A corollary to #BelieveSurvivors is the assertion that science proves accusers are almost always telling the truth, with the citation of the endlessly repeated statistic that about 2 percent of accusations are false. As I wrote here last year, this statistic is misleading and unreliable. We simply don’t have good data on false accusations and likely never will. And seeking to determine the exact number of accusers who are deliberately deceptive misses the point that in many cases, especially those that never reach the criminal-justice system, disagreement about what happened turns on differing interpretations of a similar set of facts.

In any case, a decent society does not make conclusions about the guilt of an accused person based on statistics.