Kerre Woodham: Women who make false rape complaints let the team down

I hope they throw the book at the 23-year-old woman who's been charged after making a false rape complaint against a Wellington taxi driver.

Women like this half-baked tart really let down the team. It is a dreadful accusation to make against someone and to make a false complaint casts suspicion on all genuine victims of sexual violence.

Detectives spend thousands of precious hours every year investigating stories of rape that turn out to be false complaints made by women whose motivations are varied. In some cases, they are troubled souls. Others are duplicitous slappers who can't deal with the fallout from their own behaviour. But perhaps the most contemptible are those vindictive cows wanting revenge on a boyfriend or ex-partner.

And there are those who are doing it for the cash. Since the Government's decision three years ago to allow lump-sum ACC payments, annual payouts to sex-abuse claimants have soared by more than $9 million.

Surprisingly some policemen don't want to see the penalties for making false complaints toughened up. One former detective sergeant I spoke to said he'd rather waste his time with 10 false complainants if it meant one genuine victim felt able to come forward. He was concerned that if penalties for false complaints were made stronger, women might fear being charged if their case could not be proved and would be reluctant to lay charges.

Which is an admirable sentiment. But surely it's up to the police to ensure that the case they have against the rapist is a strong one before they go to court.

And what about the lives ruined by these false complaints? Remember the young Waikato law student who was charged with rape, and was cleared only after his parents conducted an exhaustive and expensive investigation to show that there was no way he should ever have been charged with the crime?

From memory, he wasn't even in the city at the time of the alleged attack. Charges were dropped but not before he'd been named and shamed at the university and his parents had spent thousands of dollars. As for the woman, she was never named and fled the country, leaving others to clean up the wreckage from her vicious lie.

The courts have done a great job in sending a clear message to offenders that rape is one of the most serious crimes you can commit in this country. The average jail term dished out for rape has gone up considerably over the past few years. So now it's up to women to take responsibility for their own actions.

If you slept with a man because you were drunk, deal with it. You may not be able to believe that you could behave so badly, but ask yourself, was it really rape?

Did you really feel coerced, and bullied, and pressured into doing something you didn't want to do, or were you both so trolleyed that it seemed like a good idea to have sex with a stranger?

It might be hard facing up to the fact that you've made a dreadful mistake but a little bit of painful self analysis is a whole lot better than compounding the error by laying a charge of rape.

Not all men are rapists. And not all women are victims.