We should stop naming people accused of sexual assault

Sex-related crimes are the only ones in which accusers and victims are not named but the accused often are. The reasoning is admirable: There’s a stigma to being a rape victim, so we should shield them as much as possible from that stigma.

That’s why rape shield laws exist. They’re meant to protect victims, but it’s now becoming clear that the “victim” in many accusations is actually the accused. Activists often claim that the number of false accusations is between 2 percent and 10 percent. But these statistics refer only to accusations that are proven false. An equally small number of cases result in convictions, so following the same logic, we should also be claiming that just 2 percent of rape accusations are true.