At the Sundance festival
première, which I attended, when an audience member asked what people
could do to join the fight against campus sexual assault, one of the
survivors featured in the film responded, simply, “Believe us.” It is a
near-religious teaching among many people today that if you are against
sexual assault, then you must always believe individuals who say they
have been assaulted. Questioning in a particular instance whether a
sexual assault occurred violates that principle. Examining evidence and
concluding that a particular accuser is not indeed a survivor, or a
particular accused is not an assailant, is a sin that reveals that one
is a rape denier, or biased in favor of perpetrators.
This
is the set of axioms on which one might build a suggestion that
challenging the accuracy of “The Hunting Ground” contributes to a
hostile environment on campus. If I am a student at a school where
professors seem to disbelieve one accuser’s account, then it is possible
that they could disbelieve me if I am assaulted. That possibility makes
me feel both that I am unsafe and that my school is a sexually hostile
environment. Under this logic, individuals would not feel safe on campus
unless they could know that professors are closed off to the
possibility that a particular person accused of sexual misconduct may be
innocent or wrongly accused. But, then, what would be the purpose of a
process in which evidence on multiple sides is evaluated? Fair process
for investigating sexual-misconduct cases, for which I, along with many
of my colleagues, have fought,
in effect violates the tenet that you must always believe the accuser.
Fair process must be open to the possibility that either side might turn
out to be correct. If the process is not at least open to both
possibilities, we might as well put sexual-misconduct cases through no
process at all.
The ironclad principle that you must always believe the accuser comes as
a corrective to hundreds of years in which rape victims were
systematically disbelieved and painted as liars, sluts, or crazies. This
history, along with the facts that sexual assault is notoriously
underreported and that the crime suffers no more false reports than
other crimes—and the related idea that only those actually assaulted
would take on the burden of coming forward—leads many advocates today to
the “always believe” orthodoxy. We have seen recent high-profile
instances in which that article of faith has led to damaging errors, as
in Rolling Stone’s reporting of a rape at the University of
Virginia, or the prosecution of the Duke lacrosse case. The extent of
the damage comes out of the fact that “always believe” unwittingly
renders the stakes of each individual case impossibly high, by linking
the veracity of any one claim to the veracity of all claims. When the
core belief is that accusers never lie, if any one accuser has lied, it
brings into question the stability of the entire thought system,
rendering uncertain all allegations of sexual assault. But this is
neither sensible nor necessary: that a few claims turn out to be false
does not mean that all, most, or even many claims are wrongful. The
imperative to act as though every accusation must be true—when we all
know some number will not be—harms the over-all credibility of sexual
assault claims.
Sexual assault is a serious and insidious problem that occurs with intolerable frequency on college campuses and elsewhere. Fighting it entails, among other things, dismantling the historical bias against victims, particularly black victims—and not simply replacing it with the tenet that an accuser must always and unthinkingly be fully believed. It is as important and logically necessary to acknowledge the possibility of wrongful accusations of sexual assault as it is to recognize that most rape claims are true.
Sexual assault is a serious and insidious problem that occurs with intolerable frequency on college campuses and elsewhere. Fighting it entails, among other things, dismantling the historical bias against victims, particularly black victims—and not simply replacing it with the tenet that an accuser must always and unthinkingly be fully believed. It is as important and logically necessary to acknowledge the possibility of wrongful accusations of sexual assault as it is to recognize that most rape claims are true.
