A distinction needs to be made of false criminal reports, and false claims in general.
False claims of any crime are going to be substantially higher than false criminal reports of the same crime. The barrier to entry is just much lower. And there is still a social cost to being falsely accused of a crime even without a police report. (Loss of employment, social alienation).
It's also probably not true that it happens at the same rate as other reports. Certain crimes are more plausible to lie about than others, I would imagine false homicide claims are rare since there aren't mountains of dead people to pin on someone.
In the case of things like sexual assault and child abuse, there is lots of positive sympathy to exploit for something that is almost impossible to prove wrong, so the cost-benefit is much better than most other accusations of crime.
(Notice how often child molestation comes up in criminal defenses? It's an easy way to milk sympathy, while being impossible to disprove.)
A distinction needs to be made of false criminal reports, and false claims in general.
False claims of any crime are going to be substantially higher than false criminal reports of the same crime. The barrier to entry is just much lower. And there is still a social cost to being falsely accused of a crime even without a police report. (Loss of employment, social alienation).
It's also probably not true that it happens at the same rate as other reports. Certain crimes are more plausible to lie about than others, I would imagine false homicide claims are rare since there aren't mountains of dead people to pin on someone.
In the case of things like sexual assault and child abuse, there is lots of positive sympathy to exploit for something that is almost impossible to prove wrong, so the cost-benefit is much better than most other accusations of crime.
(Notice how often child molestation comes up in criminal defenses? It's an easy way to milk sympathy, while being impossible to disprove.)