Personal opinion - the lack of a "innocent until proven guilty" judicial system when it comes to sexual harassment claims is what has caused much of the fear of women. Colleges, businesses, and online communities almost always simply believe the victim, and even if a trial should occur and the accused is vindicated, the accused has already been fired, expelled, or crucified by public opinion. The records of the accusations remain online forever, with little or no followup.
Innocent until proven guilty with a trial by peers. We enshrine these in our public justice system; it needs to be spread to private companies as well.
Really, employers, universities, etc. should not even be involved in these kinds of claims. They are not competent to investigate them.
If a crime has been committed, there is a judicial system that can and will deal with that, with established standards regarding presumption of innocence and burden of proof.
To be fair, there are a number of behaviors which create negative environments for men/women/minorities/majorities which are not against the law. I personally have no problems with a company/college having higher standards than "it's against the law" - they simply need to ensure that investigations into those broken standards don't turn into witch hunts.
Also, sexual harassment laws differ from state to state. It would make sense for an organization operating in multiple states to adopt a universal policy for the entire organization.
> I personally have no problems with a company/college having higher standards than "it's against the law" - they simply need to ensure that investigations into those broken standards don't turn into witch hunts.
What is missing is a suggestion for how you could avoid that. If business and institution are free to handle these things as they please, which they generally would be granted under labor law and free speech, there are those that are going to disagree with you and there are those that are going to be outright bad at it. Just like they are at handling a lot of other things.
If sexual harassment is as important as not being deemed "a team player" at a company or the right of colleges to design their own admissions process (sometimes to the detriment of Asian students) we can expect people to be mistreated, at the least subjectively so, for this as well.
You can certainly can judge those involved, but I think it is hard to make a case against the problem as such. Because if you have e.g. extensive rights for companies and extensive free speech, there will be downsides as society changes. But that is an expected part of the process, unless you want to change the process and thereby labor law and the rights of colleges or introduce something like the right to be forgotten.
With such disproportionately high rates of domestic abuse in law enforcement professions, you really can't say they are competent to investigate them either. So whose responsibility is it?
Isn't the topic at hand how businesses should handle the balance between keeping harassment out of the workplace, but not, in the name of that cause, overzealously punishing people who are implicated as having harassed somebody? Surely you're not suggesting that 100% of such cases fall into either:
A. Crimes the victims of which should go to the police with.
or B. So harmless that no business should ever take any action on it.
I would probably agree with an argument, if you were to make it, that the punishments in some of these cases that are driven by the reaction of larger social groups are too quick and too harsh. However, it sounds to me like you're making a much more extreme case that I have to disagree with.
Testimony of lived experiences is evidence. It's enough to convict.
When you serve jury duty and the case involves domestic violence, you are explicitly reminded of this because most people will assume it is not.
Still, we end up with cases like Brock Turner where he does get convicted not with the victim's testimony but a mountain of corroborating evidence and national media scrutiny. And then receives what is essentially a non-punishment.
Of course judicial systems vary with countries, but I'm not aware of a jurisdiction where only the word of the victim is enough to convict somebody (who denies the act).
Evidence is evidence. Witness testimony is evidence, photographs are evidence, video is evidence, dna is evidence. All evidence has credibility, which can be challenged.
Every case is different: witness testimony can be far more credible than photo evidence, dna evidence can be less credible than video evidence.
There is — as far as I know — no legal system in the world that measures the validity of a case based on the amount or type of evidence. You can absolutely be convicted on witness testimony alone in the US. That’s very unlikely but entirely possible under the law.
This is possible in the US. Imagine someone rapes a nun, and she testifies to it. She identifies the defendant, and in his testimony he denies it. If the jury finds her testimony more credible — to the extent that there is not a reasonable doubt as to his guilt — they can convict him.
Of course, it helps if there is corroborating evidence, but there is no rule that says one cannot be convicted (in the US) based on a victim's testimony alone. It just doesn't happen often because usually there is some sort of corroborating evidence of a crime, and because it's hard to eliminate all reasonable doubt without any.
So, it is no different than for any other sort of accusation lacking corroborating evidence?
Is there evidence that this is more likely in sexual assault cases than others? Your post here [1] (and the post you are replying to) seem to suggest that it is actually less likely in these cases.
I think all cases that are based only/mostly on a victim's statement are very difficult to prove. In my other comment, I was pointing out that sex-based cases are more likely to be based mostly on a victim's statement than other cases.
> Still, we end up with cases like Brock Turner where he does get convicted not with the victim's testimony but a mountain of corroborating evidence and national media scrutiny.
How can we know what specific pieces of evidence led to his conviction? I would assume the jury took into account the victim's testimony and the testimony of the onlookers who stopped him. What makes you say he was "convicted not with the victim's testimony but a mountain of corroborating evidence and national media scrutiny"?
We never really had "innocent until proven guilty" in these circumstances. Legally sure, but courts have little involvement even now.
Until recently, the women/victim side was assumed guilty... still are in many places/circumstances.
We're leaving judge and jury duty to the public, social media, old media, individuals and (above all) corporate policy. None of these operate on a presumption of innocence.
> We never really had "innocent until proven guilty" in these circumstances. Legally sure, but courts have little involvement even now.
> Until recently, the women/victim side was assumed guilty... still are in many places/circumstances.
The victim being "assumed guilty" is just an awkward phrasing of "innocent until proven guilty" for the perpetrator. What do you see as the difference?
I see the difference in the way the victim and perpetrator are treated.
If someone robs your house and you see them running away, television strapped to your back, you call the police and give testemony. You say what you saw and the jury judges on the merits of the case.
