False allegation myths in workplace sexual harassment
Content warning. This article discusses sexual harassment, assault, rape and domestic abuse, including non-fatal strangulation. Support resources are listed at the end.
As trauma-informed workplace sexual misconduct specialists, we think it is necessary to confront and dismantle the myths that persist around false allegations of sexual harassment.
Since the Worker Protection Act came into force in October 2024, organisations have had a legal duty to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of their employees. From October 2026, that bar rises to all reasonable steps. Meeting it requires more than a policy. It requires understanding what actually stops people reporting, and what quietly shapes how their reports are received.
We are regularly on site, delivering training to groups of employees. One myth surfaces more often than any other. False allegations. The belief that women lie about this, routinely and easily, has extraordinary staying power. It undermines the people who come forward, and it discourages the people who are deciding whether to.
These misconceptions are not harmless. They shape workplace culture, leadership decisions, and ultimately the safety of employees. Confronting them directly is how organisations build trust and accountability.
So let us take them one at a time.
Myth: "False allegations are common"
They are not. Research consistently shows that false allegations of sexual violence are rare. A Home Office study found that around 4% of sexual violence cases reported to UK police are found or suspected to be false.
That statistic is itself misleading, and it flatters the myth.
The "false" category sometimes includes cases where the person reporting was incapacitated through alcohol or drugs, and their memory or recall is affected as a result.
An absence of clear recollection is not the same as dishonesty.
Having been interviewed about domestic abuse by police, and as someone who has lived through these experiences, I can attest to how difficult it is to recount trauma in detail. I have been asked to describe some of the most terrifying moments of my life down to the minutiae, such as which arm my perpetrator was using to strangle me, when in that moment all I could think was "he is going to kill me."
Being expected to recall such events with precision is not only extremely difficult. It can be re-traumatising.
Trauma affects memory in entirely natural ways. People often remember the intensity of their fear, the sense of danger, the feeling of the room. They may struggle to recall timelines, positions, or sequences exactly as they occurred. Fragmented memory, delayed recall and difficulty articulating detail are normal responses to extreme stress. They are not evidence that someone is lying.
Recognising this is essential for anyone handling a workplace sexual harassment complaint. It is the difference between a complainant met with compassion and one met with scepticism.
Understanding the psychological impact of trauma is not a soft skill for leaders, HR professionals and investigators. It is a competence.
Myth: "They were not convicted, so she was obviously lying"
The absence of a conviction does not mean an allegation was false.
In the year to March 2025, rape offences accounted for around 34% of all sexual offences recorded by police in England and Wales. Fewer than 3 in 100 recorded rapes result in a charge. Fewer still end in a conviction.
Now consider a figure that rarely makes the headlines. When rape cases do reach court, the Crown Prosecution Service reports a conviction rate of over 63%.
Read those two facts together and the myth collapses. Juries convict when they are given the opportunity. The attrition is happening long before anyone reaches a courtroom.
Why? Insufficient evidence in offences that are, by their nature, intimate and unwitnessed. Delayed reporting. Procedural barriers. And delay on a scale that is difficult to comprehend.
The Crown Court backlog in England and Wales reached around 80,200 outstanding cases by the end of 2025, the highest level recorded since 2016. Trials are now being listed as far ahead as 2030, and Ministry of Justice projections suggest the backlog could reach 125,000 cases by the end of this Parliament.
Four years of waiting. Four years of anniversaries, cross-examination anxiety, and a life on hold. Some survivors withdraw. That withdrawal is then read, by the incurious, as proof they were never telling the truth.
The same dynamic plays out inside organisations. Delayed investigations, opaque processes and unresolved complaints lead employees to disengage, to change their mind about proceeding, and eventually to leave. Not because their allegations were false, but because they felt unsupported, feared retaliation, or doubted the process would lead anywhere.
Employers cannot rely on zero-tolerance policies alone. Fear of consequences does not deter misconduct. Understanding does. That means educating leaders and staff about the psychological drivers, the social norms, the biases and the myths that enable harassment in the first place.
It also means setting reasonable timeframes for handling complaints, and then meeting them. Nothing signals an organisation's real commitment more clearly than how long it makes someone wait.
Myth: "If they did not report it, they must be lying"
Many people who experience harassment never report it. They fear not being believed. They fear retaliation. They weigh the cost to their career against the likelihood of anything changing.
None of that is evidence of deceit.
The criminal justice system offers a useful lesson. If fewer than 3 in 100 recorded rapes lead to a charge, a survivor may reasonably ask why they would put themselves through it. Beyond the emotional toll of recounting trauma, they face delay, evidential challenge and public scrutiny.
