77% of allegations of rape made to the police are false. ...in the Family Courts in England and Wales most of such allegations are false
By MRA-UK: In my book, The Empathy Gap, section 19.6, I discuss false allegations of rape and the difficulty of obtaining a secure estimate of the rate of false allegations due to the extremely wide spread of reported data. However, I also show in that section, using only data from National Statistics, that 77% of allegations of rape made to the police appear to be false. This brief note addresses a different question: the rate of false allegations of domestic abuse made in the context of Private Law Children Act cases in the Family Courts in England and Wales. My conclusion is grossly in conflict with the claims made in the June 2020 Family Justice Review that only a very small proportion of such allegations are false. I show here that this claim by the Family Justice Review is unsupported by the review itself, despite appearances to the contrary.
Indeed there appears to be no evidence at all to support the contention that the rate of false allegations in the family courts is small. In contrast two simple and independent arguments presented below, and based on National Statistics alone, indicate that most of such allegations are false.
1. The Prevalence of Allegations in the Family Courts
The best data for the percentage of private family law cases involving allegations of domestic abuse was provided by the Ministry of Justice research team as a private communication to FNF-BPM Cymru together with HMCTS (HM Courts & Tribunals Service), and is shown in Table 1 below.