What doesn't happen, in a robbery, is the defense team lining up a slew of witnesses talking about all the times you left your house unlocked, all the times you invited other suspicious people over, all the times you sold something on Craigslist and all the times you Googled the price of the TV that got stolen. The defence doesn't use this testemony to show that you really wanted to give your TV away, and it wasn't actually stolen, and even if it was, weren't you sorta asking for it anyway?
I meant that when word gets out, someone is assumed guilty and socially sanctioned in some way.. at least. Previously it was generally the "young lady in question," as a matter of cultural prudence.
I'm not saying that prejudice is right, it's just.. evidently hard to shake.
In every case where it was the victim's word against the accused the court almost always used to side with whoever has more power in society.
White woman accuses black man -> accused is guilty.
rich woman accuses poor man -> accused is guilty
black woman accuses white man ->accused is not guilty
poor woman accuses rich man -> accused is not guilty
It's still that way, sometimes. The difference is now is that "who has more power" suddenly varies a ton based on who's making the decision and the political optics of the situation. So some people on wall street (statistically richer and whiter than average) are scared (rationally or not, you decide) that they're now potentially vulnerable to false accusation when they were previously insulated to some degree by being (mostly) rich and white.
We enshrine these in our public justice system; it needs to be spread to private companies as well.
If I've come to appreciate anything-among many things-in the last few years of this cultural evolution full of "social justice" debate, discussion and forums-it's that there are pockets of the social fabric who seem very eager to suspend elements of the public justice system or eagerness to put a moratorium on certain 'memes' inherent to our system of adjudicating wrong deemed absolutely necessary or otherwise considered baked in, incontrovertible features of Western "justice" (because fairness, equanimity, better 100 guilty go free than 1 innocent go to jail etc) in just about every realm that isn't a court room where they would beholden to certain burdens and requirements to satisfy other 'memes' inherent to our system of adjudicating wrong.
Edit: I really wish the people who have such an issue trying to explore and openly discuss these ideas (even if you personally disagree with them) would step forward and actually offer a counter response versus driveby downvotes of myself and wutbrodo who replied here-and other comments here in the thread trying to actually explore the issue on a level that isn't surface level, shooting from the hip reactions. Barely fresh for 20 minutes and we're both nearly greyed out.
This is just called rejecting liberalism, which is happening across the left-right political spectrum. It's exhausting to see how common medieval arguments about the way society should be run have become.
That isn't to say that Enlightenment liberalism is unquestionably correct, but the conversation has shifted such that the hoi polloi have started to reject liberalism without having even done the basic work to consider the pitfalls and the counter-arguments to those pitfalls (you will, of course, find more radical strains of thought that reject liberalism, and while I disagree with them, I don't have the same problem, in that they tend to be sincerely held and supported).
To be clear, I don't mean "hoi polloi" to refer to some caricature of an uneducated lower class. It was probably five years ago that I had an argument with someone on an internal board at Google, wherein he claimed the presumption of innocence was irrelevant, since it was a legal constraint by which we weren't bound. Again, not saying that its incontrovertibly correct, but the guy had no concept of why it existed in the justice system and whether those principles were generalizable.
The judicial “beyond reasonable doubt” process is far from perfect, it has many shortcomings and is only suitable for the justice system because we’ve decided that it’s much better for someone guilty to walk free than for someone innocent to be incorrectly punished. This doesn’t work in smaller environments, like an office, because if the guilty walks free then the innocent person — the victim — suffers directly by their continued and unavoidable presence in their life.
I have served on a jury in a sexual assault trial and after what I’ve seen of the process first hand I would rather work for a company that doesn’t roleplay as the judicial system and instead believes the victim and uses the preponderance of evidence approach for determining guilt.
Most people guilty of sexual assault (in the literal sense not the legal sense) will never face any legal consequences because of how the judicial system works: I would never want to work in an office where the same was true.
> Colleges, businesses, and online communities almost always simply believe the victim, and even if a trial should occur and the accused is vindicated, the accused has already been fired, expelled, or crucified by public opinion
If you flip this statement, you find yourself in a similarly bad situation: if you always assume the perpetrator is innocent, the victim is now in a world of hurt until / if they can get a conviction. Unfortunately a lot of times for various reasons (many to do with the psychology of being a _person_, e.g. shame / no report, shock / slow to report) it devolves into "he said she said" because there's no physical evidence anymore << even if multiple people have stories about the same offender.
The result is that women live in a state of _perpetual fear of men_. And that's current state.
^ That's not even to mention that women are disproportionately likely to be assaulted / hurt by men than the other way around.
I'm not saying _presuming guilt_ is good. But that's not what happens, and your statement is a bit misleading. When you mention "firing/expelling/crucifying" you must remember these are usually done with pretty thorough investigation / good reason to believe the victim; there are far and away more cases of offenders getting away with their misdeeds.
Well, the hyperbole helps in the sense that it's an opinion shared by much more people, including some pundits, academics, and commentators with an audience, than ten or twenty years ago. This alone ought to explain, if not necessarily justify, why some men are starting to practice extreme avoidance of women.
It's not hyperbole. Some easy ways to check IRL: Do the women in your life not check their routes when walking when it's dark out? Do the men?
Do women try to bow out gracefully from relationships even if the onus shouldn't be on them, sometimes from fear of men potentially harming them? Do men do this at all?
Do you tell your daughter to watch out for predators before college? Do you tell your son the same thing, or different? Which one are you more worried for? Do you tell your daughter to stop being vigilant in <any scenario> because creeps aren't a threat?
