I was falsely accused of a sex crime. My name should never have been revealed

What are we really interested in? I would hope that is obvious. We want to convict criminals. We want justice for victims. And we don’t want to ruin innocent people’s lives.

It’s horrible being falsely accused of a sex crime (“over the clothing touching” in my case), being practically bankrupted by legal fees (only a fraction of which I’ll ever get back, in many months’ time, despite being found innocent), being publicly named and shamed, losing jobs, and frankly having your life blown apart. But there is something worse: being sexually assaulted.

Before I was accused, I knew that two of my female friends had been raped. Now I know three female friends and a male friend who have been. One went to the police; the others didn’t. Doubtless more people I know have been attacked and will never say. All I know is that it’s affected them; their sense of themselves, their relationships, their lives, for years. I also know a couple of people who have been accused and cleared; the effect on their view of the world, their relationships and their lives has been devastating too.

If our aim as a society is to punish the guilty and protect the innocent, we need to do everything possible to help real victims of sex crimes and also prevent more victims of false allegations. Our current one-sided anonymity laws, in which the accused is named before conviction, do quite the opposite.

The current system is not just damaging to people, like me, who have been falsely accused. Worse, it is damaging to victims of sexual crimes. Anonymity until conviction for the accused in sex cases will stop the falsely accused having their lives destroyed, help the complainant by significantly enhancing their anonymity, and help change the terms of the public debate by moving us away from an increasingly toxic discourse.

Some people will be falsely accused of sex crimes. A Home Office review shows that one in 25 allegations of a sexual nature are false. With almost 150,000 complaints made last year, that could mean 6,000 false complaints. It’s wrong that people should be named before they’re convicted, unless there’s an overwhelming need to protect the public, decided by a judge.

Moreover, protecting the name of the accused from being published until conviction is also likely to help complainants come forward. Those in mutual social or work circles are very likely to know, or guess, the name of the complainant as soon as the name of the accused is in the public domain. Anonymity for the accused would further enhance the anonymity of the complainant, making it more likely that more real victims of sexual crimes would come forwards.

There is a third strand: it is in the interest of public discourse around victims. The cases of Oliver Mears, Liam Allan, and many others, have hit the headlines because it’s clear that injustices have been done to the accused. We should have never known their names. The fact that their names READ MORE AT TELEGRAPH.CO.UK/ OPINION and the false allegations were reported without them being convicted, and then that the charges were found to be false, feeds the narrative pushed by misogynists that all women (and men, although it is mostly women) who come forward have “made it up.” Those of us who have been falsely accused of sex crimes have a duty to not become pawns of those who hate. I have no truck with them. Other people I know who’ve been falsely accused don’t either.

When I see “sexual offences” in print or online in future, I don’t want to see the prefix “falsely accused of ” or “innocent of.” I want to see “convicted of.” When people think of sex crimes, I don’t want them to think of the victims as the falsely accused, such as Liam Allan and the rest; I only want them to feel rage about John Worboys and his ilk and sympathy for their victims.

Anonymity is not a golden bullet. There were failings in mine and many other cases by the police and CPS that it will not solve: shoddy investigations, lack of following reasonable lines of inquiry, and politically motivated cases. But it is an idea whose time has come, because we need to change the poisonous cyclical narrative and protect victims of all types.

Anonymity before conviction, except in cases where there are strong overriding concerns about possible undetected crimes or genuine fears of harm to others, would be a positive step. It is time we restore public confidence in the system. Doing so will mean fewer innocent lives are ruined, help change the public conversation and help real victims to come forward. If we want a system that punishes the guilty and protects the innocent, then the time for action was yesterday. But let’s do what we can now.

It’s the tyranny of tiny things, and it’s exhausting. The politicisation of everyday life – the crusade against plastic straws, the demonisation of less healthy food, the new rules against staring at someone for too long or wearing clothes from another culture, and, last week, the bizarre row among Labour activists over whether it is ok to prefer dinner parties to pubs (it is fine to like both) – is at once a consequence of a political climate that systematically avoids hard decisions, and thus obsesses over trivia, and of a cultural climate which despises the ordinary as thoughtless.

This latter phenomenon is similar but different to the old world in which everything was judged by reference to class. Similar in that it is just as much of a strait-jacket, with your preferences said to say something about where you stand in the pecking order. Virtue merely replaces breeding as social currency. Different in that it is not only patronising but actively intolerant. Noblesse oblige and liberal understanding are gone, superseded by open disdain for things ordinary people do, even when they are perfectly reasonable. Try telling a “woke” millennial at a party that you like cars, or enjoy eating meat, or consider prosperity and convenience to be more important than whatever environmental fad is now in fashion, and you’ll see what I mean.

What is surprising is how quickly all this has materialised. Even 15 years

‘Anonymity of the accused would further enhance the anonymity of the complainant’

‘Accents were dropped, we became a “classless” society and politicians supported surprisingly libertarian policies on things like gambling and drinking’

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion