The past few days have been remarkably demoralising for anti-rape activists, and that’s really saying something in a field pretty much defined by exhaustion and nausea. In case you missed it, or are simply bewildered by the labyrinthine switchbacks, I’ll try to sum up. A few weeks ago, Rolling Stone magazine published a longform reported story about rape on American college campuses, specifically the University of Virginia. One of the central accounts in the piece came from a woman called Jackie, who claimed she was raped by a group of UVA fraternity brothers in a premeditated, horrific three-hour ordeal. The piece got a lot of traction; readers were understandably appalled.

Then, last Friday, the magazine posted a foul, mealy mouthed “apology” (which has since been updated multiple times, as RS editors play whackamole with their well-deserved backlash), in which they admitted they had failed to fulfill basic journalistic standards in reporting Jackie’s story – including denying her requests to retract her interview, despite her fear of retaliation – and had since discovered some “discrepancies” in her account. Therefore, they said, their “trust in her was misplaced”.

The result was swift, frightening and predictable. Jackie became an anti-feminist rallying point – incontrovertible “proof” that women maliciously (or recreationally, even) lie about rape to ruin men’s lives, and that “rape culture” is nothing but hysterical feminist propaganda. Never mind that the “discrepancies” in Jackie’s story don’t “prove” anything at all – they could very easily be the product of trauma, or the natural elasticity of memory. Never mind that Jackie’s friends did confirm that they believe something horrible happened to her that night, even if the exact details of her experience aren’t clear. Never mind that Jackie didn’t publicly name any specific perpetrator, and that she tried to back out of the story altogether. Never mind that if you know five women, you know at least one who’s been sexually violated.

Jackie has since had her real name and photo released on Twitter, with a loose coalition of GamerGaters, 4channers, professional misogynists, and garden-variety rightwingers publicly plotting blackmail and revenge. These gleeful abusers claim to be the “real” anti-rape activists, because “false rape accusations” harm “real” victims. And what helps “real” victims, apparently, is the threat of this roiling, roaring ocean of harassment, abuse, death threats and invasion of privacy that will descend if you fail to recall the details of your traumatic violation clearly enough to satisfy some teenage 4channer. Or if you’re not the “right” kind of victim (sober, demure, white, abstinent) with the “right” kind of perpetrator (scary stranger, scary alley). Rape doesn’t really work like that. Rape isn’t so simple.

In the summer of 2014, I founded an advice blog called I Believe You/It’s Not Your Fault in response to the questions I was starting to field from my soon-to-be-teenaged soon-to-be stepdaughter. It’s awkward and sometimes painful to acknowledge, but our kids begin dealing with some real stuff – sexual assault, disordered eating, substance abuse – in themselves and among their peers, years before we want them to or think they “should”.

Beyond dispensing constructive advice, the site is intended as an unassailable rock of solidarity that we can point to in sickening cultural moments like this one – when Lena Dunham is being sued for writing about being raped in her own memoir, and RS’s editors threw a rape victim to the misogynist horde in an attempt to distract from their own shoddy journalism – and say, see? See? These are our stories. We are not lying. We are real. We are here. We need help.

Because those words – I believe you, it’s not your fault – are aggressively, ubiquitously suppressed in our culture. We’ve constructed seemingly infinite incentives for victims to keep silent (you drank too much, you wore too little, you’ll destroy the family, you’ll ruin the fun, your entire sexual history will be dredged and questioned and vivisected ... in front of your grandma) and pretty much no compelling reasons to report, nor functional support systems in the aftermath. According to RAINN, the rate of unreported sexual assaults is as high as 60%, while 97% of rapists will never be convicted. So why bother? It’s just going to hurt more and go nowhere.

It’s a sentiment I hear over and over from our contributors, particularly in their stories about college: “One roommate told me bluntly that the man in my bed talked about wanting to fuck me and so she pushed him in my room and closed the door. She tells me all of this with a smile on her face. I smile back. I’m not sure what I said back to her. I blamed myself. I felt slutty and cheap.”

“While at a frat party with friends, I was raped. When it was all over, I found my friends and I kept partying. I felt like I was dissociated from myself. I never told anyone, I never went to the police.”

“No police, no rape kits, not even a report to the administration. Nothing. We just pretended it didn’t happen because no one wanted to acknowledge the ugliness of it. It had already happened and couldn’t be undone so what was the point?”

The idea that – as pandering anti-feminist goon Christina Hoff Sommers asserted over the weekend – university campuses have a “false accusation culture” is as ludicrous as the idea that Sommers herself is a feminist. Not only do we not have a “false accusation culture” anywhere on earth, we don’t have an accusation culture at all. Most victims never say a word. The price is too high. And, if their joy at the outing, harassment and supposed “discrediting” of Jackie is any indication, Sommers and her cohort would like to keep it that way.

Women’s sexual autonomy is inextricable from our political autonomy, our humanity inextricable from our power. The system, as usual, is working as designed.