manager, to designer (I’d been learning design and development in my free time in the mid 90s), to teacher (of programming to state workers), to programmer, to dba, to project manager – then back to designer so I could really learn and do it. That was my last job, and it was a stupid amount of work to get there with only 9 years' education, since my normal life completely stopped at the kidnapping.