Men are more likely to be sexually assaulted than to be falsely accused of harming someone else.

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There’s a conversation that comes up a lot when we talk about sexual violence. Usually it’s framed as a kind of protection — but what about men who get falsely accused? It gets raised in comment sections. In classrooms. In one-on-one conversations with men who seem genuinely scared.

Yes, false accusations do happen, and when they do, they cause serious harm. I'm not here to minimize that. But the fear of false accusation has become so culturally dominant — so loud, so often invoked — that it is actively drowning out a much more statistically urgent conversation about men's safety. One that actually affects men, at alarming rates, mostly in silence.

The data is clear: men are more likely to be sexually assaulted than to be falsely accused of sexual assault.

Let that sit for a second.

“False accusations of sexual assault are extremely rare (only 2-4%). Research demonstrates that rates of false reporting are consistent across violent crimes, including sexual assault.”1

It’s also key to highlight the word reporting here – those are the cases that made it to police. An estimated 94% of sexual assaults go unreported.2 The public discourse dramatically overestimates the rate of false accusations. We’ve been primed by high-profile cases, by media coverage that treats accusations as inherently suspect, by a cultural script that asks “what did they have to gain?” before it asks “what happened to them?” And that overestimation has consequences — not just for survivors who aren’t believed, but for men who are genuinely at risk of sexual violence and don’t have the language or support to name it.

What are men more likely to experience

In Canada, roughly 9 in every 1,000 men experience sexual assault annually according to Statistics Canada self-reported data. And that number is almost certainly an undercount. Male survivors face some of the highest rates of non-disclosure of any group — in Justice Canada studies, 70% of male survivors said they did not report their adult sexual abuse or assault to anyone. Not police. Not support services. Not the people close to them. The reasons are familiar and gut-wrenching: fear of not being believed. Shame. The feeling that what happened to them doesn't "count" because of who they are and what we expect men to endure. Meanwhile, one UK fact-check found that an average adult man has a 0.03% annual chance of being sexually assaulted — and a 0.00021% chance of being falsely accused (based on prosecutions for false reporting). That's a difference of roughly 230 times.3

The vast majority of perpetrators of sexual violence against men are other men. Not women weaponizing the legal system. Not strangers. People they know — friends, acquaintances, authority figures, intimate partners. The same patterns of proximity and power that show up in sexual violence against women. This matters because the false accusation narrative implicitly frames sexual violence as something done by women to men through accusations. It makes men the potential victims of a ‘feminist justice system’. And in doing so, it erases the actual violence men experience — and who is responsible for it. When we talk about men's safety and sexual violence, we should be talking about the cultures that enable men to harm other men without consequence. The locker room silences. The "boys will be boys" framing that gets applied to men hurting each other. The impossibility of being a male survivor in spaces that don't have room for that story.

I think a lot about what it costs to center the false accusation narrative in conversations about consent. It costs us the male survivors who are already invisible. It costs us the chance to talk honestly about how patriarchal masculinity makes men both more likely to harm and more likely to be harmed, and less likely to get help in either case. It costs us the real conversation.

What can we ask ourselves and the people around us to start these conversations?

• “What do you think is the biggest threat to men’s safety when it comes to sexual violence?” — Use this as an opening question to surface assumptions in the room before introducing the data. It helps us reveal just how dominant the false accusation narrative is, and creates a genuine opening for the real stats.

• “Why don’t male survivors report?” — Explore the barriers with your campus community: masculinity norms, fear of disbelief, lack of services, the cultural message that men can’t be victims. Connect these barriers to the same consent culture frameworks you already use.

• “Who benefits from the false accusation narrative being louder than the victimization data?” — A more advanced discussion prompt that invites community members to think critically about how fear gets weaponized, and who it protects.

Consent culture isn’t a threat to men. It’s a framework that could support them by challenging harmful norms about sex and power, and encouraging them to break the silence that keeps their experiences invisible. The fear of being falsely accused is real, but the likelihood is so low. Statistically, emotionally, systemically — men have far more to gain from robust consent culture than they have to fear from it.

Consent culture should never be about making men the villain. It's about making everyone safer, and that only works if we're willing to talk about all of it.