Society also teaches us, from a young age, to look for what the victim did wrong. What they were wearing. Whether they were drinking. Whether they were alone. Why they did not leave sooner. In a workplace, those same narratives surface as self-blame, and as a fear of how colleagues will look at you afterwards.
Logically, none of it holds. Only the person who commits harassment is responsible for it. But the weight of those messages is real, and it determines whether someone feels safe enough to speak.
Company culture either reinforces those barriers or dismantles them.
An organisation that tolerates sexist jokes and misogynistic behaviour is telling its people, clearly, that this conduct is socially acceptable here. Employees hear that, and they stay quiet. An organisation that actively builds respect and accountability tells them something different.
Reporting mechanisms and zero-tolerance policies only work in a culture that has already earned the right to be trusted with a disclosure.
Myth: "They lied about it to get revenge"
The idea that people report sexual misconduct for attention, revenge or gain ignores what reporting actually costs.
Revenge through reporting is, in practice, close to impossible.
Conviction rates are low. Even where a complaint is formally investigated, the likelihood of legal justice is slim. Most people come out of the process exhausted, re-traumatised and unsupported. Financial reward, recognition and revenge are almost never the outcome. The costs overwhelmingly exceed any imagined gain.
High-profile cases make this visible. People who report sexual misconduct face public scrutiny, career damage, reputational harm and personal attack. Coming forward brings more harm than benefit. That is precisely why the motivation is so rarely what the myth claims it is.
Meanwhile, perpetrators can continue to thrive. Public figures have been found liable in civil proceedings and gone on to enjoy continued public support and even to announce political ambitions.
The workplace equivalent is familiar to anyone who has worked in this field. The executive who harasses is shielded, because the company "cannot run without them." The person who reported becomes the problem to be managed.
When an organisation chooses the perpetrator
I have seen this at close range.
A company approached me after an independent investigation concluded, on the balance of probabilities, that one of its executives had committed sexual harassment.
Rather than acting on that finding, the organisation decided not to remove the executive. It cited operational concerns. It then sought to exit the person who had complained, through a settlement agreement.
And it asked whether I would provide one-to-one coaching to the perpetrator.
No.
That is not work I can do, and it is not aligned with my ethics. You cannot coach someone out of being a perpetrator when the organisation around them is unwilling to enforce any consequence at all.
That request tells you something important about how these situations are so often resolved. The organisation prioritised continuity over justice, and in doing so it compounded the harm. The victim became the problem. The perpetrator kept his desk.
This is what entrenched power imbalance looks like in practice. It is also how the revenge myth sustains itself. If the person who reports is the one who leaves, it becomes easy to tell a story in which they were never sincere.
Recognising the pattern matters for leaders and HR professionals, because accountability is not only a legal requirement. It is the only thing that makes reporting rational.
What you can do about myths and bias in your workplace
Dismantling the myths around false allegations is not simply a moral position. It is central to building a safer workplace, and to meeting the duty that rises to all reasonable steps in October 2026.
Leaders and managers need to move past zero-tolerance statements and understand what actually governs behaviour and reporting: the psychology, the biases, the social norms. Organisations that meet complaints with fairness, empathy and genuine accountability protect their people, strengthen their culture, and reduce their legal exposure at the same time.
We help organisations turn these principles into practice. That includes leader and manager training, all-staff awareness programmes, independent investigations, risk assessment, gap analysis and policy development, and the CEASE Framework®, our registered continuous improvement methodology for preventing workplace sexual harassment.
Not sure where your organisation currently stands? Our free All Reasonable Steps Checker takes five minutes and shows you exactly where the gaps are.
Support
If anything in this article has affected you, support is available.
Rape Crisis England and Wales run a free 24/7 support line on 0808 500 2222.
Refuge run the National Domestic Abuse Helpline, free and 24 hours, on 0808 2000 247.
Samaritans can be reached free at any time on 116 123.
If you are in immediate danger, call 999.
Talk to us
If you want to ensure your organisation is ready for October 2026, while building a workplace where people feel genuinely safe to speak, we would welcome the conversation.
Email: help@onesourcehr.co.uk Telephone: 01709 460500
Book a confidential consultation
Sources
- Home Office, false allegations of sexual violence
- Office for National Statistics, Sexual offences in England and Wales, year ending March 2025
- Ministry of Justice, Criminal Court Statistics, October to December 2025, published 26 March 2026
- Crown Prosecution Service, CPS data summary, Quarter 3 2025-26
- Rape Crisis England and Wales