Here’s a piece I wrote for The Week on this topic. The simple version is that when we adopt a blanket policy of believing all sexual assault accusations, as Zerlina Maxwell and others have advocated, we actually make it harder to publicly work against rape, as we tie our credibility to allegations that are eventually rebutted. That in turn makes us less likely to be listened to in the future. In a strange sense, this presumption creates an impossibly high standard where the credibility of all rape allegations is tied to the credibility of any individual rape allegation. Once again, we see that due process and avoiding a rush to judgment helps victims as well as the accused.

I think this issue is a good example of the progressive enclave problem: this presumption might seem like a good idea if you overestimate the universality of this norm. But in truth, though it’s a powerful social stigma that affects some very prominent people in the media and academia, very few people writ large have adopted it. And having that kind of standard only for a small contingent of the like-minded is dangerous in the long term. It can cause us to fail to see the very real unintended consequences of our behaviors.