The Unimaginable Can Happen To You Poem by James McLain

The following list is entirely of my own making, suffice it to say that others have at times made similar efforts to both explain false rape allegations and to categorise accusers. Some false accusers may fall into more than one category; if the reader wants to classify any of them, there are plenty of types from which to choose!

A couple of things I should add with regard to modern cases. An astounding number of these false allegations are shown to be false by dint of late Twentieth and now Twenty-First Century technology. Although television has been around since the 1920s, cameras sometime before that, and surveillance since ancient times, it is only within my lifetime and then only really the second half of it that CCTV has been both relatively cheap and practical. DNA profiling is an even more recent development; the first DNA exoneration in the United States, that of Gary Dotson, dates to only 1989.

Then there are the police, although at times their behaviour can be reprehensible - as I know all too well from my own personal experience - at other times they go the extra mile. One of the appellations by which they are known is The Filth. This is actually part insult, part compliment, because if they did not have nasty, dirty, suspicious, filthy minds, many of the false accusers on this list would never have been brought to book due to the lengths some of them will go, which at times beggar belief. In some cases the police search for extra evidence to bolster the prosecution case, and what they find astounds even hardened and cynical detectives, as with Rhiannon Brooker. At other times no doubt they have a gut instinct that the damsel concerned is playing them. As you work your way through especially the modern cases, ask yourself how many of the victims of these false allegations would still be in prison today were it not for CCTV, DNA, and police officers with filthy minds. Ask yourself too how many totally innocent men in the past have spent years, perhaps decades in prison, or have even been executed, because modern investigative techniques were not available to the detectives of the day.