Last Thursday, a gaggle of women demonstrated outside a building in Virginia where US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was speaking. Shouting slogans and brandishing placards that declared De Vos and Donald Trump were “standing up for rapists”, the women were protesting against DeVos’s determination to mitigate the excesses of the rape panic that has gripped American university campuses; and, also, they were bellowing their opposition to De Vos’s promise to insist on fair hearings and due process for anybody accused of sexual misdemeanours. Similar protests were repeated a thousand times on Twitter under the hashtag #StopBetsy.

There's no evidence that DeVos took any notice of that predictable and wearisome feminist hyperbole; but, for the first time, it looks as if women’s voices coming from an entirely different quarter may actually have had more influence on the Secretary's – and thus the government's – thinking and policies.

Families Advocating for Campus Equality (FACE) was founded in 2013 by three mothers of sons who had been falsely accused of sexual misconduct at their respective colleges. Largely organised and run by women (even though the victims of the injustice they are campaigning against are mostly men), FACE has built a formidable legal case and established itself as a serious political presence in the US. Earlier this year, representatives of FACE – including their co-president, the steely California lawyer Cynthia Garrett – had a lengthy discussion in person with Betsy DeVos. After that meeting, Garrett was asked by Candice Jackson (the Education Secretary’s equalities enforcer) to provide a written opinion on recommendations concerning campus trials drawn up by the American Bar Association. In addition, FACE supplied other research, recommendations and stories from close to 100 of the families with whom they are in touch.