3 Commitments for Leading Your Church to Address Sexual Abuse

….is with the notion that false accusations are rare. Where this comes from is a series of studies indicating what percentage of the time an accusation results in a conviction, vs. what portion of the time investigators are willing to bet something between an egg salad sandwich and their mortgage or career that the allegations are false. About 3% result in a conviction (2% with jail time), and about 2-10%, the police are willing to make that bet, really pretty much on a fairly low standard akin to preponderance of evidence.

The remaining 88%-95% of cases are cases where a good basic investigation is not conducted (a Star-Tribune investigation from a few years back indicated about 80% of cases in MN were this way), where investigators didn’t know what to do with allegations (cold trail of evidence/insufficient to go to grand jury), and more.

So my best estimate is that if a good basic investigation were done at least 2/3 of the time, you’d increase the numbers for both convictions and false accusations. Who knows by how much, but again, if we’re not doing a good basic investigation 80% of the time, we really don’t know much about the truth of these accusations.

What I can say is that if you want false accusations to be low, and if you want conviction rates for the guilty to be high, the best thing to do is to take the matter seriously and take what you have to authorities who have a pretty good “nonsense detector” by experience and training, who can collect and analyze circumstantial/physical evidence, who have immense resources for investigation, whose procedures protect the rights of both accused and accuser, and….finally…who get a share of the blame if matters are prematurely dropped.

We might say that there is really only one rule of thumb about sexual abuse and sexual assault; that it is a deadly serious, generally criminal matter with lifelong impacts on both victims and perpetrators. Treat it as such.