Recent cases highlight the danger our society, or at least the male half, faces under current approaches to violence. The case of Shona Maiden was one. She gave her false account of events to police and even went to news media with photos of her son cuddling her and appeared on tv with convincing tears giving the same account, that a man had punched her after she told him to f-off when he criticized her for speaking te reo. News media misrepresented even her account by claiming he assaulted her for speaking te reo, and generally took a white-knight approach in support of this abused damsel (see the MENZ Issues post ‘What Scumbag Would Do This?’). She said on public media that she had lost 5 teeth and had a plate in her mouth cracked, but she wrote on her Facebook page about 3 teeth on one occasion and 2 teeth on another and not about a cracked plate. After she was charged on the basis of the CCTV evidence she told news interviewers that she stood by her account and had told the truth!

The point here is that Shona Maiden believed herself to be a blameless victim of a male’s violence. She believed it so fully that she told the whole country through news media and she still appeared to believe it even after the CCTV evidence proved otherwise.

In London, Souad Faress claimed that as a man walked past her in a crowded underground rail station he sexually violated her by putting his fingers into her vagina as well as shoulder-pushing her. He was prosecuted and went to trial despite the CCTV evidence showing nothing of the sort happened or could possibly have happened. It’s unclear whether Ms Faress actually ever believed her account but she persisted with it right through to the inevitable acquittal at trial.

So we see it’s easy for people to make up allegations, confident that prevailing attitudes will gullibly jump to their support. In the case of sexual allegations, women know that no corroborating evidence at all will be necessary to obtain a conviction (that’s not to say that a high rate of cases result in conviction). And it’s easy for a person, having made up an account, to come to believe the account is true or true enough to keep asserting it. This is the reality, but our police and Courts and indeed public don’t seem to want to face this reality or maintain protections against it.

In both of the cases described above, if there had been no CCTV evidence the women would very likely have been believed and there was a good chance the men accused would have been convicted and punished, probably with significant prison terms and associated damage to their reputations and lives. Even if acquitted, many in the public would have treated them as guilty but able to afford a clever lawyer. If these women’s claims had been made in a Family Court dispute they would almost certainly have been ruled to be truthful ‘on the balance of probabilities’, double-speak for ‘whatever the judge thinks based on extensive indoctrination by women’s groups, beliefs about gender rates of violence and an assumption that women wouldn’t lie about such matters’.

The sad fact is that most of us won’t have CCTV footage to protect us against false allegations. The moral of the story is: if you can, set up CCTV at home and carry and use mobile phone video recording for incidents elsewhere or encourage onlookers to do so. The moral of the story for our government and Courts is: ‘stop stereotyping men and stop giving undue credibility to women’s allegations and feminist claims generally’.