Men do fear dark alleys yes, where did you get the idea that they don't? Stranger rape is exceptionally rare. Rapes are usually by people who the victim already knows. Being mugged by some drug abuser on the other hand is a genderless crime and a fair bit more common.
Do women try to bow out gracefully from relationships even if the onus shouldn't be on them, sometimes from fear of men potentially harming them? Do men do this at all?
That's what the entire Bloomberg article is about! Yes, men apparently now routinely bow out gracefully from relationships with women, because they fear the woman will harm them.
"That's what the entire Bloomberg article is about! Yes, men apparently now routinely bow out gracefully from relationships with women, because they fear the woman will harm them."
And the article is showing this because it is a massive, unheard of change.
My little sister was raped by her boss last year when she was an apprentice[0]. Since she was devastated (and her ex-boyfriend a cunt, pardon my french), she waited 3 day before telling my father, who then took her to the hospital, but it was to late: no evidence we could give the police.
Result, the only thing she could do was filing a report at the police station, and now she have to wait for another girl to get raped and go to the police. I still scream "rapist!" when i pass by his restaurant though, twice this year and will do that too at Christmas, and will continue until i get arrested or until i pardon him. I also gave his picture and contact information to all my highschool friends so they can avoid him, as it's a small city and we are around the same age (luckily i'm no living there anymore).
My sister's former cooking school now forbid female student to take apprenticeship there (a bit cynical, but well, better than nothing).
I was all for "innocent until proven guilty", and still am, but maybe because it's still fresh, i really can't condamn public shaming anymore.
[0]I might have the wrong word: she was working on her cooking diploma while working in a restaurant
Men are currently taken seriously when they complain about sexual assault and as a man there's no way I would voluntarily give this up. Why would I? What could possibly be in it for me?
There's a weird double standard in crime in the USA (probably elsewhere), the conviction rate is greater than 85-90 percent for most crimes except sexual assault/rape, where it's closer to 50%, and the lack of whatever you want to call it leads to less people reporting rape/sexual assault, less investigation, all the way to incarceration, so people might feel that there is an inherent bias in results of the criminal system already, part of it is the victim is put on trial in court and public in a way that discourages participation in the system.
This is probably because for most crimes, it suffices to establish that (1) the act of the crime occurred and (2) the defendant is the one who carried out this act.
In many types of sex crime cases, the prosecution must also prove that (3) the behavior engaged in by the parties was not consensual.
People do not generally consensually enagege in battery, theft, or murder. People consensually engage in sexual activities all the time. Also, sexual activities often have no third-party witnesses, which makes proof more difficult.
> Colleges, businesses, and online communities almost always simply believe the victim, and even if a trial should occur and the accused is vindicated, the accused has already been fired, expelled, or crucified by public opinion.
Colleges don't almost always simply believe the victim. It's quite the opposite: “Alarmingly, many universities are compounding this trauma by failing to support survivors and, in some cases, actively seeking to silence them.” [1]
Businesses don't almost always simply believe the victim. In fact, "often employees fear that human resources will help the company lash out at the accuser rather than punish the accused." [2]
Online communities don't almost always simply believe the victim. Take Twitter for example and how a chunk of that online community turned against Christine Blasey Ford. [3]
In the last case involving the accuser and the accused, the accuser had to move several times, hired her own private security detail, and continued to receive death threats [4], all the while the accused got the promotion of a lifetime. Hardly the case of — as you put it — "the accused is vindicated, the accused has already been fired, expelled, or crucified by public opinion."
I know that what you said is personal opinion, but as far as the data supporting that opinion, I just didn't find it.
An employer does not need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you missed your target, mouthed off to your boss, or any number of firing offenses. Association is voluntary, on both sides. Unions sometimes win a quasi-judicial system for firing, which this forum usually bemoans as making it too hard to eliminate low performers. With a judicial procedure only for sexual harassment, companies could always fire you “for” something else.
If male/female relationships in companies devolve to the same level of gaming, backstabbing, and insanity that happens around KPIs, then we might end up with a literal gender war. I think the point of the article is that regular relationships between people turning into this sort of Machiavellian game is a bad thing
I saw someone speaking in this way once; they were immediately accused of maintaining and cultivating the "rape culture" and seemed to get more heat than the supposed offender.
So as a father of two daughters in their 20's, this makes me sad. Instead of attempting to see women as equals and moving to bridge the gap -- the best solution Wall Street can come up with is to further isolate themselves? Why can't these men just learn to treat women like the humans they are?
From the article: “Some men have voiced concerns to me that a false accusation is what they fear,” said Zweig, the lawyer. “These men fear what they cannot control.”
It's just common sense for people to protect their future/careers. And it's not just men that think that way - from the article:
> A late-40-something in private equity said he has a new rule, established on the advice of his wife, an attorney: no business dinner with a woman 35 or younger.
I would wager that if you send N (where N>=2) employees to go do something, like drive somewhere and go meet with a client, go remove hardware from a datacenter rack, man a booth at some trade show, volunteer at some university event, etc, etc. and the logistics are such that it will be convenient for each of them to eat a meal or meals, possibly at a restaurant, there is a very good chance that if they go out to dinner they will do so together. Ideally gender and marital status would have no effect on whether or not that is acceptable.
When there have already been numerous well-documented instances of people making false accusations that absolutely RUIN THE LIVES of the defendants, it can hardly be a surprise that people with a lot to lose would take drastic, if ill-though-out, measures to protect themselves from that possibility. As another comment said, even when the false accusations are found to be false, it's usually too late for the defendant, and their life has already been ruined. The only way this gets fixes is if we stop implicitly believing people who accuse someone of a crime, just because of the nature of that crime. Innocent until proven guilty applies globally, not based on context or scandals.
