Too many men get away with sexual assault and harassment. Some women lie and make false sexual misconduct allegations, but the overwhelming majority do not and never see justice.
These are simple truths you don’t have to be a left-wing feminist partisan to understand. But you do have to be one to cause catastrophic blowback against your own movement in the course of spreading the word.
Morning Consult’s new poll, published today, shows that the majority of Americans — Republicans and Democrats — are equally “concerned” that men will sexually assault or harass women on the one hand, and that women will falsely accuse men of doing so on the other.
In the wake of the Kavanaugh confirmation fiasco, Republican men’s support for the #MeToo movement fell by five percent. But Republican women’s support plummeted by twice that.
It’s impossible to pin down an exact figure, but studies estimate that false rape allegations consist of a range between 2 and 10 percent of all allegations. Contrary to the oft-recited “one in four” figure, college women face a similar risk of sexual assault as all other women: 2.8 percent.
Considering that the overwhelming majority of sexual assaults go unreported, this means that women are experiencing sexual assault at rates multiple factors greater than they’re falsely reporting assault.
Sexual assault advocates — the ones who actually care about victims rather than politics, at least — can blame the Resistance, in part, for the public’s evidence-poor conclusion in the aftermath of the Kavanaugh confirmation. Someone made a choice to package apolitical truths with the sinister lie that most men are predators, and that even the most questionably timed allegations require not one shred of evidence to be believed.