It’s 9.30 at night. The phone rings. A representative for Vernon Sanders, EVP of Comedy Programming at NBC is on the line. The company regrets to inform you that they’re pulling the plug on your comeback sitcom. They’ll be publishing a media release tomorrow morning. 24 women accusing you of rape is just too many and the company has to severe ties with production.

The above situation could happen to anyone, but on the 18^th of November, it happened to legendary comedian Bill Cosby. Mr Cosby has never been convicted of rape and yet the mere accusation of (then) 24 women (the number has now increased to 35) was enough to cost “America’s Grandfather” his television show and comedy special.

Rolling Stone’s retraction of its University of Virginia gang rape article is not the consequence of a poor piece of reporting, but it is in fact symptomatic of a larger cultural issue: People love supporting rape victims. They’ll trip over themselves just to support an accuser. This is why a staggering almost 6.5 percent of officially reported rapes lead to a conviction for rape.

That’s 6.5 percent of accused rapists having their lives ruined just because the media, the public, police, and a jury are so blindly willing to believe the accuser.

Yes, rapes can and do happen. But we can’t let one example of an actual rape occurring lead to an epidemic of bad journalism on the subject, which we also have one example of.

Here’s another example: In early 2014 the media was swept up in believing Dylan Farrow’s accusation that Woody Allen raped her as a child, this was in spite of the fact that when Ms Farrow was a child she also demonstrated a history of lying about stealing candy from the cupboard.

It should be noted that Woody Allen’s wealth, importance, and aggressive legal team has prevented him from ever being put on trial for these accusations, and yet despite never being convicted, the media was incredibly willing to side with Dylan after a measly 20 years of ignoring it.

The problem these rape victim lovers are ignoring is that the justice system is built on “innocent until proven guilty”, this means that if someone has not been convicted, it’s the responsibility of anyone who forms an opinion to assume the accuser is guilty of making a false accusation.

And even if a person is convicted of rape, we also have to recognise that a false accusation can make it all the way to a conviction and so we should probably assume the convicted rapist experienced a miscarriage of justice.

Yes, the Rolling Stone article is a problem, but to focus only on that is to ignore the bigger issue. The real victims of rape accusations are the accused and if we continue to believe victims then we are guilty of attacking the victims. We need a radically new approach to rape cases: accuse the accusers to protect the victims from the victims.

Matthew Farthing is the women’s issues reporter for The (un)Australian. After learning that his girlfriend was experiencing a phantom pregnancy, he started the all-male protest group “Journalists For Phantom Life” to support the banning of phantom abortions.

https://twitter.com/MattJFarthing

You can follow The (un)Australian on twitter or like us on facebook.

Categories: Opinion

Tags: Bill Cosby, Dylan Farrow, Matthew Farthing, Rolling Stone, The unAustralian, Woody Allen