Rape and sexual assault are heinous crimes: grave offenses that should carry with them reciprocally harsh penalties. These issues were tackled recently by the “Consent is Sexy” campaign which graced The Greyhound’s cover last week. The message is solid: no means no, ensure that your partner consents and foster an environment where victims feel safe to come forward.

I feel the need to make note of these relatively uncontroversial points because I fear what I say next will not be so well received. Ultimately, “Consent is Sexy” and initiatives like it are, completely unintentionally, “empowering” women at the expense of men’s basic legal rights. Admittedly these are strong words, but they are words I am prepared to defend.

I can already hear in the distance accusations of “rape apologist,” “misogynist,” “victim blamer” and the like. I assure you I am none of these things. I am not going to trivialize rape, and I am not going to shift the onus of responsibility onto rape victims. Moreover, I am certainly not going to be unfair: I believe wholeheartedly that the people involved in the “Consent is Sexy” campaign at our fine university are sincere in their desire to make the world a better place. But I fear that the initiative and others like it make the falsification of rape easier to get away with. This isn’t a result of any ill-will, but happens by virtue of these movements’ context among hundreds of other movements that create the impression that rape is more prevalent than it is, making distinguishing genuine rape claims from false ones more challenging.

So are there really so many false accusations of rape that it’s a problem worth talking about? Absolutely. A 1994 study by Eugene Kanin revealed that 41 percent of rape cases in a particular city were false allegations. Only cases in which the victim admitted they were lying were considered “false allegations.” As the report’s methodology explains, “[The victim] is the sole agent who can say that the rape charge is false.” Kanin goes on: “These false charges were able to serve three major functions for the complainants: providing an alibi, a means of gaining revenge, and a platform for seeking attention/sympathy. This tripartite model resulted from the complainants’ own verbalizations during recantation and does not constitute conjecture.”

One may object to Kanin’s findings on the basis that they do not reflect the whole country by sampling a “small metropolitan community.” But even turning to the FBI’s more conservative, nationally comprehensive estimate of the false rape allegation rate, we’re still left with a staggering 8 percent. Alarmingly, the average false allegation rate for other index crimes is only 2 percent.

My argument that women lie about rape sometimes may sound appalling, as if it could open the door for genuine victims to be accused of lying. I have two issues with this sort of outrage. Firstly, if people are skeptical of a genuine victim’s allegation of rape, there is no one to blame save for the “victims” who falsified their rape stories. Secondly, I am personally not skeptical of rape claims. This makes statistical sense—only a minority of allegations are false—but also comes from my being a well-adjusted person with empathy. If anyone told me they were raped, I would immediately offer them all the support that I could provide.

The trouble is, the legal system is equally unskeptical with regard to rape, and accused men are practically presumed guilty from the word go. Juries are instructed that medical evidence is not necessary to prove a rape occurred, and that no witnesses are necessarily required other than the alleged victim. Unlike any other criminal charge, the de facto burden of proof is thrust on the defendant to prove his innocence, instead of on the state to prove his guilt.

Demanding evidence for the crime of rape isn’t “victim blaming,” it’s basic judicial fairness. A man falsely convicted of rape may spend the rest of his life in jail. A woman who is discovered to have made up the attack rarely faces any charges, or gets sentenced to only a few months or a couple of years under probation or minimum-security prison.

Look no further than the Duke Lacrosse scandal. The three athletes who were falsely accused of raping Crystal Mangum face public ridicule, threats and harassment to this day. Some of these threats of violence are directed at their families. On the other side of this coin is Mangum herself, who had already made and retracted a dubious rape claim in the past. She walked away from her destructive, bold-faced lie no worse for wear and as a free woman (that is, until she murdered her boyfriend in 2011).

There is nothing inherently wrong with campaigns like “Consent is Sexy,” but by perpetuating the meme that rape is some omnipresent hypercommonality, they tip the scales of justice toward the reckless assignment of blame. It is tragically easy to ruin lives with false rape claims, and while we decry the abhorrent crime of rape for what it is, we also must not condone the carte blanche presumption of male guilt in court.