DISCREDITED SEX ASSAULT RESEARCH INFECTS U.S. LEGAL SYSTEM

By Linda LeFauve & Stuart Taylor Jr.
March 05, 2018

When a toxin enters a biological ecosystem, its effect is magnified as it moves up the food chain. Even if it can be cut off at the source, the ever-widening distribution of its increasingly harmful form can cause problems for decades.

Misinformation functions in a similar fashion, gaining traction as it’s repeated by increasingly high-profile individuals who venture ever further from the source material. In this manner, distortion about the facts of sexual assault has affected the training of judges, prosecutors, and other law enforcement officials. It is how misleading assertions become embedded in criminal and military law.

This is a story of how a theory without merit, derived from highly questionable statistics, imperils the most basic tenets of due process and risks turning every unproved accusation into a verdict of guilt.

The example discussed here began with a small study by an associate professor at a commuter college in Massachusetts. The 12-page paper describing the study barely created a stir when it was published in 2002. Within a few years, however, the paper’s principal author, David Lisak, a University of Massachusetts-Boston psychologist, began making dramatic statements that extrapolated far beyond the study’s conclusions. He created, virtually out of whole cloth, a theory that “undetected” serial rapists are responsible for 90 percent of assaults on college campuses, that they premeditate and plan their attacks, and that they are likely to have committed multiple acts of violence.

When speaking on campuses, to the military, and to law enforcement, Lisak started showing a highly disturbing video that he claimed was based on the transcript of an actual interview with a campus rapist to whom Lisak gave the name "Frank." The authenticity of the video has been seriously questioned, raising grave doubts about Lisak’s contention that it illustrates the typical campus perpetrator—in his view, an unrepentant sociopath who cannot be reached or educated.

A news search for mentions of Lisak finds only a single one prior to 2009, in which he revealingly opined in an urban policy magazine about the Duke lacrosse rape hoax. He was interviewed again by CBS News in November 2009 about non-stranger rapes. He increasingly became the draw at conferences on sexual assault and his calendar filled with campus presentations. The media began to fawn over him, whether due to the drama of the notion of campuses being stalked by serial rapists or to the failure of campus administrators, blinded by the appeal of an identifiable villain, to point out the disconnect between Lisak's portrait and their own observations. (A sociopath responsible for the majority of assaults can be removed from campus. The reality of college drinking and the still-developing adolescent brain, and the relationship of both to behavior fueled by poor judgment and peer pressure, provide no such easy fix.) By the end of 2010, Lisak’s status was on the rise. Within a few years, his was arguably the most high-profile name on the topic of sexual assault.

Lisak’s serial-rapist theory was reflected in the 2011 letter in which the Department of Education ordered universities to adopt specified, guilt-presuming disciplinary procedures for alleged sexual assaults and, in the process, gave credence to the probability of repeat offenders. Lisak's theory also found its way into a January 2017 report by the White House Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault, which simultaneously criticized a more recent, nationally representative study that had been subject to far more rigorous statistical analysis. Lisak was quoted so often as to make him a central figure in the pseudo-documentary "The Hunting Ground." As his celebrity grew, the gap between documented facts and his status as an expert became almost inconsequential.

Criticism did eventually catch up to David Lisak. His serial predator model of campus rape has been compellingly debunked by scholarly researchers and well-regarded publications, including investigative articles and a book. His claims regarding the psychology of campus perpetrators were revealed to be based on nonexistent interviews. A key component of his presentations, an “unedited transcript” of an interview with a college rapist presented as timely and typical was revealed to be not only highly edited but based on an interview from three decades ago with a subject who was clearly an atypical outlier -- as documented by Lisak’s own publications.

A 2008 paper, in which he linked “undetected serial rapists” with a propensity to commit serial and “crossover” acts of violence such as interpersonal attacks unrelated to sex, was shown to have provided no basis for such a generalization. His assertions, allegedly supported by a study he co-authored in 2010, that false accusations of sexual assault are exceedingly rare, have been shown to violate basic math by counting as true cases that didn’t qualify as sexual assault, had insufficient evidence to make a determination, or were referred for prosecution but about which the outcome was unknown.

As for Lisak's vague statements about having interviewed "hundreds" of serial rapists (occasionally styled as “thousands” when others talk about him), in truth no evidence exists that Lisak has interviewed any “undetected rapists,” serial or otherwise, since his dissertation research 30 years ago.

His claimed years of research turned out to be a handful of actual research publications, reviews full of editorializing about others’ research, rehashing of the dissertation he completed in 1989, and a website that deceptively merges that dissertation’s 1980s-era research on 12 college students with unrelated data from the 2002 paper on repeat offenders.

