“Well I tried my best
but it may not be enough
And times have been so tough
that I can’t tell you”
Formed in 1967, Fleetwood Mac took the combined names of drummer Mick Fleetwood and bass player John McVie to create its name. The group sold more than 120 million albums and recorded a total of 17 studio albums in an illustrious career that has now led to multiple Hall of Fame inductions and lifetime achievement awards.
“Believe Me” was a song that was never singled from the group’s eighth and final album recorded in Britain, “Mystery to Me.” The song was written, and lead vocals were performed, by Christine McVie, the wife of the band’s namesake bassist. Stevie Nicks joined the group the next year, and the song never resonated with her, so it was rarely performed on subsequent tours, even when Christine rejoined the group later, after she and John divorced.
The lyrics to the song are simplistic, with two lyric stanzas that are repeated, with minimal alteration, three times within the piece. Those lyrics raise the question of a partner whether he would believe his girlfriend/wife/partner, or if he would continue to distrust her.
While the lyrics don’t refer to it, so many of the phrases in this song struck me as reassurances that I’ve given to female friends over the years when they revealed to me that they had been assaulted, in any manner.
This year marks 25 years of National Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and the theme presented by the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC) for April is “25 years stronger: looking back, moving forward.”
The issue begins early, and a few years ago, I covered a number of sexual harassment complaints that were nothing short of assault being committed in area school districts without serious ramifications for the offenders. Unfortunately, the victims and their parents/guardians were told, essentially, that “boys will be boys” and a very mild punishment that essentially included recess being restricted would be the end of consequences.
When that is the attitude, it’s no wonder that recent statistics indicate that roughly 10 percent of college males attempt or commit a rape, and as many as 45 percent of college males have committed an unwanted sexual misconduct of some variety.
When I was in college, the first steps were being taken to quell the prevalence of sexual danger on campus, with the installation of call boxes throughout the downtown Minneapolis campus I attended that connected directly to the University of Minnesota Police Department, which was a precinct of the larger Minneapolis Police Department.
In talking with one of the UMPD officers later in my college career, I found out that as many as one quarter of calls that came in were from male parties, seeking UMPD assistance and protection to get home because they did not feel safe on campus. While the numbers for females assaulted on campus are high (more than 25% of college females graduate college having suffered a sexual assault), men are also victims, with five to seven percent of college men graduating having suffered an assault.
The number of assaults on campus at Minnesota drastically reduced with the efforts taken by the administration there, but the issue begins much sooner. With middle school-aged daughters in my household, I hear about comments and acts made toward my daughters and their female classmates on a daily basis.
The unfortunate thing is how many women have been the victims of unchecked aggressiveness that very well could be handled at a young age if we simply believe the young women when they tell an adult.
Already, the number of sexual assaults of all varieties (from verbal assault to groping all the way to rape) that are reported are certain to be less than half of all occurrences, and some blind studies have reported that number to be as low as 17 percent of actual occurrences ever being reported to an authority figure, let alone to police.
The major reason? Lack of accountability ranks second among respondents to a recent NSVRC poll, but the overwhelming response in that poll, with more than 60 percent of respondents identifying it as a primary cause for not reporting, was not being believed.
My college days were spent in a world before the proliferation of smartphones and artificial intelligence. Those tools have many, many good things that they offer the world, but they also now deliver significantly more avenues for someone to be victimized, and potentially even without their knowledge and certainly without their consent.
There are certainly those who will say something to the effect of, “But if we believe all accusers, the damage can be done to someone who is innocent simply from an accusation!”
In part, that’s on me and my profession. Sexual misconduct allegations are significant drivers of attention. You can generate a lot of social media views, sell papers, bring viewers and listeners to a news program by covering a salacious sexual accusation that has been made. The big responsibility is to ensure that emphasis is placed on the fact that this is an accusation and all defendants are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. That won’t stop those who show up in comment sections with wood chipper gifs, but it is one thing to ensure that an accusation is handled properly.
The other side is that if an accusation is found to be false, prosecute for it. Of course, that requires a full investigation of the accusation to show that it is actually false, and those full investigations are often dropped somewhere in the middle, which is why many victims fear even bringing up anything because the accusation can have ramifications for the alleged perpetrator, but then the case isn’t properly handled and a victim is left with no conviction of the perpetrator, damage to that person’s reputation and potentially a job loss, and now the perpetrator is free to enact retribution.
Those laws for false accusation are on the books already, so what should be done is that any accusation should be investigated with the same fervor that a murder investigation would receive. An in-depth investigation like that would often lead to a higher conviction rate because more corroborating evidence would be found, but in the cases where the accuser is making an intentionally false accusation, the evidence would then be there to pursue that as well, giving the victim protection while the legal process played out and setting a high bar for any retribution against the victim for a false accusation without viable proof that is the case.
This topic is uncomfortable. It’s scary. And I’ve talked far too long on it already, yet I’ve barely scratched the surface. For more information, please look into NSVRC.org or connect with multiple organizations in Huron that do an outstanding job working with victims, from safe houses to our state’s attorney’s office.
More than anything, start with believing and go from there…
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