Numerous? Well-documented? I don't mean to be inflammatory -- but I must reading different news that you are. Can you please cite your sources?
To be clear: Numerous (to me) means approaching 20% of all accusations. That's only 1 in every 5 accusations. Does numerous mean something else to you?
I’m wondering if this is something like the numerous and well-documented instances of child kidnapping that have kept a generation of kids from being allowed outside by themselves.
There is no serious, solid research on this question. "News" is certainly not where you can get serious figures on this matter.
Even the very definitions of what counts as sexual harassment / assault / rape / hate speech etc are deeply controversial. A most prominent example are radical feminists like Dworkin who essentially say that all heterosexual intercourse is rape.
There is such research actually. Look at the studies by Kanin, Jan, and their replications. The topic of what proportion of allegations are false is studied from time to time, but not often, because the studies that are done usually report eye-wateringly high figures.
In the UK, official government research put the figure at 10% of all (rape) accusations being false. But if you read the reports, you'll see that the true figure must be much higher, as the methodology reclassifies lots of data points to avoid them being considered false.
Sure. Here are some citations if you want to do further research.
A word of warning. I've found that there is a shocking rate of lying about these studies, both in other academic papers and the media. Moreover you have to read the papers carefully because they're often written by people with an explicit agenda (to minimise the false reporting rate - exception is Kanin who appers to have no agenda). You really have to watch out and not take any claims at face value, even when they'd appear to be in credible reports from credible sources. It's very sad but it appears that in a rather meta way, the topic of false reports of rape is dogged by false reports about studies of false reports about rape!
The idea that the rate of false reporting is very high is probably once of the most controversial and dangerous topics in our society today. If you write your paper you are very likely to be attacked for it, at least if your paper is based on police report data. Good luck!
He reviews police reports for every single rape allegation in an unnamed American town, selected because the police department had the time and resources to investigate every allegation thoroughly. In 41% of the cases, the allegation was false. In this study, for a report to be considered false the accuser had to agree it was false. Thus the true rate must be higher, as there was no real incentive for the women to admit they lied to the police. The study provides data on the motives for why the false allegations were made.
Note the appendix. The original Kanin study was done on an unnamed American town. In the appendix they replicate the findings in a US university. Actually the percentage there is slightly higher at exactly 50% false reports (admitted false by the accuser).
The data Kanin provides on why false allegations are made has been replicated by the Dutch police:
This study examines New Zealand police reports and replicates Kanin, by finding a 41% false reporting rate. The paper is horrendously biased, but nonetheless contains useful ground truth data about the NZ police conclusions in a large number of rape reports. The breakdown is:
- Genuine cases, 21%
- Uncertain/insufficient evidence, 38%
- Police investigated and concluded the complaint was false, 33%
- The complainant themselves said their own report was false, 8%
If we add together 33% and 8% we get 41%.
The paper goes into a lot of detail if you're looking for material.
It states that in 9% of cases the claims were considered false by the police. This is quite far off Kanin and Jan, so what's going on? Again, it requires careful reading. About 20% of all reports are "no crimed", that is, the police classify the report as "no crime occurred". This classification is intended for very narrow and unusual situations like the ...
Hey, can you show me some of these well documented instances? The Duke Lacross case gets brought up a lot, but all those guys were exonerated and as far as I'm aware doing fine. Kavanaugh just got appointed to the Supreme Court and Lois C.K is popping up to do comedy sets, so I'm curious to see these many well documented cases you refer to.
Even accepting your cited cases as the limit (which they are not), I can't accept being nationally and universally condemned and smeared for months or years on end despite being innocent as a perfectly acceptable outcome for a baseless accusation. I suspect you'd be a lot less flippant about how everything turned out fine if you'd be in any of their positions.
I'm not familiar with the Oxford Union president. Jian Gomeshi was credibly accused, the fact that he was found not guilty does not mean his accuser was false. I don't know why you include Emma Sulkowicz, I know of no evidence at all that she falsely accused someone. Also Jian Gomeshi is writing articles for the New York Review of Books and the man Emma Sulkowicz accused graduated, so neither of their lives were ruined.
The idea that Ghomeshi was “credibly accused” is rather the point. In the only cases that went to court, he was found not guilty, and the judge went on quite a tangent about how the witnesses had lied to and hid evidence from the court.
If that’s not enough to clear his name, how can anyone ever escape the stain of a credible accusation? It seems prudent given that problem to ensure that no accusation will be credible.
For the prosecution. The accusers had all continued flirting with (and in one case sleeping with) Ghomeshi after the alleged assaults. One lied about it, and the other two didn't bring it up until the defense got hold of their emails.
The Duke Lacrosse players were crucified - 88 professors signed a letter vilifying them before any meaningful evidence. PROFESSORS - the arbiters of the scientific standard. Imagine if there wasn't exonerating evidence.
People refer to Kavanaugh as a rapist when he wasn't even accused of rape. 50% (or more) of the country still thinks of him as such. His family and children received death threats.
The case of Brian Banks is an example that should meet your standard. Black man with a potential professional football career goes to jail, DNA evidence exonerates years later.
Your past is still vital to who you are, both in your own eyes and in the eyes of others. Your comment is ignorant of the trauma that these circumstances bring to the accused - if you can have empathy for the victim, you should be able to carry the same empathy for the accused.
From your wikipedia link on the Columbia case. "Three other complaints have been alleged against Nungesser: a second woman accused him of emotional abuse and nonconsensual sex during a months-long relationship, a third student accused him of non-consensually kissing her and touching her at a party, and a fourth accuser emerged in early 2015, a fourth-year male student who said Nungesser sexually assaulted him after an emotional conversation." Oh yeah, this guy sounds like a real peach whose life was turned upside down by a false accusation.
