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 Originally Posted by boost
The paradox is that the more you incentivize false victimhood, the more fake victims you get, the more skeptical people will be of all victims.
I agree there's scope for unscrupulous people to abuse others' trust, and that there's always going to be a balancing act between accepting some number of false positives and wrongly rejecting some number of true positives.
The correct approach to evaluating any claim should be evidence based. Using sexual assault as an example, I think a bigger problem is that when the evidence is not sufficient to convict an alleged perpetrator, the assumption is often that the victim must have been lying. And, because it's so hard to get convictions on SA cases (it's usually a he-said she-said type of thing), it discourages victims from coming forward.
Using Blasey-Ford as an example, she gave by all professional accounts a much more credible testimony than Kavanaugh did, but not a court in the world would have ever convicted him of sexual assault on the basis of her 30 year old memories (nor should they imo). Even the senate couldn't find sufficient reason to bounce him although i suspect privately most of them probably believed her story over his. This leads to the problem I mentioned in that now she is open to being called a liar and a shill for the Ds, and had to go through not only the embarrassment of the hearing itself, but had to change her job and move address because of the notoriety she gained through something she really should be getting a courage badge for.
The whole metoo thing is a net positive for society because it removes some of the stigma from the real survivors, although I agree it does have the negative side effect of encouraging shitty types of people to just make things up to get some kind of revenge or fame or whatever.
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