I saw the testimony of an Elder from Jehovah's witnesses to the Royal commission on sex abuse in institutions in Australia and in his testimony he remembered saying, to a women who had been sexually abused by a JW "deacon" and who was about to bring her case to the royal commission, "all you'd be doing is dragging Jehovah's name through the mud". He said it to silence her, or at least to try to get her to be silent. She did bring her case to the royal commission and he had to testify before it. He regretted his words. The thing that made the testimony interesting for me is that I know the elder, I new him well, we worked together for many years. I think it is not a bad thing for an abused women who bring her case before the authorities and if it damaged the reputation of somebody then so be it, if she is telling the truth then that will come out and if she isn't then that will come out. But silencing the victims of sexual abuse is not a viable approach it only makes the wickedness of sexual abuse worse.
We certainly shouldn't silence victims of sexual abuse. The trouble is in this age of social media (which is a totally different world to when others were accused of similar crimes) and this age where just about everything is viewed through a partisan lens rather than a desire to find truth, what happens so often is little more than ever-more polarisation.
The #MeToo movement would have us believe that everything is about whether or not women are believed, as if it were a universal state that either all women are believed or all women are called liars. The happy medium, in which we accept some women are telling the truth, some are mistaken, some are embellishing and some are outright lying, gets lost in the howling. Where sexual assault is concerned it is an inherently problematic situation because it's probably safe to say most sexual predators, just like most other criminals, seek to commit their crimes without a roomful of witnesses. And the concept of presumed innocence until guilt is proven is inherently incompatible with the concept of automatically believing a woman when she says that a particular man sexually assaulted her.
If an accusation is made it may be that the man in question did assault her, it may be that a different man assaulted her and she just mistook who it was (especially if it wasn't someone she knew), it may be that she consented to sex and subsequently cried rape, and in the situation of a claim of inappropriate touching there are even more potential factors that muddy the water, not least the fact that touching someone over their clothes could genuinely be accidental.
In this day and age the minute someone is accused of any offense, especially anything even remotely sexual, the process of "trial by social media" commences, and the associated echo chambers will mean that a substantial number of people will simply continue to read what they want to read and ignore anything that goes against their partisan leanings.
In many ways it's a shame that, on the face of it at least, two accusers of this Republican nominee are Democrat activists. If nothing else, a Republican activist claiming the Republican nominee sexually assulted her would instantly gain credibility because she would lack the obvious partisan motive to derail his nomination.
