5 Arguments against UVA Exposed and Why they're all Nonsense.

The twitter account UVA Exposed has recently caused what the University will probably label a “campus-wide conversation” on sexual assault and harassment. Through the account, an anonymous twitter user has publicized dozens of anonymous sexual misconduct claims ranging from emotional abuse to out and out rape. While many students have expressed their support for the page, an unsurprisingly large number of people have greeted the account in, let’s say, a not so welcoming manner. 

In this article I’ll outline the most frequent arguments I’ve heard against the page’s existence and then address each one of them. For the sake of brevity I’ll skip all the incel arguments and instead focus on the more “serious” arguments I’ve heard. And by “serious” I mean the arguments that your fiscally conservative, socially liberal friend has made where he “100 percent supports survivors”, but he “just has some questions”.

But, before I get into the arguments, I first want to spell out exactly what the twitter page is and is not.

1. UVA Exposed is not a court of law. No allegations made on that page will be brought before a judge unless one of the anonymous victims chooses to bring them before a judge. Likewise, none of the accused will face legal repercussions unless, again, the allegations against them are physically brought before a judge. Accordingly, UVA Exposed is not subject to the same procedures as a court of law, because, again, it is not one. 

2. UVA Exposed is a warning network for victims. It gives victims a safe and public space to warn other people at UVA against dangerous and abusive students and faculty. Justice is certainly a component of UVA Exposed, but its primary purpose is still public safety, to protect the UVA community against predators while providing victims a safe and secure place to voice their stories. 

Now that that's out of the way, let’s get into the arguments. 

1. “No Due Process!”

This is, perhaps, the most common argument against not only UVA Exposed but also the #MeToo movement as a whole. The argument essentially goes that when a victim accuses someone of sexual misconduct, the accused is not given a fair trial based on their alleged crimes and they are summarily “cancelled” by a twitter/real mob without sufficient evidence. To be honest, I’m not sure where this misconception comes from. Allegations of sexual misconduct, especially in college, are subject to an incredible degree of scrutiny which sometimes goes beyond the legal standards of due process. For example, according to RAINN (the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization), 23.1% of women and 5.3% of men experience sexual assault or rape during their time at college. That’s more than 2.5 million men and women currently in college who have been or will be raped or sexually assaulted. Now, with those numbers in mind, how many students do you think are expelled each year for rape or sexual assault (expelled because that really is the only appropriate University response to someone found guilty of sexual assault or rape)? LESS THAN A HUNDRED! You heard that right, less than a hundred men are expelled each year for rape or sexual assault, out of around 2.5 million cases! And even when you exclude the sexual assaults and rape which go unreported (about two-thirds), you’re still left with an expulsion rate of less than 0.02%. To put that in perspective, that’s lower than the conviction rate for murder (arguably the crime which should have the highest burden of proof) and also the conviction rate for rape in our actual court system. 

So, it’d be hard to argue that those accused of rape don’t see due process by our University. But even if that were the case, UVA Exposed is not a real court and therefore isn’t subject to the same procedures as one. Due process is a legal term that only refers to a citizen’s right to a fair trial in our actual legal system, not in the so-called “court of public opinion”. Individuals have no legal obligation to judge claims based on legal standards.

Now, you could argue that accusers should have the right to due process in the court of public opinion even if they’re not entitled to it because social consequences can be just as bad as legal or university consequences (more on that later). But, let’s be honest, the world is much more complicated than that. One of the reasons victims tell their stories through unofficial channels like UVA Exposed is precisely because their stories don’t meet the burden of proof in criminal courts. But, does that mean that their stories should go unheard? Of course not. Yes, public accusations should be met with an appropriate degree of skepticism out of fairness for the accused, but at the end of the day, it’s up to each individual to base their responses on their own opinions. And this happens all the time in the real world. In fact, a large amount of the judgements we make everyday about various people, groups, and ideas come from unproven allegations. When someone tells you that a Professor is a really bad teacher, you don’t ask for empirical evidence or tell them to prove it to you by legal standards, you evaluate their claim based on their character, your experience, and the evidence available to you and then you make a personal judgement. 