Yet all of these devastating exposés have barely dented Lisak's popularity. In spite of his own warning in that 2002 paper that the “non-random nature of the sampling procedures” precludes interpreting the data “as estimates of the prevalence of sexual and other acts of violence," he has built a career doing exactly that. His original research—the ostensible basis of his expertise—fits on a single page of his curriculum vitae. In spite of this limited output, he continues to be a featured speaker and forensic witness based in large part on the very distortions that have been so convincingly exposed.

Were the damage wrought by David Lisak's popularity confined to his college-circuit road show, there might be some hope that his toxic influence would be worn down by the critical thinking ostensibly prized by the academy.

Instead, that has not happened. The list of invited presentations, workshops, and media appearances in which he has hawked his unsubstantiated theories runs an additional 40 pages on his curriculum vitae. Among the most worrisome aspects of Lisak’s presentations and workshops is how they appear to be gaining influence among professionals close to the investigation and adjudication of sexual assault. His debunked serial predator theory and wildly extrapolated statistics on the false-accusation rate form the core of the training materials he has developed—and in some cases sold to law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and the military.

Whenever Lisak presents his serial predator theory—invariably accompanied by his claims about the low rate of false accusations of rape--his toxic influence spreads. A small sampling shows its range:

S. Air Force. Special training for the Office of Special Investigations: The Behavior and Characteristics of Non-stranger Rapists: Implications for Investigation and Prosecution.
Joint U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Mobile Training Team conference, Naval Air Station Jacksonville. The Undetected Rapist.
Delaware Judicial Education Retreat. Sex Offenders: Myths and Realities.
S. Marine Corps. Special training for JAG officers: How Predators Pick Their Prey.
California Administrative Office of the Courts. Handling Sexual Assault Cases: Sex Offender Characteristics and Evaluating Evaluations.
Wisconsin Office of Justice Assistance Statewide Sexual Assault Response Team Conference. False Reports of Rape: What Do the Numbers Tell Us?
Special Law Enforcement Training, State University of New York. The Behavior and Characteristics of Non-stranger Rapists.
Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan Sexual Assault Summit. Rapists: Myths and Realities.
Again, were the damage limited to misinforming attendees, it might not be so large as to warrant concern about the damage wrought by Lisak’s influence. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, either. For example:

A project funded by the U.S. Department of Justice compiled a list of 25 “facts” that judges who attended seminars offered by the National Judicial Education Program—a company for which Lisak has served as a faculty member and that continues to sell materials he created—said they wished they’d known before presiding over sexual assault cases involving adult victims. Although the fact list includes some reasonable and factual assertions, it also includes Lisak’s unfounded claims about serial predators and false reports. As part of its curriculum, NJEP advises judges to use voir dire to gauge prospective jurors' familiarity with these “facts.”
Especially frightening was one judge’s conclusion that “when evaluating sex offender risk, actuarial assessments are more accurate than clinical assessments.” That is, a psychologist’s judgment of the danger the defendant represents should take a back seat to the statistical likelihood, based on Lisak’s “research,” that the defendant has committed other acts of “undetected” violence.
Lisak’s misinformation has been passed on to law students, practicing attorneys, and judges through a number of influential sources, including Cornell's Law School, the Judicial Education Center, the Florida Court System, the National Center for State Courts, and the American Bar Association. In every case, the benefit is to the prosecution.
Even the National Academy of Sciences has used Lisak’s unsupported serial rapist theory to weigh in on “police mishandling” of rape accusations that “has allowed serial rapists like those in Lisak and Miller’s research to perpetrate again and again without detection.”
A 2016 amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court of Ohio made a similar charge but upped the ante by invoking Lisak’s (equally unsupported) claim that these serial offenders had a propensity for other violence as well.
Most troubling of all, Lisak’s material is being codified in law enforcement policies, legal precedents, and judicial guidelines at the local, state, and federal levels.

The Sexual Offense Bench Guide for judges in the state of Washington, for example, draws liberally from Lisak’s 2008 publication “Understanding the Predatory Nature of Sexual Violence.” His claims have been similarly incorporated into New Mexico's Sexual Assault Bench Book, the Tribal Court Judges Bench Book on sexual assault, the Missoula County Attorney's Office Policy and Procedure Manual, the Pennsylvania Crimes of Sexual Violence Benchbook, New York State's Judicial Symposium, Wisconsin's Prosecutor's Sexual Assault Reference Book, and the Judge Advocate General Corps Criminal Law Desk Book.

The relationship between prosecutors, judges and the juries who will ultimately arrive at verdicts in criminal trials is further tainted by recommendations that prosecutors and judges incorporate into the jury selection process: namely, Lisak's claim that false accusations are rare and his unsupported theory about serial offenses.

continued

National policy, effected through a pop culture movement of throwing away due process, isn't unheard of.
The Asset Forfeiture crap was sold to us by a rabid media,,,
The lack of due process and the
Accusations equal guilt
Attitudes need to go.