Men can't be brought to trial on someone's word. There is a requirement for the prosecution to have a prima facie case satisfied, i.e. they have to show that there is a minimum threshold of potential liability before the court will even hear the case.
Furthermore, because of the way sexual assault laws and trials are constructed, the trial itself is HEAVILY anti-complainant, pro-defendant, beyond even the normal criminal-trial bias toward the defendant's innocence beyond reasonable doubt. This means that the only time a prosecutor will take a rape case to trial is when they're almost certain that they will get a conviction.
I may have misspoken, I can't find anything directly saying that it could be brought to trial based on hearsay, but it is definitely possible for a man to be arrested without any corroborating evidence from the accuser. This might give more info:
http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/2010/07/if-presumptively-innocent-are-given.html said:
That wasn't enough, they said. So we enacted Fed.R.Evid. 413 and many states adopted similar laws. Unlike any other criminal charge, including murder, assault, even planning the World Trade Center attacks, a rape trial in federal court and in various states allows evidence of the defendant's commission of prior offenses (specifically, his prior offenses of sexual assault) to show that he has a propensity for committing the crime at issue. This rule, which is unique in all of American jurisprudence and widely condemned by legal scholars, allows the jury to hear about the defendant's prior acts whether or not the defendant takes the stand. Even accusations of prior sexual offenses that occurred years before -- and even crimes for which the defendant was acquitted -- are admissible if the alleged act is proven by just a preponderance of the evidence (far lower than beyond a reasonable doubt). This is sometimes all a jury needs to convict the man or boy of the crime at issue.
Because of rape shield laws, the victims anonymity is protected, but not the anonymity of the accused...meaning that the accused party never even has to face their accuser.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape said:
FBI statistics for the annual rate of false reporting of forcible assault across the country have been a consistent 8%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape#cite_note-0 A study from the UK found that of the approximately 14,500 cases of rape reported in 2005/2006 9% were classified as false allegations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape#cite_note-1
Nearly 10% of rape accusations are found to be false...obviously people like to jump the gun when charging people. Rape is a devastating charge, and even a mere accusation can ruin a man's reputation and career. That's why prosecutors are more likely to go after them: they provide free scapegoats for the media, the accused are more likely to settle and keep numbers where they want them. There are actually cases of British lawmakers making stricter laws in the late 90s because rape allegations were at an all-time low.
You're also wrong about the admissibility of evidence; tendency evidence is almost NEVER admissible against the defendant, but it IS against the complainant. The example you give isn't even anecdotal evidence like you're referring to. A better example is "She has had lots of sexual partners" or "She often wears low-cut tops."; those sorts of evidence have been excluded from use against the complainant by recent amendments because they don't actually prove or disprove the case, they just create prejudice.
The unfortunate part about not being able to use "she's a slut!" as evidence is that you also can't use "she explicitly told me that she wanted to do this!" as evidence. Because of the elimination of
mens rea, a woman can change her mind at literally any time before or after the fact about consenting to sex, whether or not the sex was intended to be consensual from the beginning.
I don't know where you get the domestic violence figures from, but the stuff that I've read during my law degree pegs it more like 90+% towards women, not 60-40. Furthermore, your statistics on sexual assault being faked are also incorrect; rape is actually one of the LEAST falsely-accused charges; it has roughly the same rate of false accusation (upper estimates of about 5%) as most other crimes, except that rape is statistically the most underreported crime so the number of actual rapes is higher, bringing the ratio of false accusations to rapes down.
I've never seen anything say >90% of DV victims are female, even from horribly biased sources.
Here are some sources that back up my claim of a 60-40ish spread, and that's not counting cases where violence was reciprocal.
And I have a problem with people saying that "rape (or anything) is the most underreported crime". How could you possibly know that, and how could you possibly quantify that with the varying definitions of rape? People saying things like that without supporting them are what creates the anti-male attitude that the author in the OP was advocating against.
I don't mind this little side-tangent, but I'm personally more interested in what other people think is misogynist about the article in the OP considering the initial reaction to this thread.