Except they are trying to use them in the justice system. People are bringing charges and denouncing attempts by the accused to defend themselves. Look at the reactions to the accused lacrosse players at Duke. This has been a topic discussed on this site in regards to other areas of life as well. To pretend that the only bad thing that can happen is a criminal charge is nonsense. There are kangaroo courts being set up on university campuses that meet these exact standards. The accused is condemned in a show trial, with none of the civil rights or legal protections built into the real world system. Instead it's run by rules dreamed up by the women's studies department and campus activists. Leftists fall back on the difference between a school and a court of law, as if the former has absolutely no power or responsibility and is incapable of doing harm. A college is a private institution that is not subject to the standards of a court of law or government body when they do something you agree with, like rushing to conviction out of sympathy for a victim of Emmanuel Goldstein the patriarchy, but where is that position when it comes to religious institutions on campus, or the school setting a policy against interracial dating, or has admissions policies that don't produce a student body with the ethnic composition desired by diversity advocates, or allows a tenured professor to teach unfashionable perspectives. When it's a progressive ox that's being gored, they sing a different tune.

And then there is the point that there are very real consequences for the accused. Kicked out of school, on the basis of an unsubstantiated rape allegation, all the time put into his education to that point is lost. He's still going to be behind even if he can find another school willing to take him and all his credits. Good luck recouping his tuition and efforts on not-yet-completed courses if the accusation is mid-semester. And how much luck do you think he'll really have when he's on record as being expelled for sexual assault or rape? Unlike Lifetime movies, in reality, they don't just take your word for it that the charges are bullshit and wave you through. It's the sort of thing prospective employers can easily learn and something he has to get past with any responsible or worthwhile romantic partner in the future.

He can try to sue the school, but any institution with at least half-assed legal counsel has enough leeway built into their policies to allow them to expel students at discretion, and probably had the student sign off on it with a host of other forms and applications with which he is inundated at registration. Who reads through that stuff and says "Hey, what if I'm falsely accused of rape?"

But according to Legolas, he isn't going to jail, so there's no problem, right?

Even if you are right, SO WHAT? Do you even READ what you right? No doubt a lot of black men were lynched in the South by people with good intentions and sincere outrage at their sexual predation of helpless women and girls, as well as a responsible desire to make sure it doesn't happen to anyone else.

Feelings and intentions and sympathy are BULLSHIT. Especially in criminal justice. The symbol of "Justice" in our society is blindfolded and holds a scale. A scale is not about "balance" as people assume from its mechanical function, it is about measuring something against an agreed up and objective standard. The scale is not about what is fair. You don't put two random objects on a scale to determine if they are the same weight, you put one object on one side, and weights on the other, until you determine what the actual, objective weight of an object is, according to a legally defined standard.

Justice is about impartiality and facts. Intentions don't matter except in determining the degree of guilt. If the most sleazy and self-interested advocate in the universe can demonstrate a preponderance of facts to support his case, that is what the just is instructed to take into account. Neither the defendant nor the plaintiff nor the accuser or victim is supposed to be judged on the number of gang tattoos he possesses, or the color of his skin or his youth and attractiveness or age and afflictions. They dismiss jurors who come into the trial with strong feelings and a desire to prevent bad stuff from happening, or whose backgrounds suggest a predilection to act one way or another. The ideal juror is someone who is supposed to keep an open mind and only use the facts presented in the trial.

Actually, a desire to see something doesn't happen to anyone else is not responsible at all. It requires control and power over others, when our society is supposed to be about freedom and choices. Settle for supporting the efforts of people you know and care about to protect themselves. And yes, that DOES mean taking precautions in social situations. It means be careful about transportation and taking measures to avoid vulnerability. That's life. It might not be fair that men don't have to take the same precautions but men don't think it's fair that they have to pay for everything. And yes, that includes with feminists. For all their assertions of their right to pay, it's one in a million that doesn't secretly reserve the privilege NOT to pay, and resent men who don't offer.

