Fixing the Fight is a series on discourse in the modern political landscape – particularly in areas where nobody is on the same page, or bad arguments are being proposed. In each article we will look at an issue where a bad argument or counter argument is being made and correct aspects of it, so a proper dialogue can proceed in the hopes of bettering how we discuss these issues. Today we tackle #BelieveAllWomen, and the crisis surrounding rape and false accusations.
TOPIC: The Policy of handling rape accusations.
BACKGROUND: Within the past decade, growing awareness of sexual assaults on college campuses has made the concept of rape more visible than ever, and in order to combat it and help shine light on these atrocious crimes feminists have engaged in numerous social media campaigns to increase awareness further and help survivors step forward.
INITIAL ARGUMENT (Feminists): “Believe all women when they say they are raped or make a rape accusation. It is the only way to ensure that every woman who is raped can feel comfortable enough to come forward. “
COUNTER ARGUMENT (MRAs): “Women can and do lie about these things and those lies can have massive detrimental effects on the lives of men.”
TERTIARY ARGUMENT (Feminists): “False accusations are very rare, and this kind of argument poisons the well – making women afraid to come forward and other people more resistant to believing legitimate accusations.”
Why The #BelieveAllWomen Debate Is Flawed
To be fair, both sides have a point. You need rape victims to come forward – but you also have to weed out malicious and false complainants. How do you do that in a way where you don’t discourage real victims, or simply lock up every person who is accused? Both arguments seek to change policy in, essentially, opposite directions.
The facts are still the heart of the debate as they escalate towards statistics and studies for reasoning behind their points. This is how a debate is supposed to work in theory. A lot of room for debate where a mutually exclusive conclusion isn’t out of the question. Feminists will argue that false accusations hover between 2-8% of reported rapes. MRA’s will provide statistics on how its more common based extrapolated on how false accusations of rape compare to other crimes. And so forth. There in lies the problem. Rape statistics are notoriously unreliable. They rely on self reporting, which may not be a legal definition of rape. People don’t come forward. False accusations not attached to reports aren’t counted. Some types of rape, such as female on male don’t even get counted as rape so accusation and reporting statistics get skewed. There are lots of ways data can be inaccurate and a lot of it is extrapolations.
And because of that, a policy based on all or nothing becomes even trickier. Most people would agree that ‘only a sith deals in absolutes’, and yet even the tempered variation of #BelieveWomen (instead of all women) has a subtle implication of absolutism. Albeit: structured with a little room for nuance. But men have a legitimate cause for concern. A false accusation, malicious or not, can cause serious damage on individual and societal levels. Indeed: they can and do lead to suicide, social exclusion, violence, and more.
The mere existence of genuinely false accusations, such as the now infamous Rolling Stone UVA rape story, serves to discredit the notion that we should believe all women all of the time. Another issue people rarely consider is that by believing all women (automatically) and creating more and more of these scandals, eventually the dam will burst and justice will need to be done for innocent men in prison. It will be demanded, in fact. If that happens the backlash will be dire, and a good chunk of the public may decide to believe no women at all – no matter the circumstances. A massive scandal of this level has already happened in the UK (second citation), and the ramifications are dire. More than forty rape cases are being reviewed, the system will be tied up for years, and who knows how many hundreds of innocents have suffered as a result?
On a logical level, the key problem with #BelieveAllWomen is scope and scale. Feminism is using the scope of the individual to achieve massive changes aimed at creating a ‘Guilty Until Proven Innocent’ system for men, and men only. And some of the highest legal authorities in the land are listening to them – instituting dangerous policies where a man is deemed a rapist until he can prove otherwise. We have already seen the damage that Title IX causes, and it will only get worse if actual courts start practising that broken system.
Meanwhile: MRAs are using a large scope to spot something on a smaller scale. This sets up a ‘trolleycar problem’. Prevalence of a problem doesn’t change the fact that its a problem – but we have two problems with seemingly competing interests. Feminists seem to want to ‘push’ the one man in front of the ‘speeding trolley’ to try and save many more possible rape survivors – while MRAs argue that doing so is reprehensible, and might not even work. They also point out that undermining the court system will backfire and effectively destroy it. But a third issue is this: what if we extend this #BelieveAllWomen to all rape reports – even events that police deem to be ‘no crime’? That includes cases where they can prove that no rape occurred to the claimant, and she retracts her case with no ill will. Even worse: what if prosecutors in murder trials cite this president to argue that they shouldn’t have to do more than accuse someone? At that point, it’s not up to them to prove you did it anymore – you have to prove, explicitly, with hard evidence, that you didn’t.
Ultimately, neither feminists nor MRAs want to bring additional harm to rape survivors – or the legal system. MRAs have a lot of sympathy for victims of rape – particularly as rape of men is an MRA issue. However, they would argue it serves a better need to not create more victims – whereas feminists don’t want people rubbing salt in some admittedly devastating wounds.
There is one other problem with this argument however…
Who Is Wrong about #BelieveAllWomen, And Should Fix It
Obviously Feminism is wrong, and #BelieveAllWomen is a witch hunt. The idea ‘We should simply trust women who make accusations’ is an empirically false statement – much in the same way that ‘we should believe no women at all’ would be. As I said above, only a Sith deal in absolutes. The secondary argument – that real rape victims will be put off from coming forward because it could land them in prison – is essentially baseless as the police would have to find evidence of actual wrongdoing to prosecute them. Education – not injustice – is, of course, the solution to that problem. To try and alleviate hypothetical anxiety by putting innocent men in prison is outright tyranny on a par with the Soviet Union.
