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The well-meaning progressive mantra today is to “believe the victims” of sexual assault, in hopes more of them will draw the considerable courage necessary to come forward. Twitter has been awash in random punters “believing” three strangers’ accounts of being attacked by another total stranger, Jian Ghomeshi. Yet many progressives also believe total stranger Julian Assange is unquestionably innocent of any sexual wrongdoing in Sweden. And many unquestioningly believe in total stranger Brent Hawkes’ innocence as well.

As flawed as the Canadian justice system is, I trust it properly to sort out horrible situations far more than I trust human beings and their weird brains and Twitter accounts

Believing a friend’s or a spouse’s side of a story needn’t be an insult or a disincentive to the person telling the other side. It will hardly come as a surprise to that person. And as we have been reminded throughout the Ghomeshi trial — not least by those in the “believe the victims” camp — our memories are pretty crap. People can honestly disagree on versions of events in which jail time hangs in the balance.

But the believe-the-victims movement invites us not just to believe people we don’t know when they accuse other people we don’t know; it invites us to broadcast that belief. If we all started doing that for every trial that made the news, declining to do it for one trial or another might, in fact, become an insult to the accuser and a disincentive to other victims coming forward — especially since, as we saw initially with Ghomeshi, so many are inclined to believe the powerful and the popular.

If we were capable of applying a believe-the-victims principle dispassionately, even when it impugns our friends and families and heroes, then it might be theoretically defensible. But we clearly are not.

As such, I follow a radical policy: if I don’t know the accuser or the accused or much of anything, for sure, about the circumstances, then I keep any ironclad beliefs about guilt or innocence that I might have to myself. As flawed as the Canadian justice system is, I trust it properly to sort out horrible situations far more than I trust human beings and their weird brains and Twitter accounts.

• Email: cselley@nationalpost.com | Twitter: cselley