And how do you know that isn't already the case? I see a lot of assertions that victims are not given these considerations, but only anecdotal evidence from prejudicial sources against. And to whatever extent women are not treated as well as could be wished, male rape victims would kill to be receive the exact same handling female victims do.

There are places you go for concern and sympathy. A priest, a family member, a friend, a therapist, a gynecologist, the invisible unicorn in your backyard. Not the criminal justice system. Not the entertainment media. Not the faculty or your assailant's employer. Not a tort attorney.

But that goes both ways. Feminists like to assert things like this happen and for all I know, they do. But you don't hear too much about actual attempts made on the lives of such women. More often, you hear about subsequent crimes committed by such women, which cast further doubts backward on their credibility.

On the other hand, all that stuff DOES happen to people who are accused. It happened to the man falsely accused by Tawana Brawley. It happened to Clarence Thomas, who is just about the only man in America about whom is it acceptable to make a certain degree of racially charged comments or jokes. You can get hounded out of your job for free speech that can be indirectly asserted to be comparing Barack Obama to a monkey (for example, by suggesting that a monkey did something related to Obama, but which Obama himself did not do, like draft an insurance regulation bill), but a national magazine can portray Clarence Thomas as a racist stereotype or a lawn jockey statue. It happened to the Duke lacrosse players, whose own teachers condemned and demonized them in a letter signed by multiple faculty members, and whose season was canceled, whose academic careers were jeopardized and whose coach was fired, because members of a group of legal adults over which he had authority in a narrow area of activity, were accused of behavior he did not partake, condone, order, suggest, permit or even know about. Nor was it even suggested he had anything to do with their behavior. But under the terms of his employment, he was vulnerable and close enough to the falsely accused to be a satisfactory example, so he was fired.

Well, I'm glad we have you on record as saying that convictions require proof, and can't be had simply by appealing to widespread societal notions and emotional reactions to perceived but unsubstantiated ills. May I presume you will join me in criticizing those who condemn the death penalty as racist, and arguing that most condemned convicts ARE very likely to be guilty? Do you now agree that it is highly unlikely for police officers to react to widespread societal beliefs inculcated in them in schools and by entertainment media to incline them to jump to assumptions about an accused person's guilt, and proceed to investigate and gather evidence to support their assumptions, rather than keeping an open mind to all possibilities?
The difference being, a person who makes a false accusation is reaping the consequences of their actions, however unjust or disproportionate. A person who was falsely accused did nothing of the kind. And I know you wrote "disbelieved" not false, but ANYONE who is widely disbelieved suffers. That does not mean everyone is accorded an automatic level of belief. Even trustworthy people who make statements beyond the experience or comprehension of their audience are not necessarily trusted.

The tragedy of the human condition is limitations. We have limited amounts of resources, most especially time. We have needs to meet, and that entails making choices and decisions, and those require knowledge. The resources required to gain knowledge are resources needed for other things as well, so we go by rough judgments, generalizations and our own experiences. That precludes believing and acting on everything you hear. Somethings you just don't have the time and resources to check out, so you go by the credibility of the people telling you. It's not going to be perfect, and it's not your fault. But a lot more harm is done by people who try to perfect the system than by people who just try to get by and do what they need to do.

One of the things they tell police personnel in regard to dealing with the public is that, even though for the police, it's just another day on the job, to the person talking to them, the topic of discussion is the most important thing in their life at that moment, and thus deserves a degree of respect, or at least understanding of their mentality, no matter how trivial or mundane it might be.

