Image courtest HuffPost Canada
Althia Raj of the Huffington Post Reports:
“OTTAWA — The presumption of innocence is "strictly" a legal construct that shouldn't stop Canadians from believing women who come forward with allegations of assault, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said Thursday.
While some members of his caucus stood behind him with incredulous looks, Singh told reporters there are "different issues" at play when women step forward with accusations.
"If you are asking me when I was a lawyer in a legal lens, there is a discussion or presumption of innocence — but that is strictly about the procedures in court," he said.
"When it comes to creating a just society, we need to look at the reality that we have to believe survivors if we want to tackle violence against women, if we want to shift a culture that for too long women have been silent about the ongoing violence that they experienced in their lives.””
I have an unpopular position on this issue: the movement to purge sexual predators from positions of power and punish them for their actions is worth a small number of wrongfully accused men feeling the consequences of actions they didn’t take. But I totally disagree with the notion that all men accused of inappropriate behavior should have their careers destroyed; both on moral and strategic grounds.
Feminist movements like #MeToo are accomplishing incredibly important and long-awaited work in demolishing violent and misogynistic power structures that have enabled and protected those that have hurt so many people. This purge needs to happen, and innocent men will be caught in the crossfire. I feel terrible for them, but we need to look at the bigger picture.
If feminists do away with ALL scepticism of sexual abuse claims they will lose all credibility. Feminist-pushed proven false accusations will pile up, and soon the public will stop believing real victims I understand and sympathise with the anger of people that were violated, or had their careers destroyed because they refused to be violated. Problems aren’t solved by those who are drunk on rage. We need to do what is practical if we want to solve this problem.
Let me state the obvious: men who have their careers destroyed of allegations of sexual misconduct are victims too! We should listen when men defend themselves from accusations just as we listen to women when they make those accusations. It is not sensible to punish innocent people for the crimes of others.
There must be a line between allegations that we should believe and allegations that we don’t believe, so what is it. Here are a few criteria for allegations that we should believe:
There is physical, audio, or digital evidence of misconduct
The accused person steps down from their position
A large number of women make accusations against one particular person
The first one doesn’t need an explanation. If someone’s bodily fluids are somewhere they shouldn’t be or there is a video of them committing the crime, of course, we should believe the accusations.
If the accused man steps down from his position and retreats out of the public spotlight it probably means that he doesn’t want to be prosecuted for a crime. After all, it’s better to lose one’s career than to lose one's career and go to jail!
If a large number of women come forward and tell their story they can’t all be wrong.
To wrap up, I find Jagmeet Singh’s words to be very disconcerting while still having a grain of truth to them. While we must accept that some innocent people will be punished along with the crowd that is guilty to oust sexual predators from power, we can’t go off the deep end and believe any baseless accusation we hear. Both for the sake of innocent people, and for the sake of the #MeToo movement.