I'm speechless, just saw this on Facebook...

[seabeyond]

62. British Home Office study (2005)

British Home Office study (2005)
A 2005 study, "A gap or a chasm? Attrition in reported rape cases" was the largest and most rigorous study to date commissioned by the British Home Office on UK rape crime, from the initial reporting of a rape through to legal prosecutions. The study was based on 2,643 sexual assault cases (Kelly, Lovett, and Regan, 2005). Of these, police departments classified 8% as false reports.[11]
The researchers noted that some of these classifications were based simply on the personal judgments of the police investigators and were made in violation of official criteria for establishing a false allegation. Closer analysis of this category applying the Home Office counting rules for establishing a false allegation and excluding cases where the application of the cases where confirmation of the designation was uncertain reduced the percentage of false reports to 3%. The researchers concluded that "one cannot take all police designations at face value" and that "[t]here is an over-estimation of the scale of false allegations by both police officers and prosecutors." Moreover, they added:

The interviews with police officers and complainants’ responses show that despite the focus on victim care, a culture of suspicion remains within the police, even amongst some of those who are specialists in rape investigations. There is also a tendency to conflate false allegations with retractions and withdrawals, as if in all such cases no sexual assault occurred. This reproduces an investigative culture in which elements that might permit a designation of a false complaint are emphasised (later sections reveal how this also feeds into withdrawals and designation of ‘insufficient evidence’), at the expense of a careful investigation, in which the evidence collected is evaluated.[11][12][13]

FBI statistics
FBI reports from 1996 consistently put the number of "unfounded" rape accusations around 8%. In contrast, the average rate of unfounded reports for "Index crimes" tracked by the FBI is 2%.[14]
However, "unfounded" is not synonymous with false allegation. Bruce Gross of the Forensic Examiner says that:

This statistic is almost meaningless, as many of the jurisdictions from which the FBI collects data on crime use different definitions of, or criteria for, "unfounded." That is, a report of rape might be classified as unfounded (rather than as forcible rape) if the alleged victim did not try to fight off the suspect, if the alleged perpetrator did not use physical force or a weapon of some sort, if the alleged victim did not sustain any physical injuries, or if the alleged victim and the accused had a prior sexual relationship. Similarly, a report might be deemed unfounded if there is no physical evidence or too many inconsistencies between the accuser's statement and what evidence does exist. As such, although some unfounded cases of rape may be false or fabricated, not all unfounded cases are false.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape