That is: if you create a system in which a small number of people can get someone else in prison, or to take a large amount of their property, the narrow-view (not society-wide or political) correct response is to isolate yourself/only meet others in public, in full view of others.
A “denunciation rule” is when the testimony of a certain number of people establishes a fact in some forum. The most basic such rule is when a police officer testifies on a traffic violation or other routine offense. It’s the officer’s word against the defendant’s, and as the officer is privileged/royal, the officer’s testimony is declared to be factual. More generally, it refers to how many witnesses are required to establish a particular fact (though it may require context, like evidence of damage). For example, in a car crash, it might be considered that 3 witnesses are sufficient to replace the evidence that might otherwise be provided by video of the incident (though we know about the issues with eyewitness testimony).
An no-evidence denunciation rule, is a “he-said, she said” situation, in which key components (such as the damage of property) of the situation that would be required for an objective observer to make a determination without any testimony, have no supporting evidence aside from the witness testimony, or its rough equivalents in written or computer text created by people involved (ignoring the serious issues about forgery of such). In a typical Stalinist terror, we think about the evidence-free denunciation rule being saying bad things about Stalin, but that considers that the speech is a crime. More typically, you would consider a light assault such as getting shoved or punched in the body, as a relatively common situation where someone might call the police, but then the police gets on the scene and have to try and sort out the situation. A more extreme case is a classic lynching: the mob is told by supposed witnesses to an event that something happened, so the accused is brought out and swung from a tree.
By contrast, a low-evidence denunciation rule is where the evidence clearly isn’t enough to establish a fact, and so the witness testimony is filling in part of the detail. The classic example is seeing the criminal with bloody hands/cuts; the witness does not see the crime, but if the body is found and other circumstantial evidence confirms that the accused was in the area, had the motive, and the witness could have seen the bloody hands, that could be considered sufficient to convict the accused.
Consider the recent case of Breest v. Haggis, case number 161137/2017, in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York:
The macro here is that four years after the alleged offense, a lawsuit was filed claiming rape, in which four other individuals also testified that the accused had a pattern of rape and rapey behavior. For this, the jury awarded the plaintiff $10M USD.
Consider the counterfactual to the ruling without appeal to any specific physical evidence: that these instances of sex were consensual. That means that the defendant set himself up to lose millions of dollars, for having sex with five women. (and there remains the possibility that this judgment might have been entered with just one woman’s testimony)
Consider further that the facts as alleged by the primary accuser, involved several actions that clearly were consensual on her part, such as agreeing to get in the defendant’s car and to change the location of the drinking to his apartment. That means that in contrast to the typical low-evidence denunciation rule, where the low-evidence would tend to implicate the accused, in this situation, the accused had some evidence to suggest that whatever happened that night was consensual. (Note that it’s also relatively common in rape accusation cases, that something that started consensual became non-consensual. That’s what makes the typical rape situation unique from a criminal justice and prevention perspective.)
Therefore, in reflecting on this case, we must consider that in the state of New York, practically speaking, having sex with a woman who is not married to you (and maybe even if she is) exposes you to the potential for millions of dollars in liability. Given that the general parameters and legal framework of this case are not specific to conditions in New York, but to any jurisdiction in which individuals can be convicted on the basis of evidence-free denunciation rules, this means that practically, the whole population of the American Empire must consider themselves as at risk, if they should choose to have sex with a woman who is not married to them. (Since this is about the larger principles, I leave aside any speculation about how this applies to gay sex, etc. despite its general importance.)
Unfortunately, that’s not the only conclusion we must draw from this. Significant amounts of evidence acknowledged by both parties, indicated the defendant’s innocence or at least reasonable doubt. Moreover, the complaints in all cases were years old, providing plenty of time for the deterioration of witness memory, loss of geospatial data like tower dumps, contamination/degradation/co-mingling of DNA, and the fabrication of texts, etc. So the full significance is not that you can be convicted of rape with no evidence other than an accuser’s words, or that you can be framed for rape given a few years’ time to prepare the forged exhibits: it is that even if you have evidence of your innocence, and you have the doubts due to the passage of time inhibiting confidence in the contrary accounts, you can lose millions of dollars to such accusations. Moreover, since there has been a wave of legislation (in many American imperial provinces) retroactively repealing various statutes of limitations in child rape allegations, you never could consider that any solitary interaction you ever had, could not be used as a pretext to take your life savings and to reduce you to peonage to pay the remaining judgment.
How could you defend yourself against this? Aside from the obvious “don’t talk to anyone/go anywhere” (the definition of solitary confinement), there could be the possibility that only meeting people in public, would be sufficient to prevent a jury/court from finding against you on the basis of such accusations. Consider by examples what that means:
- You will never let your girlfriend enter your apartment, nor you hers, before you have put a ring on her finger. (Which is bad for 18-year olds to not have any idea of whether they can stand each other, but is completely insane for anyone dating a single parent, to not spend any time with their kids at home)
- Similarly, you will never go to your normal friends’ house (or you theirs), unless you are in a group of 10 or 11 people of differing backgrounds and motivations – enough to shield you from a few of them ganging up on you later for whatever reason.
- You could set up cameras in your house and constantly live under video and audio surveillance. (alternate prison)
- You won’t go to any location such as a national forest, where you might encounter one or two people with no other witnesses.
- You also won’t be working in a group of less than 5, certainly not late at night or on weekends.
- For sure, you will not be mentoring or doing any similar activity one-on-one with a member of the opposite sex.
- For also sure, you never will be taking care of or supervising another person’s child alone. (It’s your option as to whether to be terrified of being alone with your own kids – that was a big problem for people back in the 80s and 90s with “repressed memories”)
Your best-case scenario is that you live at the group meeting house, and all the kids live with at least two adults hanging over them at all times – so zero privacy, double the cost of child care. Your worst-case scenario is that you marry someone you’re clearly not able to live with, because you couldn’t even spend a weekend together, or look in each others’ apartments. You also can throw any concept of equal workplace treatment out the window; you may as well go to a sex-segregated workforce.
The alternative is to accept the risk and live in terror that anyone you ever met can rob you of everything you own at any time. While in some objective sense one could consider the probabilities and stack them against e.g. getting hit by a car, the practical reality is that human beings suffer when living in an insecure situation. Hence the acceptance of the no-evidence denunciation rule puts every person into a permanent state of insecurity/fear, just as with other general terrors.