Here’s the deal,
@Bohandas: there are several high profile sexual misconduct cases involving false- or at least unprovable- allegations. Duke. Tawana Brawley. Etc. This list goes on.
But
because they are so high profile, a certain portion of the public has adopted this debunked notion that the risk of false accusations of sexual misconduct is much higher than it really is.
Especially if the accused is a white male.
Furthermore, there is seldom a correspondingly strong pushback against similar accusations against women or minorities. How many times this year has a female teacher been accused of sexual contact with a student and it made the evening news? How many times have people vehemently asserted those women were innocent? Bonus question: given that male teachers are many times more likely to be arrested for this crime, how many MEN got their names and faces broadcast to the community?
The 17-year-old was suiting up for track practice in February 2018 when his gym teacher at Canton McKinley High School reached out to him on Snapchat. Tiffany Eichler asked the boy to come to her …
www.dispatch.com
Or consider the Central Park 5. Refresher: five black teens were accused, convicted, and then served decades of time before being exonerated by DNA. Rather than pushback against the accusations, the initial case gave us the term “wilding”, and (then just a private citizen) Donald Trump took out a full page ad to call for the death penalty in their case. (Note: he has never apologized.)
Moving away from sex crimes, Richard Jewel was famously accused of being the Olympic Park bomber. Few then were concerned that the accusations were incorrect; the error of law enforcement in his case led to major changes in how they deal with the press. (White male, yes. But this was
terrorism, not a sex crime, so contemporaneous pushback was minimal.)
So, yes, it IS important to be aware of the issue of false accusations and guard against them. But in doing so, you have to be reasonable and objective when assessing the risks. Distorting them does a disservice to society and will discredit your in the eyes of those who pay attention to the actual statistics.