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	Study Says 9% of Rape Claims 'False' By John Burke Sunday Business Post October 23, 2011 http://www.sbpost.ie/news/ireland/study-says-9-of-rape-claims-false-59216.html Some 9 per cent of all rape allegations made to the gardai are false, according to research conducted for the state prosecutor's office. However, Director of Public Prosecutions James Hamilton said that, despite the research, his own experience of dealing with rape cases did not bear the findings out. "One of our studies suggested that it was as high as 9 per cent, but in my experience, it wouldn't be anywhere near that high," Hamilton told The Sunday Business Post. Hamilton, who retires next month after 12 years as the DPP, defended the handling by his office of rape complaints, including cases of historical clerical abuse. "One of the interesting statistics is that our overall conviction rate, comparing the number of convictions with the number of complaints made, is pretty well the same as in theUK,"Hamilton said. "In the UK, they actually charge a lot more [people], but there's a lower conviction rate. We charge fewer people than in the UK [as a percentage of alleged rapes based on reports to police], but the overall conviction rate is pretty much the same,which leads me to think that, if we charged more people, wewouldjust get a lotmore failed cases. "I don't think, at the end of the day, the alleged victims in these cases would thank you for taking these cases and failing." He declined to comment on specific criminal cases or on a statement in the recent report by JudgeYvonneMurphy into the handling of abuse claims in the Catholic diocese of Cloyne, in which some alleged victims of clerical abuse said they were "disappointed" that no prosecutions had been brought by theDPP. However, he said that,while commissions of inquiry were "useful" for giving a general statement on what may have happened, the DPP had to rely on a much higher burden of proof. Hamilton also said that one of the problems in taking historical cases to court was the poor memory of witnesses, incorporating the question of whether the alleged victims's recollections had become "contaminated" by group therapy or from having heard of complaintsmade by others. He said he had encountered cases where teachers or clerics were accused of abusing pupils at institutions or at schools, only to discover, on closer examination, that the accused did not work there at the time of the alleged abuse. Citing the Hanly Report into the treatment of rape claims in the Irish criminal justice sector, Hamilton said that the research gave a detailed insight into the realities which prosecutors had to deal with when faced with many rape complaints. That report, conducted by NUI Galway's Conor Hanly on behalf of the Rape Crisis Network of Ireland (RCNI), found that just one in three rape cases reported to gardaý' were prosecuted by the DPP's office. "One of the things which emerges clearly from that is that the vast majority of rape cases are acquaintance rape, not stranger rape," Hamilton said. He said consent was often the issue, and that there was a major problem establishing whether consent had been given, due to the influence of alcohol.
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