From the link;
As Stephen House, Chief Constable of Police Scotland explains: “From a police perspective there is nothing to suggest either anecdotally or evidentially, that false reporting of rape is prevalent, in fact such cases are very rare. We recognise that there are many reasons why a victim would subsequently withdraw from the criminal justice process and we are trying to get a better understanding of why that is and what we can do to improve confidence in the system. What we do know however is that of those rape cases that we later reclassify as no crime, only a very small proportion of those are as a result of a false report, so few in fact that ordinarily the statistics would merit no further debate”.
The perception that large numbers of allegations of rape are false is very damaging to women, and to survivors of rape in particular. It reinforces prejudicial attitudes to complainers – for whom the barriers to justice are already considerable, with women already scrutinized and judged on many irrelevant factors (dress, flirting, alcohol consumption etc) – even when an allegation is taken seriously. It is the evidence, not the complainer, which must be tested and examined. But popular myths that women cannot be trusted perpetuate a relentless focus on their motives, sexual history, demeanour, credibility and behaviour, leaving perpetrators able to remain unchallenged by comparison, in relative obscurity. In some cases, this has allowed serial offenders (as in the cases of John Worboys and Kirk Reid) to act with total impunity and continue attacking women, sometimes for many years, as a result of doubt being cast on the words of their victims.
The principle that an accused man is innocent until proven guilty should not mean that women should be presumed in many cases to be liars. The low level of reporting among rape victims is already to a large degree attributable to a fear among many that they will not be believed – and a grossly exaggerated perception of the extent to which false allegations of rape occur only makes this worse, exacerbating the fear many women considering reporting experience, that they will not be believed if they do. Conversely, there is no evidence that large numbers of men are being falsely accused of rape.