Let me use a hypothetical example. Let’s say you’re an employer interviewing a candidate for a job you’re offering. He/she is a solid candidate and you’re considering hiring them to be a part of your company. But, as you do some background research you notice that in the past they have been accused of sexual assault. You look into the claim and, based on all the existing evidence, you come to the conclusion that he/she (let’s be honest he) is likely guilty of sexual assault.That is your opinion, and even if you can’t necessarily prove that opinion in court, it would be reasonable for you to act on that opinion in order to potentially protect yourself and your employees. Why? Because that’s how the real world works. We often have to act based on limited evidence which would not hold up in court. The same would go if you had a job applicant who you thought was lazy. Should you check your biases and make sure you’re not wrongly assuming laziness? Of course. But, at the end of the day, you have to make judgements based on incomplete evidence. Again, this is how the (non-legal) world works. 

And, when people talk about “cancel culture” and “social media mobs”, they’re usually referring to a number of individuals who have come to their own, personal conclusions about an allegation and have then acted on that conclusion. For example, when Netflix heard about the allegations against Kevin Spacey, they made the conclusion that based on the available evidence he was probably guilty and they then fired him based on that conclusion. The same went for Universal Studios and all the companies who had ad deals with Spacey. And the same goes on a smaller level. When I see a credible accusation on UVA Exposed about some guy in the UVA community, I make an individual judgement about both him and the claim and then conclude that I don’t want to associate with him. And if, then, two hundred other students happen to come to that same conclusion, that is not a “mob” or “cancel culture”, that is multiple people agreeing. 

Now, you could argue that the climate against sexual assault in today’s society, especially on social media, is at such a height where the average person’s individual reasoning is clouded by a desire to be “woke” or to “virtue signal”, and thus they’re more likely to rush to judgement on an accused individual. But, does this argument bear any weight when you look at the facts? Using the national averages, about a fifth of female UVA students likely have been raped or sexually assaulted while attending the school. How many examples of male students being socially ostracized because of an allegation can you think of? I can think of only one: the Rolling Stone case. And that one ended with a full exoneration of the students involved as well as an apology by both the University and Rolling Stone. As far as I know, every UVA student in that specific case graduated and got a job without any serious consequences. Was their experience in the national spotlight horrible? I’m sure (though not as bad as being raped), but, that’s one case of anything resembling significant ostracization, one case in how many years with how many thousands of sexual assaults and rapes. 

So the fact remains that if someone you know is accused of sexual assault or rape, there is by no means a requirement for you to judge them by legal standards or give them “due process”. The real world is not a criminal trial and you are entitled to act on your own opinion. Give the accused a fair shake, yes, but at the end of the day, again, we are not in a court of law, so you have to act based on your own judgement of the situation. 

1. “Anyone Could Post Something on There”

It’s perfectly conceivable that some internet troll could send a fake accusation to this page just to cause trouble. I suspect the page’s creator vets claims in order to avoid this but even if she/he doesn’t, the calculus still doesn’t change. If someone were falsely accused on this page, that would be tragic (though unlikely). However, if this were to happen, the fault would not be on UVA Exposed. It would be on the university for not taking sexual misconduct cases seriously. I’m sure many of the victims on UVA Exposed would prefer to go through a humane, university process to seek justice for their abusers’ terrible acts, but the university doesn’t offer that. They instead offer a process which results in little to no consequences for abusers and leaves many victims wishing they hadn’t pursued justice at all. 

Now, one could argue that UVA’s inability to appropriately deal with sex crimes is still no excuse for a page which anonymously posts allegations. But, I again would point out that UVA Exposed is not a court, it’s a warning system. If the page was a way in which to administer mob justice on the accused, then I would be opposed to it as well, but it’s not that (see number four). It’s a network which allows victims to safely warn others of dangerous individuals in the UVA community. Certainly no criminal actions will come of these anonymous allegations, and I doubt there will be any serious social consequences either. Will some of the accused maybe lose some friends, or get dirty looks in their classes? I’m sure. But at the end of the day, if schools, employers, and clubs won’t take action based on credible, public allegations, why would they act any differently based on anonymous ones? For all the talk about the excesses of cancel culture, little real damage has been done to the accused parties. Last I checked, Kavanaugh is still a Supreme Court Justice, Joe Biden is still the Democratic Presidential nominee, and Donald Trump is still the President of the United fucking States despite credible, publicized rape allegations against each of them. And they have the entire country scrutinizing their actions. Do we seriously think that anonymous posts on a twitter account about random college kids will have any meaningful impact on their lives. As far as I can tell, everyone who has been accused on that page is doing fine. And even the highest profile accusation against basketball star Mamadi Diakite, has gone largely unnoticed and unpunished. Mamadi was accused three times of sexual assault, but I have yet to hear any response from the University, his coach, or any NBA Team representatives. He hasn’t even himself put out a statement because he knows he doesn’t need to. He will likely still get drafted into the NBA and go on to lead a fruitful life, just like everyone else who’s been accused. 

