We now define consent as something so etheral (probably rightly so) that it's virtually impossible to prove it was granted (clearly, "leave me alone" remains unambiguous). People can change their mind but feel coerced to continue, or grant consent to something different than what ends up happening. Court cases thus go down the "he said, she said" route.
I don't really know how to get out of that.
The flipside is that, indeed, because genuine accusations are so thin on physical proof, it is so hard to separate them from fake ones. Whenever I hear someone publicly shamed for sexual misconduct and the wrath of public opinion descends on them, a part of me shudders at the thought of that happening to an innocent person, with no defense available.
There's a third way, but perhaps equally unappetizing: record all interactions.
I omitted this possibility for obvious reasons.
Video is obvious, but assuming you use a modern phone, you might as well add other sensors like accelerometer data, and extra channels like all WhatsApp conversations.
> I'm going to assume you mean a video recording, which is the only way to be absolutely certain about what occurred when you have exactly two witnesses who also happen to be the accuser and the accused.
Alas, even videos can be ambiguous. Eg picture some BDSM play. There can be lots of context required to make a decision.
The solution is the de-stimulation of society from an era of overt sexual manipulation and an adjustment of expectations regarding the value of casual sexual activities.
I'm not sure that is necessarily a problem. If someone is willing to suffer in prison to get revenge, then there must be some kind of serious grievance behind it. They say "an armed society is a polite society", and this kind of double edged sword might just lead to a more polite society. It becomes a formalized way of taking vigilante justice basically.
It's nearly impossible to prove a rape case in court. Because of this, there has been some groundswell of support for relaxing the burden of proof in rape cases to a standard that might ultimately permit some false accusations to result in wrongful convictions (a horrifically bad idea that would likely be a Pandora's box imo).
If you reduce this down to the fundamental tension: either we have to ask women to become dramatically more vigilant and accept some nonzero risk of rape (more or less what we implicitly do already) OR we have to increase the likelihood of wrongful convictions.
As far as I've been able to discern, there is no good solution here. And that's how asinine ideas like this "sex consent app" show up. It's a kind of manifestation of denial.