But the corollary is that no matter how important you believe your situation is, it's just another day on the job to someone else. Your one motor vehicle accident that throws off your whole day, and represents hours of time in the future going through the bureaucracy with police reports, towing service, repair shop, replacement rental and insurance coverage plus whatever medical issues result, plus whatever domino effect it has on your affairs that day, and financial repercussions of your loss and lost time, to the cop taking the report, it's just another task. To the tow truck guy, it's just another hook-up. To the garage, it's just another repair job. To your insurance rep, it's just another claim. Each of those people, if they have been in the business long enough, has dealt with people lying about their responsibility in a car crash, lying about the state of their car before and after it was towed, lying about their willingness to pay for repairs ahead of time or lying about the state of their claim. So, no matter how big a deal this is for you, you also have to understand that it's not for them, that they have skin in the game and if you are indignant that their professional difficulties compare to your personal sufferings, THEY FEEL THE EXACT SAME WAY.

That's why feelings are bullshit. My personal motto on the subject is that feelings are like bowel movements. Everyone has them, they are perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed about, but they also should not be expressed in public. They are a topic of conversation best reserved for qualified medical professionals, or humorous purposes, or those sufficiently close to you that it is an acceptable topic of conversation. So, almost literally, bullshit.

THERE'S the signature phrase of an objective person discussing something in good faith!

But the numbers game also comes down to how big of a problem is it that so few convictions occur? Given the limitations of human capability and the necessary trade-offs between freedom and control, how much are we willing to go along with in order to achieve a higher conviction rate? You can always increase the rate of convictions by tampering with the process, but is the end convictions or justice? Justice is not merely punishment, it is also the absence of wrongful punishment, the absence of persecution or abuse. It seems monumentally unfair to someone who has suffered an indescribable trauma to say that potential victims have to look out for themselves, because we are not willing to pay the costs of ensuring all the guilty get punished...but ultimately, prevention is better than punishment, and if it appears to place an undue burden on the victim, well, victims ARE the ones who suffer. I was cautioned about my behavior as a fifteen year old boy, to keep above reproach and not give anyone cause to accuse me, because if it came down to "he said, she said" I was unlikely to be believed. This was in regard to an incident after school, when some girls visiting the campus claimed they had been flashed by a group of boys. I was there, I saw the whole thing and not one person exposed himself. They were acting like jackasses, but not the specific thing they were accused of. It didn't go anywhere, but our coach sent the accused kid home early. I didn't think it was fair, but I was more or less told, by my own parents (and my mother confronted the coach about it when she heard) "too bad, that's the way things are, don't let it happen to you." And honestly, that kind of behavior is disgusting enough that it should be nipped in the bud, even if it didn't happen. It was not an injustice done, there were no further incidents of that sort the rest of the school year. But it's orders of magnitude more serious when real and lasting action is to be taken, when the power of society is going to be leveled against someone. There needs to be restraint and protections. You can protect yourself much better from a rapist than from a government with no restrictions on its ability to incarcerate or execute.

Except that's not the standard used when someone accidentally commits rape, like when they are drunk and lose control with an equally inebriated partner or have sex with someone who feels threatened and unable to safely refuse consent or is suffering the effects of punch that you didn't know was spiked. A person does not have to do anything to be falsely accused of rape.** So comparing the consequences for the wrong-but-mistaken accuser, to the consequences for someone who out of the blue, is wrongfully accused, is a false equation as well. The mistaken accuser had a choice to participate or not, and did so with the knowledge, even if only in the abstract, without grasping the scope, of potential blowback and fallout. In the typical feminist mythical version, the accuser does so in the face of active discouragement and pressure to not talk, so it's not like the accuser can be unaware of the risk.

**One of the Duke lacrosse team's most vehement defenders, the columnist and polemicist, Ann Coulter, might very well have been motivated by guilt for a column I distinctly remember her publishing at the outset of the public scandal, titled "Lie Down With Strippers, Get Up With Fleas" or something like that, in which she suggested that if you don't want to be falsely accused of rape, you shouldn't go to those kinds of parties. Later one it turned out that some of the accused and charged had NOT, in fact, even gone to the party, and at least one was able to prove via taxicab & phone records and ATM receipts exactly what he was doing and where he was on the night in question. But even a conservative lawyer, whose critics would claim is predisposed to suspicion in the case of media outrage on behalf a minority woman, automatically assumed the accused were guilty of something.