But still, I would agree that even if the social reaction against the accused was minor, it would still be horrible if someone were wrongly accused. And the answer to this is that we should individually and responsibly judge each allegation based on our knowledge of the accused, but that doesn’t mean we should take down the whole page. Let’s be honest, these informal victim networks have existed long before the internet or twitter. Women have long passed along warnings about certain abusive men to other women for protection. Yet, none of these allegations were fact-checked or held to the standards of due process. They consisted of comments like “Hey, I’ve heard bad things about that guy, watch out!” or “That guy tried to do x with me, watch out!”. Is it conceivable then that an untrue rumor about a guy was spread among these networks and negatively affected him socially? Absolutely, but at the end of the day that’s the price of free speech. False claims will occur and will negatively affect others, but the answer to this isn’t to shut down all unproven claims, it is, again, to evaluate each claim individually and even-handedly. 

1. “This is libel!” 

This claim is pretty easy to debunk as it's, for the most part, false. There’s a common misconception that in libel cases the burden of proof is on the accused to prove what they are saying is correct. However, the exact opposite is true. If you want to accuse someone of libel you have to not only prove what they’re saying is false (in a court of law), but you also have to prove that they knew what they were saying was false. In other words, you need to prove incorrectness and intent. It would be quite difficult, then, to sue UVA Exposed successfully for libel as you would not only have to prove that one of its allegations was false, but also prove that UVA Exposed knew it was false when they posted it. So, in other words, even if some of the accusations were incorrect, the owner of UVA Exposed is still almost certainly not committing libel. 

1. “This is mob justice!”

This is another common response to UVA Exposed which I imagine stems from the narrative rampant in conservative and liberal circles alike that social media “mobs” are exacting justice on hapless victims without bothering to give them a fair trial. As Nathan J. Robinson points out in an article for Current Affairs, the ideas of “cancel culture” is largely overblown. No matter how many times we hear about mobs cancelling this or that, the reality is that most of these “twitter storms” have little tangible consequences. But, I think it’s also important to push back on the idea that UVA Exposed and its followers are enacting “mob justice”.

It’s important, then, to define exactly what people mean when they say “mob justice”. First off, what is mob? In the sense of the word as used in everyday conversation, a mob is a group of people who act based on a group mentality instead of their own individual reasoning processes. Most typically a mob acts based on group emotion towards a common cause. Now, at first glance this definition of mob certainly sounds like UVA Exposed and its followers. After all, they are a group of people who share a common frustration towards a certain issue (in this case, sexual misconduct). But it would be, I think, mistaken to claim that followers or supporters of UVA Exposed have lost their “individual reasoning processes”. Granted there is no great measure of public opinion on the topic, but from the tweets I’ve seen about UVA Exposed as well as what I’ve heard in person, no one is saying that everyone accused on this page should be immediately ostracized without a second thought. Most people’s views are much more nuanced (and reasonable) than that. For instance, I’ve heard many people say that they’ll be careful around x person in the future but that they aren’t sure if they fully believe the accusation. Or they’ll say that they can believe x person did what they were accused of, but not y person. This doesn’t sound like the death of “individual reasoning” to me, in fact it sounds like the definition of it. Most people are evaluating each claim based on all the available evidence and acting accordingly. Are there some who would call for immediate and extreme punishment for everyone accused on that page? Probably. Though I haven’t met them yet. But, we shouldn’t miss the forest for the trees. A reasonable majority with a few extreme outliers is not a mob.

But what about the “justice” part of “mob justice”. Do proponents of UVA Exposed qualify for that? Well, to the best of my knowledge, when people refer to “mob justice”, they aren’t referring to actual moral or legal justice, but rather to punitive measures used by a mob which are usually reserved for traditional legal authorities. So, for example, in the case of mob lynchings in the American South, the mob used a means of punishment usually reserved for the government (the death penalty) and used it to seek revenge for their own racist grievances. But, it’s difficult to apply this idea of “mob justice” to the UVA Exposed supporters. For that to apply, they would have to be advocating some type of legal punishment without trial for the accused on the page. So, if supporters began to lock up the accused in private prisons without a trial I would agree that it’s mob justice. But that’s not what they’re doing. Most people aren’t even advocating social punishment for the accused, they are merely saying that the University should reform its processes for reporting and investigating sexual misconduct so that all parties involved can have a fair trial. 

