I've been here for a while and I've been thinking about an old experiment I did a couple years ago. Hypothetical scenario: Ten men are about to be sent to prison. One of them is innocent. What do you choose: do you let all ten men go or do you put them all behind bars?

When I asked this question of people, all but one said: "Lock them all up". They gave various justifications for it, like: "It can easily be sorted out later" "It'll be cleared up" "The guy's guilty or he wouldn't be on trial", but the fact remains that they were willing to lock an innocent man up rather than let the guilty people go free.

At the time, this was simply an idle experiment I came up with because I was bored. However, it's given me a lot of insight as to why wrongful convictions happen. There are enough people willing to convict even if there is some doubt in their mind, because after all, we can't let a dangerous man go free. Justice has to be done; someone needs to pay for the crime.

This is especially relevant when it comes to sex crimes, which can enrage us beyond all sense of reason. Risk of a wrongful conviction is highest when there's strong public outcry. In the words of Alan Dershowitz, rape is considered such a heinous crime than even innocence is not a defense. Most vigilante killings involve sex crimes; women in danger from predatory men was the prime motivation for black men being lynched.

False accusations are a men's rights issue for a damned good reason. It has nothing to do with whether they're rare or common (with "rare" being a relative term) but because the consequences are potentially horrific. You can lose everything: your job, friends, family... even your life. And dismissing them as so rare as to be practically nonexistent or to claim: "If you're not guilty, you have nothing to worry about'; or worse, claim that falsely accused men can gain from the experience shows an appalling lack of empathy for male suffering.