THE trial of legendary US entertainer Bill Cosby begins tomorrow and I’m dreading it. Social media will be awash with theories, opinions and the harshest judgements you’ll ever read. The women alleging sexual assault against Cosby will face their own trial by social media; focus will be on their behaviour, their motivations, their culpability, and much less on questions of alleged wrongdoing on Cosby’s part.

Thankfully, most of us believe in the principle of innocent until proven guilty. Cosby deserves a fair trial, and his accusers deserve an environment where they feel safe and supported to take the action they’ve taken.

The justice system should take care of the rest. And in a perfect world it would, but when it comes to rape and sexual violence cases it’s not that simple. UK conviction rates are notoriously low and we hear horror stories about how the system deals with victims.

Organisations like Rape Crisis do wonderful work in supporting women and advocating for improvements in the law, and it’s a long, hard slog for them. Yet there are numerous examples of how social media, through its apparent influence on mass opinion, is undoing much of the good work charities have done in changing attitudes towards sexual violence, particularly against women, which must be understood within the frame of power structures and societal dominance of men. This is not something easily explained in 140 characters. Rather, social networks like Twitter are far more suited to outdated soundbites that prey on people’s prejudices.

Social media is like entering a time machine and travelling back towards attitudes I thought had become more or less extinct. In my younger years I was confident that scourges like racism and misogyny were a dying thing of the past, existing only within small bubbles of thought that most people considered to be a bit mad.

But you only have to look at the case of footballer Ched Evans to see that it doesn’t take much to get the engine on that time machine going. Social media is a cesspit whenever the issue of his rape case comes up.

Evans was recently cleared of rape after having been originally convicted in 2012. The prosecution argued that Evans’s alleged victim was unable to consent to sex due to alcohol consumption and the justice system agreed. However, on appeal, Evans’s conviction was quashed and he was subsequently found not guilty at a retrial of the case, although he didn’t deny he’d had sex with the alleged victim.

At the very least, anyone following the saga should have understood that the case had highlighted how poorly understood the issue of consent is, and a decent conversation about that could have ensued. Instead, Evans’s accuser found herself in what I can only imagine is the depths of hell. After being named on social media and hounded by bullies, she was forced to change her name and move location several times to protect herself.

It was a high-profile case, but the attitudes it highlighted are not unusual, and the Cosby case will inevitably prompt similar pond life to emerge. If it wasn’t hard enough before for women to speak out about sexual violence, it’s terrifying now.

The big problem with social media is that nobody really knows what to do about it. Abuse happens on such a mass scale, usually perpetrated by anonymous trolls, and the law finds it difficult to get a handle on it. This leaves women vulnerable and unprotected in a way that would never be tolerated by judges should it appear on newspaper pages.

On social media, everyone is a publisher, but the means to hold users to account doesn’t adequately exist. Questions arise around free speech, restriction and control, but when one person’s free speech not only hampers another’s, but may actually silence victims of crime, at what point will society finally agree to step in?

We accept that such laws and regulations are essential within general society to enable freedom of expression but prevent its exploitation for harm, so why do we keep allowing anonymous trolls to dictate the free-speech-police narrative on social media? It’s time we prioritised the vulnerable in our society instead of the cowards.