157
40% of teenage boys believe women lie about domestic and sexual violence: new research
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
157 points (85.5% liked)
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I need to know, how that question was phrased, otherwise that 40% number is completly meaningless. The two extremes would be "Do you think a woman has ever lied about domestic and sexual violence?", or "Do you think all reports by a woman of domestic and sexual violence are a lie?". In the first case a significant share would answer yes, because a single false claim ever makes that statement correct. The opposite is true for the second phrasing, where a single correct claim makes that statement false. The real phrasing is probably somewhere in between, but even then you could heavily influence the outcome with subtle changes to the phrasing.
The answer is obvious!
~~If you ask someone who answers "yes" to "do you think all women lie about domestic and sexual violence?" the question "has anyone ever reported you for sexual violence?" Will inevitably be "yes" also!~~
It was supposed to be a joke. Dont @ me
That's not the question that was asked. You snuck an "all" in there to make it sound more ridiculous and uncreditable.
The question as phrased in the article simply says "do you think women lie about dv/sa." It's vague and open to interpretation, which is why it's bad research methodology. But it's more likely to be interpreted as "do you think any woman lies/has lied about dv/sa," and because absolute statements are easily negated, the obvious answer to that question is yes. Otherwise you would have to claim "No woman ever lies or has ever lied about dv/sa," and that's patently false.
But you can go ahead and accuse everyone who questions the research methodology of a poorly-written survey of having committed sexual violence. That only provides an example proving that "Yes, some women lie about it."
Alright, I've evidently written my comment with poor phrasing.
It was supposed to be a joke at the expense of guys who think "all women are liars" being the guys who are the type to commit sexual assault in the first place.
I don't think any guys say "all women are liars." That's certainly not the claim in this article, although it's presented as if to indicate that misleadingly.
I've met misogynists who will make explicit claims like "all women are liars"
In any case, I know it wasn't the claim of the article, it was supposed to be a joke (also at the expense of the ambiguity of the title)
Okay, well those people are uncouth, uneducated troglodytes deserving of ridicule and scorn.
But we shouldn't conflate making an absolute claim such as "all women are liars" with making a particular claim such as "that particular woman is lying, because I didn't do the thing she is accusing me of."
Too often people treat any claim to innocence by an accused man as some misogynistic attack on all womankind. If a guy is innocent and gets accused of something, it's not misogynist to say "No, that's not true. I didn't do that."
The converse is also true about making absolute claims such as "No woman is a liar." It's simply divorced from reality, and all that it would take to disprove it is one example of a woman who lied. Emmett Till's accuser lied, did she not? That's just one famous example, but studies have shown that upwards of 5% of reported, official cases turn out to be demonstrably false accusations. That's 1 in 20, just of cases that make it to court.
The lesson is to avoid making absolute statements. It's not about "all women lie" or "no women lie," because both are false statements. It's about assessing the credibility of accusations on a particular, case-by-case basis. But people don't like when the answer is "it depends" or "it's complicated." They want some blanket solution which will always apply in every case, but that's just not how reality works.