Also people here really seem to be assuming any case where someone is found not guilty means the accusation was false, which is not how it works. Just ask OJ Simpson.
>Also people here really seem to be assuming any case where someone is found not guilty means the accusation was false, which is not how it works. Just ask OJ Simpson.
Duke Lacrosse might be “doing fine” now, but while it was happening they certainly weren’t doing fine. Kavanaugh made it to the court, but for the rest of his term, he’s under a cloud. What happened to Kavanaugh was brutal. Just because someone survived the ordeal does lessen the fact that it happened at all.
Just to be clear, you know he almost certainly did it right? Dr. Ford came forward before he was nominated. Also he has full time security guards now and gets welcomed with standing ovations, whereas Dr. Ford keeps having to move because of all the death threats and hasn't been able to go back to her job.
Well to start I wouldn't have gone up and said a bunch of easily verifiable lies where I claiming boofing meant farting and that I threw up a lot during beach week because I have a sensitive stomach. I wouldn't have had a temper tantrum where I complain about how the Clinton's were somehow behind it. I would have encouraged an FBI investigation into things and encouraged them to speak to the only other witness, Mark Judge.
Is that true? I thought her claims were investigated in detail and found to be clearly false, with witnesses she said were there saying they had no clue what she was talking about and remembered no such party, her own testimony contradicted itself, etc. And then the fact that she waited decades to do anything about it.
The last I heard about Kavanaugh he'd been totally exonerated. There's no reason to believe he did anything to this woman.
No, that is not what happened. Her claims were briefly investigated, there was only one other witness, Mike Judge, and he was not questioned. No one else remembers that specific party but they all agreed that it was the kind of thing get together they would have gone too, her testimony was consistent, and lots of assault victims wait a long time before coming forward. So you managed to be wrong about everything.
You know that Kavanaugh was shortlisted by Romney during the 2012 presidential campaign? Predating Dr. Ford's timeline for documenting the alleged abuse during therapy.
I mean if your theory is that she just randomly picked someone from Romney's shortlist of Supreme Court judges and decided to expose herself to a whole bunch of death threats, vileness, and potentially lose her job in the thought that it would discredit him I guess that's theoretically possible. It goes against logic and human nature and compared to the alternate hypothesis of a drunk teenager did something inappropriate it's very unlikely.
Ultimately, I don't think the percentage of cases really matter: we have a tendency to have an irrational fear of things that have a very low probability. (Like child abduction etc.)
I don't think this is any different. The chance of being falsely accused is probably very small, but I know I'd absolutely crushed, both mentally and physically (lack of sleep for months in a row) if it happened to me. Even if, a year or two later, they'd clear my name. It's sufficient to have just a few high profile cases to increase that fear.
That doesn't mean that I'd go out of my way to avoid hiring women...
This is risk impact 101. Risk = probability x impact. Even when the probability is small (false accusations), the huge potential impact can result in large overall risk.
The damage is not simply probability x impact, as it's also important to limit the potential downside. When a person or company pays for insurance, it increases the average damage in return for decreasing the variance.
"When there have already been numerous well-documented instances of people making false accusations that absolutely RUIN THE LIVES of the defendants"
*Citation needed on that claim.
The reality is that "false" sexual assault/harassment claims are around 2% to 10%. And that number is likely higher than reality because some law enforcement agencies will call a claim "false" simply because they could not find enough corroborating evidence. [1]
If anything, there is a disincentive to report sexual harassment/assault, because the victim has HISTORICALLY been victimized again in the media. The vast majority of sexual assault crimes go unreported because of this and other reasons. [2, 3]
The rolling stone article is a great example of how an entirely false claim can still end someone's career and life, even when it's debunked beyond doubt. Companies are risk adverse - they would never hire someone with a public claim against them even if the claim was shown to be false.
Why run the risk that you get a sociopath who will make a false claim for their own gain?
The problem is people treating women worse than they treat men. There's sexism at play when people consider which approaches are appropriate when they are attracted to someone.
Look what you have not said: "Why can't these women just learn ..." Somewhow you only seem to require men to do things? Are you arguing that it's acceptable for women falsely to accuse men? Ask yourself: what have you done to ensure that women not falsely accuse men? Have you had "the talk" with your daughters about false accusations?
So you have not asked your daughter to avoid falsely accusing others.
Why?
Does the law say, "false accusations are acceptable if the false accuser is in not in a position of power"?
In my experience, the "position of power" reply is a canned response that is being used to deflect a question. It is in my experience never accompanied by a substantial understanding of what power actually means, and of an awareness of the long tradition of difficulties of defining the concept of power.
In order to help you get away from this naive position, let me invite you to consider reflecting on the fact that the ability falsely to accuse others of heinous crimes and get away with it might be a power in itself. (Cf how the Khashoggi murderes are likely to get away with it -- would you or I get away with murder?)
Consensus seems to be that somewhere between 2% and 10% of investigated rape claims prove to be false.
Stanford: Myths about false accusation [0]
BBC: The truth about false assault accusations by women [1]
CNN: Sexual assault false reporting: What the statistics say [2]
There is no consensus. Your references [0, 1] both claim some variant of most-rapes-are-not-reported trope (I have not had time to look into [3]):
- "only about 40% of rapes are ever reported" [0]
- "the number of rapes and sexual assaults which are never reported or prosecuted far outweighs ..." [1]
Pretty much by definition of "not reported", it is difficult to believe that one can confidently make statements about the number of rapes that are not reported.
