Sorry, I'll try again with less snark.
This issue is often framed as a tug-of-war between two sides: the agency of the rape victim versus the reputation of the falsely accused. The most reliable statistics I've been able to find on rape accusations is 33% of rape victims report the crime while 2% of reports are false accusations.
Source, please? Looking over
Wikipedia suggests that 2% is very low on the scale. Admittedly there seem to be recurring methodological problems in what is counted as "false" which inflate figures, but that doesn't automatically mean that the lowest number is the right one.
The unlikely false positive is why we demand evidence from the prosecution in a court of law, which I find to be adequate protection for the reputation of the falsely-accused.
I don't, not when magazines go around publishing stories without fact-checking.
There is a worrying trend among some elements of Social Justice that strongly discourages doubting a rape accusation. There is a good reason for this, of course, the last thing a rape victim needs is being told they* are a liar. But it also sets up an environment where it's really easy for a woman to accuse a man of being a rapist and very hard for a man to defend against that accusation.
And I think the best answer to that is to be supportive of victims without, y'know, sending death threats to the accused. And that's might not be optimal, but it's not like the current balance is better. Because in the current balance, the accused who happen to fall in the public eye get death threats and the accused and cleared get dismissed as frat boys who probably deserved it anyway.
(and then there's assholes like
this guy, but that's a whole other thing)
I jumped to a conclusion that UP was using this as an cudgel to make it harder for rape victims to publicly accuse rapists, but it's possible that wasn't his intent.
Maybe he was, can't read UP's mind.
Speaking for myself, publicly accusing rapists is complicated and it has serious downsides and while I'm not necessarily against it I'm not unambiguously for it either. A publicly accused person will with very high probability suffer a lot of fallout regardless of innocence (but sometimes making accusations public is important anyway, and if a high-profile person is accused it will become public regardless).
As for any suffering the falsely-accused frat boys went through, I don't buy that it's the same level of torment a rape victim has to endure.
If you mean that being raped is worse than being falsely accused, sure. But if you mean that the societal treatment of rape victims is worse than that of accused rapists, that is
very context-dependent. Probably true on average, but not in every individual case.
*This trend is mostly about women accusing men, but men get raped too and are also often dismissed for it, although for different reasons.