But this doesn’t let MRAs off the hook either – by focusing on only the falsely accused and the statistics, it is easy for other to paint them as trying to undermine victims and call them liars. Feminist rape victims, of which there are quite a few, are known for unleashing their own traumatic experiences on MRAs as an example of why we must #BelieveAllWomen. These are anecdotal stories, but they can come in a tidalwave of examples – often forcing the MRA to back down and capitulate. This is bad news, because there is another possible victim here – the accused. Backing off and capitulating – instead of finding real solutions – is exactly what is putting innocent men in prison for decades. A prison where they may be raped and abused on a daily basis.
The issue here is that both sides are adopting a stance that focuses purely on one gender – which stokes us-vs-them tribalism. The MRA focus on the guys who are falsely accused combines with the feminist focus on the female accuser – and this forces people to pick a gender. Or, more accurately, think they have to. But they don’t need to – and that is where MRA’s can fix this debate.
How To Fix It
Center your arguments on the middle-ground, with an equal focus on both sides – male accused and female victims, both. That means explaining how falsely accusing men can hurt female rape victims and create animosity towards them.
Remember that UVA example we brought up earlier? It was important. It was one of the biggest rape accusations on a college campus ever, and one of the most highly publicized accusations following Obama’s expansion of Title IX cases. In the immediate aftermath, the fraternity in question had to suspend operations and held a press conference, all ‘Greek Life’ (Fraternities and sororities) activities were suspended. The president of the college (a woman, mind you), was forced to face daily protests about unsafe conditions on campus and calls for her resignation. Reporters who started to piece together inconsistencies were maligned – and Charlottesville Virginia became a mad house. The Frat house was broken into, death threats were exchanged, enrollment dropped. And, most tragically, it was reported that the likely results of the story being published was that survivors of rape were less likely to come forward. The story itself was cited as a way to discredit other rape allegations – most notably against Bill Cosby, at the time. If Cosby is guilty, the UVA case potentially delayed justice for victims of a serial rapist for 4 years.
MRAs point to the damage these false allegations have to men, bur rarely point to the effects they have on larger society. Yes, they are fairly rare – as are rape convictions – but that scarcity is also what helps draw media coverage. The coverage itself is what (Feminists believe) scares away rape survivors, in addition to the typically sensationalized aspects of fake rape stories. The media loves stories like Duke Lacross and “A Rape on Campus” (sometimes to the detriment of their own integrity), and that can make women seem less believable due to saturation bias. Hence #BelieveAllWomen – as a radical knee-jerk reaction. These events get covered more, so the problem seems more endemic – though if they are is yet to be determined. 2001 was dubbed “the summer of the shark” despite having fewer shark attacks and fatalities than usual – but people became worried about sharks because the media had a sensational story that supplanted itself in peoples heads. And that is the danger of not addressing false accusations, and preserving justice for the accused – you end up with scandal after scandal. The feminist counter-argument that false rape accusations should be censored by the media would just make things worse – creating even more explosive scandals that eventually have to out. For example – the number of accusations that result in an innocent man killing himself. They cannot keep a lid on that forever – the only thing achieved will be to drag both the media, and feminism, into the scandal by making them fully complicit in a cover-up. That will cause an even bigger blow-up that will could push rape victims away from reporting.
In other words: Believing All Women who make accusations, a sentiment that started growing louder in the wake of UVA, hurts women because it creates the very situation Feminists want to avoid. Taking the Feminist arguments as truth, they must support the accused if they want to help female rape victims. The damage that a repeat of the UK False Rape Scandal could cause is incalculable – especially if it took place in a large country like America. A swath of highly publicized rape verdicts being overturned – especially ones that resulted in years of prison time before the acquittal – would devastate the credibility of the system, harming victims of rape.
This entire debate must STOP being framed around one side alone – it effects the real female rape victims #BelieveAllWomen is supposed to help, the men who are accused, the communities, society, and everyone. It is trading questionable short term gains for massive long term risks.
MRAs and Feminists alike need to propose a system of compassionate scrutiny. A system that does not point fingers, but instead maintains the nuanced position of not judging either side until all the facts are in. This is backed up by a recent UK judge, and related campaign, which states that the only way to solve this situation is anonymity for both sides until a verdict is reached. This system would tell all rape victims – both men and women – that they can come forward, and we will listen, but we still need to verify the truth. It isn’t “believe all women,” or “believe all accused” – it’s “we want to believe you. Help us believe you. Everything will be fine if you tell the truth.”
Conclusions
The discussion around rape is always a sensitive one. I could (and very well might) write a hundred pieces on this alone. Emotions will always be charged. Each side will present points with data and hard realities, but that doesn’t mean that absolutism is the way to go – even if locking up hundreds of innocent men might catch a few rapists who would have otherwise slipped away. Regardless of how common or rare false accusations are now, any system where one person’s word can automatically ruin another’s life (especially with no consequences to the accuser) is one that’s going to be abused. It is a situation that can only be maintained by tyranny and treating entire groups of people as automatically suspect.
Outside of a tyranny, the Justice System cannot afford positions built on a foundation of sand. #BelieveWomen is a Jenga tower that is one brick away from collapsing, and when it falls it will hurt everyone – men, women, society, survivors, and those it falsely imprisoned. Only with the precaution of a little critical thought can we create a more compassionate and more sustainable approach to this fraught issue. And only by upholding the Gold Standard of Innocent Until Proven Guilty can we do that.
Authors note: I know this is long but I appreciate you giving the read if you made it this far. Please leave me feedback on the Men are Human discord where I am Evildl17, in reddit under u/evidl17 or my email [email protected] Thanks.
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