Known alleged rape victims should not immediately be believed

I'll provide quotes from my opponent in italics, and respond accordingly. However, when Person C hears the testimony of Person B regarding the rape, they do need to immediately believe it in order to have cause to investigate further. -DStallman I don't see how belief in the claim is necessary for investigation. Really, you just need to not have the belief that the claim is false. One can hold a middle ground position, one in which they neither believe nor disbelieve the person. It's sort of like how with belief in god you can have a theist, agnostic, or atheist. The second, of course, is one that neither believes nor disbelieves in a god. The claim that they raped them, in itself, is reason to investigate and a belief that they did, I don't think is necessary. Perhaps my opponent can explain more fully that it is necessary. I mean, going back to the theist, agnostic, and atheist analogy, you don't need to believe in a god in order to investigate to see if there is one. Similarly, you don't need to believe Person A raped person B in order to investigate it. Believing a victim does not necessarily go against "innocent until proven guilty," as believing a victim's claims does not necessarily equate to believing that someone is guilty; it just means that you think the victim's account is credible and thus you want to investigate just to be sure. -DStallman Well, I think by definition it does mean the former. It's pretty simply logic: if you believe that the claims of the alleged victim are true, then you believe that the alleged perpetrator is guilty of the crime. One can't simultaneously believe the person is not guilty or innocent, while believing in the claim that they did the crime. Therefore, while the repercussions of guilt should not immediately be levied on the accused person, the claims of the victim should be given validity until they can be disproved. Alright, I'll define validity because it might be important, I suspect my opponent has no objections to this definition, if they do, we may want to go to the comments and settle the definition: validity is "The quality of being logically or factually sound; soundness or cogency"[2]. So, to give validity to the claim that someone raped the alleged victim, means you're accepting it as something factually sound, or essentially that it is a fact. When someone accepts something as fact, they put it in their perception of the alleged perpetrator. In a study conducted by Ap Dijksterhuis and Ad van Knippenberg, it was found that our perceptions heavily influence our behavior, and believing in a stereotype or something about someone, will inevitably affect how we treat that person, regardless if we are conscious of it or not[3] Therefore, if someone starts to give validity to a claim by accepting it as factual before any evidence is taken into account, it does often result in the one who believes the claim, to treat the other person differently, often negatively if the claim is a negative claim and positively if the claim is something positive. If the alleged rapist is innocent of the crime, then the one who believes it, is inevitably giving them unfair attitudes, behavior, etc. So, the repercussions of guilt, as you put it, are still likely to be applied to the alleged perpetrator, even if they are innocent simply because a relative/friend believes the claim of the other relative/friend that they did it. This logic would also apply to when someone claims someone did something good. When one hear ssomeone has done something good, one is more likely to treat them better, which could be unfounded and unfair because they may not have actually done that good thing. While I don't see a problem exactly, with treating someone good even if they didn't do a good thing, treating someone badly because one believes they did something wrong, is a problem if it wasn't confirmed that they did it. Over all, I still think it is safer in life to neither believe nor disbelieve claims of people unless you see evidence. Sources [2] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com... [3] http://www.communicationcache.com...