Another shortcoming of [0, 1] is that they don't in fact say what they mean by rape. The very definition of this term is controversial (e.g. statutory rape, which is nonforcible sexual activity in which one of the individuals is below the age of consent. Note also that the age of consent varies between different legal systems). This is a serious omission.
Given this, why should one take the rest of the articles serious?
..because there isn't a "these men." There are individuals mostly concerned with themselves and their friends (also daughters etc.) and there are institutions.. The institutions just want to avoid trouble, and "changing the human X" is not a viable tactic.
> Why can't these men just learn to treat women like the humans they are?
This sort of willful misunderstanding of concerns feels like a subtle gaslighting campaign.
The vast majority of men being discussed here have zero problems in their treatment of women. They quite rationally have calculated that being around women at work is now a significant risk to them, with little or no upside in return, so they're bowing out.
You can preach all you like, but in my experience it's almost impossible to get people to act against their own self-interest, especially when the welfare of their loved ones is on the line.
As we saw with the Kavanaugh hearings, a mere accusation is enough to unleash hell-fires. There is a large part of society that follows the “believe” culture which is what I suspect causes the fear. Nobody should be “belived” — evidence, corroboration and due process should be required. These days, a woman can literally accuse any man of anything and the man’s reputation can be destroyed. With Kavanaugh, some of the allegations brought by Avenatti were being treated as credible and having actually happened until they were proven to have been ridiculous.
However, I think public figure/political circumstances are the outlier and don’t agree with the concept of avoiding women. That’s just dumb on a number of levels. But I can understand the risk-adverse thinking. Ironically, the crowd screaming to “believe her” despite a lack of evidence actually caused more harm to women in the long run since the implication is that a women accusing anyone of anything is going to be “believed” regardless of evidence and without a consideration of due process. That’s a scary place to be as a man, knowing that a mere accusation and public flogging awaits even if there is no evidence of any wrongdoing having occurred.
>Why can't these men just learn to treat women like the humans they are?
They're not worried they don't know how to treat women with respect. They're worried that in 5, 10 or 15 years they they'll be put on the spot to defend their behavior in an interaction they don't even remember happening.
Well you can explain your daughters that men don't act the same with men and women, just like women don't act the same when with women or men.
Men are now protecting themselves against possible accusations of wrong doing by women, in professional settings, conferences, school... because now anybody can accuse them of abuse on Twitter with a simple hashtag and the world will never believe they are innocent even they have been deemed innocent by a court of law.
I personally refuse to be with alone with a female coworker in any situation, even elevators. And any private meeting is done with the door open.
As a senior executive at a financial institution, and a father of a daughter, you may not be surprised to hear that I don't agree with this characterisation.
The article focuses on the self-preservation concerns and it would be a lie to suggest that there's no CYA involved.
But it's not the only dynamic. As a senior exec I both legally represent my employer and am seen to represent it by many employees. If how I act or communicate is misconstrued this could have far reaching consequences.
But more important to both of these (because the real risk of something going pear-shaped isn't that large), is the effect that, seemingly inconsequential, actions can have on the recipient.
As an example, a mentee of mine received an email from a senior colleague asking her to go for drinks. She asked my advice as she felt obliged to go but didn't want to give the wrong impression. She was quite concerned. Turns out, he had invited a number of people who had performed well on a project but had omitted to be clear about why they were invited. Entirely innocent, easily misconstrued.
In my view, if senior folk get more thoughtful about their actions, it's likely to be net positive. There may be some unintended consequences (there usually are) but I don't believe the real risk is especially high.
I agree with your conclusion that "if senior folk get more thoughtful about their actions, it's likely to be net positive".
You also mentioned that "If how I act or communicate is misconstrued this could have far reaching consequences". I agree -- and this also cuts both ways.
The original point I was trying to (clumsily) make was: One could easily see the men in the original article as actively excluding women from positions of power. The 'far reaching consequences' in this case would be punishing women who have legitimate grievances for raising those grievances and emphasizing a power gap between genders.
I'm not defending their gender policies per se but I am increasingly jealous of societies that actually have a culture other than neoliberalism. Every society has its faults but I'm seriously wondering if ours may be much greater than those we love to attack (like the middle east). At least they have large cohesive families they live close to, share meals with, enjoy traditions with. It seems like most Americans don't even have that anymore. But at least women are "free" to sell junk CDOs to middle America. Thank God!
Yeah, here in America I can't go with my family to a nice public stoning of an adulterous woman. I just have to settle for my wife being allowed to drive on her own and have meaningful rights.
Which is why I specifically said I wasn't defending a specific country's gender policies. And yeah, here in America where we have an economic system that guarantees mass extinction of life, destruction of the biosphere, mass exploitation of humans you can't see in your daily life. Clearly your culture has it all figured out!
It's telling that I'm unsure if this line of comments is more concerned with the problem that people abuse other people, or the problem that people falsely accuse other people of abuse.
Sorry, from my perspective it's important to have that rule to prevent abuse. My understanding is that BSA implemented it after several instances of sexual abuse by volunteers, not due to fear of false accusations.
It's both. It's in the guidelines for sporting groups I have worked with that there's an open door at all times with offices and that there is at least one supervising adult/parent of the juveniles present at all times. I assume this is due to insurance and legal liability - all organized sporting groups have liability insurance or it's going on your personal liability. This unfortunately did not cover pathological cases like the US Gymnastics scandal where the doctor apparently even abused his patients in the presence of their parents in the guise of an examination.
