I feel like what you're saying takes away the agency of victims and the necessity of believing them and their testimony being part of getting them justice. My word should have been enough to put the man who sexually assaulted me in jail. It wasn't. And you're saying that's okay. It's not.
It’s really, deeply shitty that a lot of people end up escaping justice because of modern evidentiary standards. There’s a lot we can do to improve that - ending the rape kit backlog, developing better and more empathetic resources for survivors, etc. But there are two things on which I will continue to stand firm:
- legal innocence until proven guilt, and
- proven guilt beyond a reasonable doubt
Due to the nature of domestic abuse generally, it’s often really really difficult to establish guilt beyond said reasonable doubt. I do not begrudge any victim one iota of their pain and outrage over that. But erring on the side of innocence is really, really important. There’s a reason multiple societies through history have relied on Blackstone’s formulation. Establishing a precedent of imprisonment based on one person’s word may be satisfying in the moment, and it may occasionally have a just outcome (as in the case of your abuser), but it is a scary precedent to set in a society. Once invoked, it will almost always favor the powerful.
Worse yet: it favors the unscrupulous.
If you tell everyone “you can send someone to jail with an accusation of assault, no questions asked, we’ll trust you” – who do you think is going to take you up on that, most of the time? How long before the victims get completely drowned out by unscrupulous folks trying to dispose of their personal enemies?
Any social system you set up – of any kind – is going to be gamed by hordes of people trying to abuse it in the worst way. It has to be robust against that, and if it isn’t, it will quickly devolve into a tool of chaos and destruction.