Stats on men who are falsely accused?

December 24, 2010 10:24 AM

Are there any statistics regarding the number of men who work in childcare and are falsely accused of abusing the children in their care?

For bonus credit: statistics on how the fear of being falsely accused is affecting the number of men working in child care.

posted by Jairus to Grab Bag (5 answers total)

This link refers to a page where you'll find a research citation estimating a 77% false accusation rate. Wouldn't have guessed that high myself, but I have certainly seen it before.

Seems to be especially high in divorce/custody proceedings.

The prevalence of false accusations is a matter of debate. Disagreement over the proper ratio of false abuse statistics may range anywhere from 20% to 80%.It can be extremely difficult to correctly track the ration of true to false accusations because of the problem in identifying the intent of the accuser. In some instances a mother genuinely believes abuse has occurred. In other instances the mother may not be sure and simply doesn’t know what to do other than to file an allegation of abuse. However, when one considers all factors, including the number of retracted allegations, recantations and the preponderance of cases proven to be dishonest, a fair estimate settled upon by many studies is an average of 77% (Brennan & Brennan, 1994).
posted by GnomeChompsky at 3:59 PM on December 24, 2010

That Dean Tong book is hardly a reliable research source, any more than the Brennan and Brennan book is. Both are self-published, and neither Tong nor the Brennans are social scientists.

There probably aren't solid statistics. Childcare is a very low-paying field with a lot of employee turnover; it seems like it would be hard to do a really meaningful longitudinal study given that.
posted by Sidhedevil at 4:47 PM on December 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I did find this, which says that the Department for Children, Schools and Families in the UK carried out a review of allegations against staff working with children, 2.8% of the allegations were judged to be malicious, and 13.4% were judged to be unfounded. It's a gender-blind stat, though.
posted by Jairus at 12:30 AM on December 25, 2010

Best answer: A new study says male elementary teachers live in a steady state of anxiety, with 13 per cent reporting they had been wrongly accused of inappropriate contact with students.
posted by Jairus at 12:59 AM on December 25, 2010

If I understand the question correctly, it's not "what percentage of accusations are false", but "what percentage of men who work in child care have been falsely accused".
posted by endless_forms at 9:24 AM on December 25, 2010