That’s as problematic as innocent until proven guilty for obvious reasons.

Personally, I think we need to get away from the polar and (only) criminalizing way we think about abuse and misconduct.

Accountability doesn’t mean you have to be stripped of your livelihood, ostracized from society, sent to jail, or canceled forevermore in all cases and circumstances. It does mean you need to be made aware of your abusive behavior and take responsibility for it so that you learn new skills and don’t do it again and that you need to take responsibility in some fashion for mitigating the damage you did to the person you abused so that both of you can be restored to society as healthy functioning people rather than damaged goods.

We can’t do that if we limit ourselves to binary or polar thinking about a complex social problem. No, our thinking must be equally nuanced to move forward.

So how about we don’t think in terms of either “innocent until proven guilty" or “guilty until proven innocent" at all. What if instead we make a safe space for people to tell their side, we ask questions, we investigate, we look to see if there’s a pattern of behavior, we look at attitudes and what’s going on in people’s lives, we look at addictions and mental health and THEN AND ONLY THEN we make determinations about whether conduct was criminal and to what level, what sort of accountability will be most effective, what sort of restoration and restitution is required, make a plan for all parties to follow through and follow up.

And we move forward as a society out of rape culture and a perpetual cycle of abuse.