So, not only are the followers and supporters of UVA Exposed not a mob, they are also not seeking mob justice in any way, shape or form. 

1. “Why are these accusers anonymous?”

I almost put this argument into the incel file, but I’ve heard it frequently enough where I think I should address it anyways. But, seriously, if you don’t know why women and men are afraid to come forward with sexual misconduct allegations by now, do some research. 

Women who come forward with sexual misconduct allegations (especially rape and assault) are consistently attacked and/or shamed. This has been going on in the public spotlight since the beginning of time, from Anita Hill to Jennifer Flowers to Christine Blaise Ford. Even in the supposedly pro-MeToo Democratic Party, an accusation against Joe Biden was met with intense victim blaming (to the point of calling the accuser, Tara Read, a foreign agent of Putin). And it's even worse in less publicized cases. University students especially are likely to face some degree of ostracization after coming forward with allegations. And for those of you who can’t fathom that in the age of #MeToo and #TimesUp victim shaming is still a thing, read this heartbreaking testimony from a young woman from a college in Texas:

“I was raped at a party by a popular football player,” she told me. “When I reported it to the police it ended up being my word against his. And I became the town pariah. Everyone at school hated me and constantly made comments like, ‘How could you accuse Randy of doing such a thing!’ ‘You’re ugly—he can get any girl he wants, why would he choose you?’ ‘You’re just trying to hurt him—why would you do such a thing?’ It got so bad I had to drop out of school. But Randy just kept on playing football. By the time the case went to court, I couldn’t even step outside my house. There was a mistrial because half of the people on the jury supported Randy. My family had to move out of town so I could get a new start.”

And this is not an uncommon occurrence. Allegations are often met with a hostile reaction from University communities, especially when a popular student or athlete is involved. Even the university police are not immune from victim blaming. But the damaging community reactions are not always so blatant, Melissa Nipper wrote an excellent paper on how seemingly innocuous “rape myths” frequently and subconsciously result in more subtle forms victim blaming and victim shaming, where the community isn’t so much attacking the victim as ignoring or dismissing them. And there are many more personal, psychological reasons why victims don’t come forward which I encourage everyone to look at if you’re unfamiliar with the topic. 

Research aside though, I think if everyone takes a couple seconds to put themselves in the shoes of victims, they can quickly understand why accusers are scared to come forward and sometimes choose to remain anonymous.

Conclusion: 

I’ll end by reiterating an important fact about UVA Exposed: it is not a guillotine or a tool to socially execute random men, it is a place where women can safely voice their experiences of sexual misconduct in order to warn other students of dangerous individuals or environments. People need to stop framing pages like UVA Exposed as ways to “get men” and rather start treating them for what they are, informal networks to help warn people against the abusers in a community. This twitter account is not trying to tear men down, it is trying to lift women up. No one is saying that you have to believe every allegation on the page. I can completely understand how that would be challenging for some people, especially in the black and brown community. But when we say “Believe all Women”, we are merely asking that you give every woman the same level of baseline trust afforded to everyone else in society. 

And to all the scared men out there, I understand that you’re terrified of seeing your name on that page, but you have to understand that women (and men) are just as scared of being raped and sexually assaulted. It’s horrible that an innocent man could be anonymously accused of rape on this account. But it’s also horrible that hundreds of women at UVA are raped and sexually assaulted each year without any punishment for their abusers. Not to mention that these victims can’t even go public with their stories without being shamed or silenced. And the fact that the University - and the UVA community as a whole - regularly treats these victims’ stories with widespread dismissal and derision is what makes these messy twitter pages necessary in the first place.

So, if you’re really “down with the cause” how about you stop attacking UVA Exposed and instead do something meaningful like helping to create a better environment for survivors or pressuring UVA to create a better response system for sexual misconduct. And if you’re successful, maybe one day there won’t be a need for pages like UVA Exposed. But, until then, long live UVA Exposed!

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P.S. If by chance the creator of the UVA Exposed page reads this article, you’re doing amazing work! Stay strong, stay healthy and stay at it if you can!