women who come forward with complaints of sexual assault and harassment must be supported and believed.
-Justin Trudeau
This really cuts to the heart of why the weaponized #metoo is such a terrible thing. Women who come forward must be believed, unless the accused is on "your" side. Real and well documented cases of real abuse are ignored, because they might hurt "your" side, while even vague and unsubstantiated accusations are hurled at the "other" side.
So if you are a real victim of abuse, what happens? Do you attempt to lodge a complaint anyway, knowing that one side will jump aboard and expand it like a balloon, while the other side will dismiss it as being a partisan attack? For the accused, how can they possibly proceed in a situation where all the protections of the Rule of Law have been abandoned?
And the situational nature of this goes beyond sexual abuse, what about domestic abuse or "honour killings"? Similarly FGM is "off the table" for discussion. You can probably think of other issues which are no longer spoken of, and people who try are shouted down, "disqualified" or "deplatformed".
And if rational discussion os no longer permitted (or even punished-look at "compelled speech" or how "Human Rights" tribunals operate), it dies not mean these issues go away, only that they now fester below the surface, ready to explode at an unexpected instant and probably in ways that the vast majority of people (regardless of their positions) will not approve of.
So the only way to get this under control before it destroys our high productivity, High Trust society is to insist that the same rules and same protections apply to
everyone (the Rule of Law). Ignore "whataboutism", focus on the known facts and what can be verified. If you are unfortunately a victim, you MUST swear out a complaint right away and have forensic evidence gathered: "he said/she said" is no way to resolve an issue.
If we as a people collectively insist upon this standard of behaviour, and apply it to every case, regardless of if it is Justin Trudeau or Justin Smith, then we have a chance of salvaging something out of this mess.