After Jimmy Savile's decades-long campaign of rape and sexual violence was finally exposed, there was disbelief that it could have been covered up for so long. It was not just that he was shielded by an establishment that courted him; an NSPCC report found that survivors of his abuse were "ignored, not believed, laughed at", and even told they should be flattered by the attention. There was a renewed understanding of the need to support and believe survivors who spoke out, or so it seemed.

But after a series of high-profile rape trials that have delivered "not guilty" verdicts, culminating in Nigel Evans' acquittal on nine charges last week, it is the acquitted who are seen as the new victims. "The police and the CPS are dragging the names of decent, honest, innocent people through the dirt on a weekly basis," wrote one Telegraph columnist. "And it has to stop."

MPs led by David Davis are on the offensive against the Crown Prosecution Service, and there are renewed calls to grant anonymity to alleged rapists, a privilege no one proposes for accused murderers and which would radically reduce the chances of other victims coming forward. The police are overcompensating because of their failures over Savile, so the new narrative goes, and this overzealousness needs to be driven back.

This represents a troublesome loss of perspective. No one who is rational can look dispassionately at the facts and conclude that false accusations are the real problem when it comes to rape. Official statistics suggest that 97,000 people are raped a year, yet on average only 15,670 become recorded crimes and, in 2012-13, there were just 2,333 convictions. A CPS review last year found that, over a 17-month period, prosecutions for false allegations made up just 0.6% of rape cases.

Neither are these exceptions always clear-cut: the Women Against Rape campaign helped one survivor who was being prosecuted for a false accusation after she said she was raped by a man who ejaculated on her T-shirt, but no DNA evidence was subsequently found. After the case was reinvestigated and sperm was indeed discovered, the charges against her were dropped. Rather than false accusations, what should really chill us is this: in most cases in Britain in 2014, to rape is to get away with it.

The revelations since the Evans trial that a third of parliamentary workers have experienced sexual harassment expose far more than the workings of the Westminster bubble. Much has been said about the lack of a human resources department, the problematic one-on-one relationship between a researcher and an MP, and so on. It afflicts other countries too: in Finland a third of women employees have reported sexual harassment; and last week a US congresswoman demanded lawmakers take compulsory sexual harassment training programmes after a Republican was filmed kissing an aide. But it all underlines that sexual harassment, assault and rape are the products of unchecked hierarchies of power – and male-dominated power at that.

Granted, the specific opportunities for an abusive MP are clear. There has been an explosion in the number of young researchers over the past 25 years, and they are generally ambitious, wary of taking actions that might sabotage their career and dependent on the patronage of parliamentarians.

"People just think to themselves, I should keep my mouth shut, what else can I do if I want to get on?" one former researcher who was sexually assaulted tells me. But, as Women Against Rape's Lisa Longstaff puts it: "Where people are in power, there will be sexual assault and rape." That goes for other workplaces: schools, religious organisations, asylum detention centres and so on. It may also include forms of harassment that are not prosecutable offences: it is possible to make someone feel like a piece of meat and remain within the boundaries of the law.

We know that sexual harassment and violence is mostly directed at women. The Everyday Sexism group has been cataloguing the leering, belittling, threats and gropes that thousands of women suffer every day. The implicit message to women is, whether you are a cabinet minister or a hospital cleaner you are nothing more than a sex object subordinate to men.

But the parliamentary revelations demonstrate that men are also sexually harassed, mostly by other men: four out of 10 male researchers report such harassment. A recent study of US soldiers reported that men could find sexual harassment more distressing because they had little experience of dealing with it.

And then there is the all-too-taboo subject of men being raped. It is estimated that 72,000 men suffer sexual attacks each year, but they rarely come forward. A still suffocating form of masculinity doesn't help: male rape survivors tell me of a sense of shame. "Sexual assaults remove power and control, and when it happens to men there is a loss of a sense of 'maleness'," says Duncan Craig of Survivors Manchester and himself a rape survivor.

We are so far from dealing with the harassment, assault and rape that trashes thousands of lives. The aftermath of Savile gave hope that if survivors came forward they might finally be listened to and believed. It would be a tragedy indeed if that legacy was undermined.