@Denzark

You should start by separating out two concepts. Lying about abuse and exaggerating about abuse. These are two different concepts, they may share some motivations, but not all the motivations and by definition they are going ot be different.

When someone is lying about abuse, this means the person reporting the abuse made a conscious decision to create a situation when there was no abuse. Even then, it is separated into further subgroups. False allegations and baseless reports.

A false allegation is exactly that, you are able to prove factually that the crime did not occur. This is an exceedingly small amount of cases, probably less than 2 percent of overall cases.

A baseless allegation is where the allegation is true, but does not meet a legal definition of a crime, this is a bit higher.

When you add these two items together you get a "lying" (for lack of a better term) of somewhere between 2 and 10 percent of all abuse (I'm including sexual assault as part of these numbers) allegations.

You can point out the BBC cases as a point of contention, but those are in the minority. Just like there may very well be some people glomming on to the Bill Cosby rape story, but for the most part those allegations are being proven true.

Then when you get to "exaggeration" of abuse, then that is a different can of worms you opened up. Because what you are saying with "exaggeration" is that the abuse really did happen, but the level was less than what is being reported. Once again, this can be broken down into multiple categories. From the reporter of the abuse exaggerating to third parties exaggerating the abuse. But the danger in claiming someone "exaggerating" is you're minimizing what the victim is or was feeling, in essence you're blaming the victim for how they are reacting to abuse. And let's face it, that isn't really that cool.

That is why ideally, and some jurisdictions have put it in place, others still need to, two separate tracks for victims of abuse. A track for counseling to make the person whole, regardless of the situation. And the investigatory track which is totally separate from the counseling, which looks at the claim dispassionately and can hold people accountable.

I tend to take the opposite view of abuse in BDSM communities, I tend to think it's a bit higher and more underreported than the community at large. We tend to throw around these great concepts like "openness" and "truthfulness" the reality is that in most BDSM communities they don't want to hear truth being spoken to power. They don't want people to fuck up their good time by asking "Is this path really necessary for you?". I tend to throw out the concept that before letting someone wade into the deep end with a full blown dynamic, that they should be in their mid-20s or older, because of the fact their brains haven't fully developed from a physiological or psychological stand point. At that point I would expect to see claims and rates of reporting of abuse to drop to levels that are more consistent with the population at large.