https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/virginia-justin-fairfax-sexual-misconduct-allegations-polygraph-unreliable/
Polygraph Tests Are Notoriously Unreliable. They’re Even Worse in Cases of Sexual Assault.
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His report, obtained by CBS and published Wednesday, concluded that Fairfax’s physiological indicators—such as perspiration, breathing, and heart rate—were “not indicative of deception” when he denied engaging in “non-consensual sexual activity” with either of his accusers, Vanessa Tyson and Meredith Watson. Fairfax, for his part, seems to have taken the results as an exoneration: “I feel so strongly regarding my innocence that I submitted myself to polygraph tests for each of the accusations against me,” he said in a statement to CBS. “I passed those tests. I did not assault either of my accusers.”
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But on the other side, lie detector tests are perhaps even more flawed when used on those accused of sexual misconduct. Mary Koss, a public health professor at the University of Arizona who has studied sexual violence for decades, argues that polygraph exams are particularly ineffective in testing the truthfulness of a person accused of sexual assault because “most rapists, even those in prison, do not perceive what they did as rape no matter what others saw.” She adds, “If you truly believe something to be true, even if it is a misperception, you can pass a polygraph.”
Indeed, research shows that most offenders will not admit to “rape” or to “sexual assault,” even at the same time as they cop to behavior that amounts to it. That’s according to Kevin Swartout, a Georgia State professor of psychology, who studies perpetrators of sexual violence and the type of people most likely to commit those crimes. When Swartout surveys men about whether they’ve committed sexual violence, he has to carefully design his questions to account for this problem. “If you were to ask somebody, ‘Did you penetrate someone’s vagina with your penis when they did not want to?’ They might say, ‘Yeah, I did that, when I was in college,’ or whatever.”
But when you ask if they committed rape? As Swartout explains, “They’ll say, ‘Oh, no, no, I’ve never, I’ve never done anything like that.'” Once, he says, when he asked about 350 college men a similar series of questions, about 30 admitted to behavior that the FBI would label rape. But only one person openly said yes, he had committed rape.
The reason boils down to our tendency to give ourselves a pass when we’re evaluating our own behavior, especially compared to others. Labels like “rapist,” Swartout says, “carry a special meaning above and beyond their actual definition. It’s basically the worst thing that you can be labeled.” And the discrepancy between the facts and perpetrators’ self-regard is exacerbated by rape myths—such as the belief that rape is usually a stranger-leaps-out-of-the-bushes situation—that reassure men who have committed sexual violence against a friend or intimate partner that they don’t qualify as a perpetrator.
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