And then, as now, women were deemed to be vulnerable to a rape culture. In the words of Jessie Daniel Ames — a white woman, Suffragette, anti-racist, and founder of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching — the obsession with black rapaciousness was built on “assumptions as degrading to white women as they were oppressive to blacks”. She argued that the hysteria over black rape was pursued under the “guise of chivalric protection of white females”, which “actually demeans women and reinforces the myth of female vulnerability”. Today, media feminists have extended this further, presenting women, including themselves, as requiring chivalric protection not only from black men but from all men. I guess at least this is an equal-opportunities culture of fear.

This is why Lee elevated righteous scepticism: she was addressing a culture in which instant belief had replaced fairness. As it has again today. This is not to say modern-day feminists are racist. Of course they aren’t. But there is a thread that ties the old racist hysteria about black male rapists and today’s supposedly progressive panic about “rape culture”: an astoundingly dismissive attitude towards due process and the rigorous establishment of guilt. What both these moments share in common is an insistence that we believe the victims. No questions, no scepticism, no interrogation — just belief. But belief in cases like this has caused untold damage throughout history. Black men were hanged because of a cult of belief. In the Satanic Ritual Abuse and paedophile panics of the 1980s and 90s, families were torn apart as a consequence of a cult of belief. What damage is being done now by the elevation of almost-religious belief over cool, just scepticism? Our cry should not be “I believe you”; it should be, “I respect you and I want to believe you. But I need proof. Strong proof. Because I prefer civilisation to barbarism.”