I haven't worked on Wall Street for about 10 years, but when I did it was unbelievably misogynistic. None of our dozens of partners were women. The younger partners referred to their wives as "my first wife" while they were still married to them. The older ones of course were all on their third or fourth marriage. And the president of the firm, who was old enough to personally remember the Hindenburg disaster, just went around grabbing the secretaries' asses.
Wall Street has moved on with the times as has the rest of the world in the last 10 years. At this point I don’t think it is an outlier in terms of social attitudes. If anything it is at least outwardly more progressive by virtue of A. Being based in major metro areas B. A shift in skill set demand away from extrovert Lacrosse bros towards quants/techies and C. The amount of money on the line to blow up in a bad HR situation. Are there dinosaurs and jerks? Yeah. But not a disproportionate number.
It’s scary that this is done by people who earn money by managing risk. They came to the conclusion that this is the smartest way to operate. That should not be taken lightly.
Unless you can demonstrate they are as competent at risk assessment in this arena as they are in finance, you're fine to take it as lightly as anyone else's personal decisions. There's no a priori reason someone good at financial risk assessment would be as good at rationally modeling and reacting to risk in a domain which is significantly more personal and less quantifiable.
I'd say there are other factors. One big one for me is confounding:
"Sex predator/Abuser" will be the label placed on a guy who violently rapes a woman, just as it will be applied to the guy who said something PERCEIVED to be inappropriate (or who might have had consenting sex with a employee)
My sister the other day refereed to a guy who cat called her as "Violating her integrity".
When there is little distinction in describing:
1- someone saying bad things
2- an act of violently forcing yourself on someone and scarring them for life
3- Inappropriate, but consensual sexual behavior
It can be a little worrisome to be accused of saying bad things or of being even perceived as possibly having a relationship with someone.
They’re all interlinked behaviours. For people who are constantly at risk of being sexually assaulted, being harassed by someone is a major indicator of that someone posing physical danger. Although the verbal harasser may never escalate to physical assault, their harassment is a part of the environment that creates risk to potential victims and contributes to their fear.
As men it’s easy to think of harassment as isolated but for many women it’s a constant day to day threat and successfully managing that risk means quickly identifying potential threats even if they may not escalate beyond verbal harassment.
Verbal harassment can put someone already on edge in fear for their life. He absolutely violated her if that’s how she feels.
So... you think it is fair to the woman in example 1 to have the same term applied to example 2?
1- The first woman's gang rape where she spent months in the hospital recuperating.
2- An upper middle class woman getting told in a loud manner "uuuuhhh girl, you're looking finnnnneeee today"
Really? You can't see the difference between 1 and 2? You can't see the need for different terminology?
That's on you. I find it silly, and I find the confounding hurts everyone involved. Including girl #2, who has a legitimate complaint, but seems ridiculous using the terminology that is used for #1.
It also creates an environment of emotions and hysteria instead of reason and logic applied to resolving problems.
Sure, #1 is uniquely described as “gang rape” and #2 is “verbal assault”. I don’t think verbal assault and gang rape are equivalent. That’s not what I’m arguing.
I am arguing that any form of sexual assault is predatory behaviour engaged in by an abuser and it is completely appropriate for a woman to consider someone who verbally harasses them to be a sexual assault risk.
Sexual assault is woefully under reported and woefully under prosecuted, you cannot possibly argue that we have ever applied “logic and reason” to this issue. The progress that has been made in the last decade has improved the logic and reason applied to this issue but we have a long way still to go. A few decades ago you could not legally rape your wife, how is that logical? Or well reasoned?
Err, I was using the term "Violation of a woman's integrity".
According to you, both 1 and 2 can be described that way.
Listen you are right in part. Like when people talk about drugs being ba-a-a-a-d.
Is cocaine bad? Yes
Is the war on drugs justified by this? No
Same here. You are talking about a real problem. You are suggesting solutions that hurt everyone involved and then acting like if someone doesn't agree with you they are denying the problem.
I'm not denying the problem. I pointed out issue with an applied solution and instead of addressing them, you bring up the problem the issues were supposed to address, while ignoring the point.
You can’t swing a cat without finding a victim of sexual harassment who felt violated by harassment even if it wasn’t physical. Your physical body isn’t the only part of you that exists, if you are harassed to the point where you don’t feel safe living your life because of the threats posed to you wouldn’t you feel violated? Your life has been compromised.
If you mean “physically violated” then sure, you cannot be physically violated by words, but I don’t see the value in making that distinction. If a woman is afraid to go to work because her colleague shouts obscene remarks at her every time he sees her, why does it matter (in the context of ensuring she feels safe at work) if he hasn’t escalated to committing the acts he threatens yet?
Every situation is different, for some women a physical assault can be far less violating than a daily campaign of verbal harassment.
My statement is absolutely true and the fact that you see harassment and assault as such black and white things makes your ignorance clear — the fact that you had to edit my single sentence to try and make your point should have been a pretty clear sign of that.
There are physical assaults that are far less consequential than verbal assaults, that’s an indisputable fact. Anyone who has experience with victims, has been a victim _or_ even just someone who uses “logic and reason” would understand that.
Sorry mate, you have good points but they don't justify the reasoning.
If a person is being harassed by a colleague and they're not cool with it, then the next step is reporting it and trying to get that person out of their life.
> You cannot be physically violated by words, but I don't see the value in making that distinction.
Maybe I can point out the value for you... Americans and humans in general have an inalienable natural born human right to say, in general, whatever they wish. There's value in human rights. On the other hand, any kind of physical touch can be interpreted as assault if the recieving party doesn't consent.
> Why does it matter if he hasn't escalated to committing the acts he threatens yet?
