It’s over a year since the #MeToo scandal of sexual harassment broke. It has shaken up our culture and relationships in so many ways over the past 12 months. It isn’t going away, either, as the allegations about Sir Philip Green this week have shown. But it has now reached a point where it could either improve or severely damage the way in which serious allegations are dealt with justly.
The whole movement has been extremely messy. This was inevitable, given the number of people, mostly women, who have had to put up with being ignored or belittled when they complain even about serious sexual assault, let alone more subtle harassment. As with older sex scandals, a lot of the allegations burst out into the press and onto social media because the complainants felt they had nowhere else to air their allegations. In some cases, they had tried to complain and had been rebuffed.
The problem with this sudden flow of information was that every allegation was treated as credible as soon as it was tweeted.
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