The election held this month in Virginia resulted in a surprising sweep for Democrats, both up and down the ballot. For rape survivors, those results are welcome news.

Re-elected Attorney General Herring is now able to continue his $3.4 million project to completely eliminate Virginia’s backlog of untested rape kits. Thanks to legislation Herring signed in June, the Victim’s Notification Law, not only will the state end the current backlog, any future one can be avoided. Now, all survivors will be notified when their tested kit yields a result.

This testing is occurring at a time when the prevalence of sexual assault is high in the public conscience. Just last month, the years of rumors swirling around Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein became his undoing.

Several women came forward, with damning stories of abuse and manipulation at the hands of Weinstein. Those stories helped fuel a movement, #metoo, that has led to dozens of women (and men) coming forward with their own painful stories. Started to encourage women who’d been sexually harassed or assaulted to open up, by the following morning of its existence, #metoo has been retweeted over half a million times.

This is for sure an empowering moment, certainly at this magnitude. Unfortunately, there’s something that always follows those that come forward: doubt.

This is something we hear all the time from men ( and women,) both the accused and bystanders: It’s a witch hunt. Women are just doing it for attention. They’re just jealous or mad or crazy. Or perhaps because they felt peer pressure to join the #MeToo “bandwagon,” perhaps because they felt slighted for other reasons. These ideas invariably follow accusations of assault, but especially when they come in these kinds of numbers.

But what sort of “pressure” is that? Do we honestly think women want the abusive comments they get when their stories go public? Do they want to be forever known as “the girl who accused ___ of sexual harassment”? Do they want people posting personal details like their addresses and cell phone numbers for the world to see?

There are a lot of other things that can get people attention or help them stay “on trend” that don’t involve going through all of this public scrutiny and trauma, not to mention the curtailed career prospects and additional personal life fallout. The truth is, only about 2% of all rape and related sex charges are determined to be false, the same percentage as for other felonies (SAGE).

Nonetheless, many men (and women, mind you) feel something la suspect when “so many” women come forward. So what then? Why have so many come out now?

Part of the reason why so many people came forward all at once is that there is strength in numbers. Our society is still not conditioned to listen to one woman who says she was assaulted, and the system that allegedly will “seek justice” for her can be invasive, violating, and demoralizing. But when ten, or thirty, or fifty women come forward with separate and similar stories, something usually shifts. People listen. Some beg ignorance. Others apologize for that same ignorance. But people listen to the considerable numbers of survivors trying to tell their stories.

The “numbers,” of course, have really never been small: According to RAINN (The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), one in six women has been a victim of an attempted or completed rape. A 2015 study found that one in three women has been the target of workplace sexual harassment.

And when women do try to say something, to gather and whisper and share what they know, those women are often threatened or thwarted. In a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, a third of women said they had experienced sexual advances from a male colleague or a man with influence over their job; a third of those women said the advances constituted sexual abuse. The majority of people who experience harassment don’t report it, and of those who do come forward, 75 percent face some kind of retaliation.

The methods are always critiqued and the accusers are always scrutinized. Our own president, in an effort to discredit his accusers, claimed they were “too ugly” for him to have done anything to them. Unfortunately, then, many keep these stories to themselves, whether for fear of ruining the job that lets them eat, or simply because they don’t think anyone would believe them.

It’s true that this month, in particular, has been quite a moment for how we talk about sexual harassment and assault. This happened earlier this year when the Bill Cosby case made the news and when the footage of Trump bragging about "grabbing pussy" circulated. (Of course, a darker moment occurred when that same man was elected President.) Weinstein was fired.

Ailes was fired. Cosby has been disgraced. But Clarence Thomas, who harassed Anita Hill, presides on the Supreme Court. Brock Turner served merely three of the six months he was sentenced to prison. Men are still viewing assault in terms of “if I had a daughter,” a metric of possession and patriarchy (created and perpetuated by our economic system, a topic for another article.) Suffice to say, much more work needs to be done.

It can be difficult, even terrifying, for anyone to come forward with a report of harassment and assault. The justice system, and society as a whole, historically tend to disbelieve these stories.

For the first time, many of these stories are finally coming to light and perpetrators of assault and harassment are facing tangible consequences. To dismiss this pivotal moment as a "witch hunt" denies that an enormous societal issue is being reckoned with at last, and will prevent an important shift toward accountability from happening. As far as we’ve come, we can’t go back now.