What are the ethics of outing your rapist? That's a question being debated around the internet after a "New Orleans beauty guru" posted a video on YouTube, saying that her father raped and abused her repeatedly from the time she was four years old until she was 13. She names him and his wife, and says he physically abused her, her brother and her mother for years. Her father was never tried for raping her, let alone convicted. He denies the allegations. Her mother was granted a divorce from him in 2000 on the grounds of "habitual cruel and inhuman treatment".

She isn't the first woman to name and shame the person she says assaulted her. Savannah Dietrich, a 17-year-old girl from Kentucky, was sexually assaulted by two classmates while she was passed out; the boys took photos and circulated them around school. Dietrich pressed charges, and the boys agreed to a plea bargain that gave them a relatively lenient sentence. Dietrich then ignored an order to keep quiet about the case and tweeted the boys' names. She faced potential jail time for doing so.

Other women have named their rapists on Facebook, on Twitter, on Tumblr and on other sites. Every time, concern springs up: isn't this vigilante justice? Aren't accused criminals innocent until proven guilty?

In a US court of law, yes – but while we live under the rule of law, we don't live in a court. Outside of the courtroom, people are entitled to their own narratives about their own lives. Concerns about the burden of proof and vigilantism are sometimes legitimate, but those same concerns don't seem to arise when someone says, "my super broke into my apartment and stole my stereo" or "my grandmother's caretaker has been pilfering money from her purse." There's no admonishment to withhold personal judgment or not take action; there's no suggestion that the accuser is probably lying or that she should keep her mouth shut until a jury of her peers finds the alleged criminal guilty.

Protection for criminal defendants is crucial, and so is protection for the falsely accused and wrongly convicted. Putting the burden of proving guilt on the prosecution is a strength of the US legal system. But the video blogger is on YouTube, not in a court room. Her father isn't facing the curtailment of his liberties by the state. She isn't posting anonymously while naming her alleged assailant; she's using her full name and attaching her accusations to her own face and reputation. To suggest that she can't or shouldn't tell her own story – to suggest that she has to turn her story over to a court before we can accept her word as her own truth – effectively muzzles her and many other women. It clips our agency. It puts our own narrative in the hands of someone who presumably knows better.

Attempts to tell rape survivors that their experience isn't "true" and that supposedly impartial groups of men know better has a long history. Rape of certain kinds of women – slaves in ancient Rome, for example – was a property crime against the slave owner, not a violent crime against the woman. The enslaved woman's experience of her own assault was irrelevant; what mattered was whether her owner believed his goods were damaged. The Roman woman Lucretia killed herself after being raped to make it clear she was virtuous and didn't consent to sex; The Christian theologian, St Augustine, later wrote that Lucretia must have been "so enticed by her own desire that she consented to the act". How did he know better than Lucretia herself?

Fast forward several centuries: marital rape wasn't fully outlawed in the US until 1993 – there was simply no legal mechanism to make "true" the experience of women who were raped by their husbands. Rape shield laws protect women who report assault from having their own sexual history used in court to discredit them and bring evidentiary rules for sexual assault in line with those for other crimes; they weren't implemented in the US until a few decades ago.

Before that, the truth of a rape accusation hinged not on the woman's own testimony, but on how "good" a woman a jury believed her to be. The general requirement for a witness to the assault was similarly abolished barely a generation ago. Until very recently, the issue of consent wasn't relevant in rape cases; bigger questions were how virtuous the victim was and how strongly she resisted the attack. In other words, when it comes to rape, women have historically been told that our own truths aren't true and their own experiences have to be validated by a legal system built and run by men.

The video blogger and women like her challenge that model. They own their own stories and don't agree that their narratives have to be corroborated by the legal system to be factual. In a country where more than half of rapes are never reported to police and only 3% of rapists ever spend a day in jail, that's powerful.

Of course, not everyone who tells a story is telling the truth. And the danger in naming and shaming alleged criminals is that people do sometimes lie. While women don't lie about rape any more than people lie about being victimised by other crimes – and in fact rape is one of the least likely crimes to be reported to police – there is a justified concern over the small number of dishonest people. False accusations can ruin lives, which is part of the reason why our legal system requires substantial investigation and an "innocent until proven guilty" standard for criminal cases. Outside of the criminal system, in the US, there are legal safeguards like libel and defamation laws that give someone who is unfairly maligned recourse in civil court. And in the US and most other jurisdictions, truth is a defence against defamation – so if her father were to sue her for allegedly defaming him, he would have to show that her accusations are false.

I have no idea if the video blogger's story is factual, and the point of this column isn't to determine whether or not her accusations are true or false. The point is to say that speaking out about our experiences of sexual assault takes significant courage and that there are important legal safeguards for the small number of cases in which accusations are false.

Rape remains woefully under-reported and shamefully stigmatised. Narrating our own histories without anyone else's approval or endorsement is what initially brought sexual assault out of the shadows. Continuing to speak the truth is what keeps the light on.