  Short range correlated (SRC) nucleon-nucleon pairs in nuclei are typically
studied using measurements of electron-induced hard nucleon-knockout reactions
(e.g. $(e,e'p)$ and $(e,e'pN)$), where the kinematics of the knocked-out
nucleons are used to infer their initial state prior to the interaction. The
validity of this inference relies on our understanding of the scattering
reaction, most importantly how rescattering of the detected nucleons (final
state interactions or FSI) distort their kinematical distributions. Recent SRC
measurements on medium to heavy nuclei have been performed at high-$x_B$ (i.e.,
anti-parallel kinematics) where calculations of light nuclei indicate that such
distortion effects are small. Here we study the impact of FSI on recent
$^{12}$C$(e,e'p)$ and $^{12}$C$(e,e'pp)$ measurements using a transport
approach. We find that while FSI can significantly distort the measured
kinematical distributions of SRC breakup events, selecting high-$x_B$
anti-parallel events strongly suppresses such distortions. In addition,
including the effects of FSI improves the agreement between Generalized Contact
Formalism-based calculations and data and can help identify those observables
that have minimal sensitivity to FSI effects. This result helps confirm the
interpretation of experimental data in terms of initial-state momentum
distributions and provides a new tool for the study of SRCs using
lepton-scattering reactions.
