The worry? That you too, could be accused of rape. This is the fear that US president Donald Trump mongers.

Joint research from Brown University and the University of Massachusetts found that about 6.5% of men rape. About one in 16. And it is with this small percentage that the power lies. It is convenient for them that you, too, are afraid of being accused, because if you are afraid, you will join the ‘Choir of Disbelief’ that invalidate the stories of their victims.

Of this 6.5%, it is not just once that they rape. Because reporting is so low, (between 64% and 96% of all rapes are never reported to a criminal authority), these guys go again.

And how often do they go again? These repeat rapists commit, on average, 5.8 attacks each.

So who, then, benefits from the dismissal and disbelieving of victims? The rapists. They go undetected because victims know that the social norms are set in such a way that they will not be believed; worse, should they speak, they will be pilloried for ruining someone’s reputation.

Trevor Noah, the 34-year-old South African mixed-race presenter of America’s The Daily Show, is fast becoming the sharpest cultural critic of our time. This week, after Brett Kavanaugh was sworn into the American Supreme Court, he identified Trump’s most powerful tool throughout the entire Kavanaugh affair.

Trump weaponises victimhood.

What does this mean? In post-apartheid South Africa, for example, the fear was that once-oppressed black people were going to rise up and steal all of the jobs, homes, and lives of the powerful white.

White people were shaking in their boots, indignant in their newly-found victimhood.

“Never mind the fact that we have been in control down here for centuries, we are the real victims now,” they cried.

Millions of black South Africans live in wood and iron structures in townships to this day.

It is this flipping of the story, where the persecutor plays the victim, that Trump employs most often, and his most recent use of it has been around sexual assault.

“I find Trump’s most powerful tool is that he knows how to wield victimhood,” Noah told his studio audience last week during a break. “He knows how to offer victimhood to people who have the least claim to it.”

The presenter said Trump has changed the focus of the ‘Me Too’ conversation to one where men are the real victims, with the possibility of them being falsely accused. In doing this, he has turned the victim into the persecutor.

“[Trump] is saying the real victims of the ‘Me Too’ movement are men,” Noah said, adding that a lot of men will connect with that feeling.

Noah then turned to his studio audience — the cameras did too — and he asked how many of them had ever been falsely accused of a sexual assault. Not a single hand was raised.

All in all, since the Me Too movement gained momentum this time last year, it is estimated that around 100 people out of 7bn have been publicly accused of sexual assault.

And what are the numbers in cold hard data for victims of assault? Around one in four women and in one in six men will experience either a rape or an assault in their lifetime. If the number of victims is so high and the number of predators is so low, who’s the real winner here?

These undetected winners, the presidents of countries who are recorded boasting about groping women’s intimate parts, make themselves out to be the victims. In doing so, they get into the heads of all the good and great men who innately understand consent, trust, the delicacy of intimacy, and make them worry that they, too, could be accused of assault.

No. In order to be accused of assault, you would firstly need a tectonic cultural shift where victims feel it’s worth their while talking about their assaults, let alone reporting them, and secondly you would need to have possibly acted improperly.

However, Trump wants all heterosexual men on tenterhooks. He also wants all heterosexual men to be suspicious of victims who speak out. Again, who benefits from this fear-mongering and cynicism? Not innocent men and women, not the 64% to 96% of victims of assault who do not report, but the 6.5% of men who commit 5.8 rapes each.

By peddling the fear of a false accusation, Trump and men like him play to your deepest anxieties: What if I get accused? It is an easy thing to connect with. Fear can grab a fierce stranglehold on us all.

But it is not you he is trying to protect from so-called false accusations, it is people like him,people who have not only groped women’s vaginas, but who have boasted about the freedom to do so. If you’re afraid, you keep your mouth shut and he gets to be unaccountable, and the 6.5% continue to go undetected.

This week, Noah’s astute commentary was followed by a viral thread on Twitter, for men, by writer AR Moxon. He writes: “Hi, guys. Imagine if one day you got kicked in the nuts, really hard, on purpose. You doubled over. Felt the pain. Nearly passed out. Nearly puked. Then you got kicked again. And again.

Imagine it happened to you when you were 12. Imagine it was an 38-year-old woman who did it. Imagine it was your mother’s friend and business partner.”

His thought experiment goes on and is worth the one minute of your time if you are trying to get your head around this whole “who’s the real victim here?” stuff.

One other man adding his twopence worth this week was Irish actor Robert Sheehan, formerly of Love/Hate. In Hot Press magazine, he talked about the Me Too reckoning, and what’s interesting about what he says is that it is so non-defensive.

“It makes you self-examine and it makes you ask yourself: ‘Am I being compassionate enough to women about their position in society, challenges they have to face?’

“I think in that regard it’s been very helpful. There’s been a lot of healthy compassion encouraged out of men towards women’s position.”

A woman once said to me you can judge or you can help, but you can’t do both. As we are all faced with this cultural reckoning around intimacy, consent, and sexual relationships, what do we do? Do we dismiss? Do we belittle? Or do we listen? Do we look at the data, and not the myth, and reflect on how we could all be less fearful for ourselves and more compassionate for others?