Newsbeat rape coverage

Following this http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/21016808#TWEET659531 seemingly awful and biased mis-reporting of rape figures I made a formal complaint to newsbeat. This is their response -

Dear Ms Clarke

Thank you for contacting us regarding ‘Newsbeat’.

We understand you had concerns about a news article which related to a recent CPS report on the number of false rape claims made in proportion to legitimate claims prosecuted.

We passed your concerns to Rod McKenzie, Editor, Newsbeat who has responded with the following:

“This was a story commissioned to specifically examine what it was like to be falsely accused of rape. To help contextualise the story we reported on a 17 month study carried out by the Crown Prosecution Service which set out to establish how common such false rape allegations were. In the past we have published many stories highlighting the issues surrounding rape and domestic violence, specifically targeted at our core audience of 15 to 24 year olds. Please find links for two such stories below:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/17230648

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/17238674

On this occasion we chose to look at those young people – usually men – who are occasionally wrongly accused. We know from our audience research that among this group concern over this issue is commonplace – we sought to contextualise this anxiety. I do not agree we misrepresented the study, or published an article that might somehow put people off reporting such serious crimes. However, having considered feedback I agree we were not clear enough in our wording. For clarity we have replaced a word in the second sentence from ‘common’ to ‘unusual’.

In the fourth line of our story we quote the Director of Public Prosecutions Kier Starmer who says false rape allegations are ‘serious but rare’. In the accompanying video he makes the same statement within the first fifty seconds. Whilst our story hears from a young man who says he was wrongly accused, we ensure that rape victims are given a voice by running quotes from Dianne Whitfield from Rape Crisis. We also feature a video which contains a Nottinghamshire Police spokeswoman who says their starting point is always to believe allegations of serious sexual assault. She goes on to explain how thoroughly they investigate both sides of any allegation. Far from downplaying the seriousness of rape we finish our article by publishing the phone numbers of advice lines for people who believe they may have been the victim of rape or domestic violence.

On the day this story was broadcast we received a big response from our young audience, and we openly invited feedback on this challenging topic. Whilst some people did say our reporting of false accusations was damaging to real rape victims, on our Social Networking sites false accusations were described as “disgusting”, and one young man told us that he felt the bigger problem was that these claims make life harder for real rape victims to be taken seriously. On Twitter another young male listener told us "Allegations of rape not only waste police time but wreck the lives of those accused! And another wrote... "My 23 year old nephew was recently accused of rape. He then killed himself. The girl did it again to another guy."

Our view is that all aspects of this story merit coverage and debate and we will continue to do so."

Thank you again for taking the trouble to get in touch with us.

Kind Regards
BBC Complaints
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints
Not impressed quite frankly...