Because expressing their rights to speech isn't illegal. Not only is it not assault, but it's not even close to assault. You're miles away from actual physical assault. In terms of logical progression.
Edit:
> for some women a physical assault can be far less violating than a daily campaign of verbal harassment.
Can you explain this, because I'm entirely unconvinced.
Physical assault is wide ranging, from unwanted groping (touching body without permission) all the way to rape. Verbal harassment is wide ranging, from something creepy said in passing to violent language used constantly.
I don’t think it’s hard to imagine being more threatened and traumatised and violated by someone in a position of privilege detailing the ways they want to have sex with you in graphic detail every day you interact with them, than threatened/violated/traumatised by a drunk person at a party grabbing at your body without permission.
I think you're 100% wrong. Any person would feel more threatened by a person physically assaulting them, than by being harassed verbally. What's hard to imagine is how you ever came to this conclusion.
Verbal harassment doesn't get any more violent than putting the idea of assault in your head. Actual assault is the manifestation of the idea brought by the verbal harassment. It's an entire order of magnitude worse than verbal harassment! It's not even in the same league!
I’m not arguing hypotheticals. I know women who have had experiences that were more harmful to them because of what was said and what that represents, more so than physical assault experiences.
I don’t know what your life is like, whether you’re friends with many women, but if you ever have an opportunity to listen to someone speak about abuse I really recommend it. You will learn so much. Abuse is so much more than what you think it is.
I was verbally abused by my mother all through my childhood, I understand it plenty.
If you make the comparison of horrific verbal abuse to nearly-innocent physical abuse, I could see what you mean. But if you keep the degree of assault identical between physical and verbal assault, physical will always be worse.
This is cowardice. Rational cowardice, perhaps, but still cowardice nonetheless.
> “Some men have voiced concerns to me that a false accusation is what they fear,” said Zweig, the lawyer. “These men fear what they cannot control.”
This reveals so much about the mentality of the people being interviewed.
The statistics of false rape accusations do not justify this concern. I would expect that an industry that copes with risk as part of their job to understand this.
Cowardice, defined here as the lack of personal integrity in the face of occupational hazards, can sometimes be rational and sometimes be emotional.
Some of the men are demonstrating a rational argument (albeit based on flawed statistics), but they're using it to justify running away from the problem rather than addressing it.
That's offensive. These men have the right to do displays of virtue (such as only talking with an open door). Why do you presume that men must risk their jobs ? It sounds like some some macho-requirement.
> Why do you presume that men must risk their jobs ? It sounds like some some macho-requirement.
One of the cornerstones of their entire industry accounting for the uncertainty of the future. They're already risking their jobs (and, indeed, their companies) every day.
Contrast that with a statistically insignificant number of false accusations.
If they are truly afraid of false accusations (like they say) rather than true accusations, then they haven't clearly done the math.
(If, on the other hand, they're afraid of true accusations, they should proactively cease to sexually harass women and maybe they'll have a less guilty conscience.)
I'm not imposing a macho-requirement on anyone, just asking that they exercise some sense of consistency here.
You're looking at this with statistical, risk management. There's a subset of risk management that focused on what's called "catastrophic," risk management. That's when the impact of the event, which is rare but can happen, is so high that one is willing to go the extra mile to prevent it. This includes obvious examples like nuclear powerplants having ridiculous security or classified systems being air gapped with dedicated, physical lines. However, there's less-obvious cases where the same thinking is employed:
One company's head of security at WTC started doing evacuation drills after the 1990's bombing thinking something destructive to whole building is worth having a plan for. He said all but 5 people got out in 2001. In same place, a bank was running OpenVMS clusters on high-quality hardware with a far-away site in case something happened to the building (standard concern, too). They claimed those nodes were the last thing that failed with no transactions lost. Everything else was destroyed.
People often consider hurricanes, tornados, flood levels, wild fires, and earthquakes before moving into an area. Lots of folks avoid Tornado Alley and the Southern/Southeastern Coast for that reason. One person thinking floods might get bad in Texas put an inflatable, rubber circle filled with water around their house. It was only one floodwaters went around instead of through. Likewise, the Hurricane Architecture article said author [statistically-unnecessarily] went with dedicated servers and architecture for super-high volume. Became main source for news during flood for entire state with tons of traffic. Kept folks informed.
Lots of people either don't put political/religious/relationship/work information social media or periodically delete it to make digging up previous dirt on them harder. It either takes no effort (former) or small effort (latter). The endless volume of folks getting quoted before being slammed online or being fired at work suggests this is a rational practice. Also, as Schneier says about crypto, the number and effectiveness of such attacks seem to go up overtime where traditional, risk assessment is nearly impossible.
Certain appliances, like toasters and tumble dryers, cause a disproportionate amount of homes to be destroyed. Many homeowners make sure they're only used when someone is there to react to damage. For toasters, some people also unplug them when not in use (idk if that matters). At least "person is there" is a costless precaution that prevent loss of entire home.
Another which is sometimes labeled discrimination is folks staying out of the hood to avoid being violently assaulted. There's quite a few hoods in Memphis, TN near me. Most people, regardless of race or gender, avoid them if they can since they don't want to be mugged, raped, beaten, or killed. When weighing that, people consider the psychological effect it would have on them. If they don't live there, the choice is (a) go meet people, do stuff, etc where I almost certainly won't experience violence or (b) go do same stuff where said violence is reported (or not) several times a day in those same places. Most people, again all groups, do (a) to avoid cost of (b) since it's never worth it to them. Some do (b), though, for a variety of reasons. Just saying it to acknowledge they exist.
In the main article, these are rational, successful people are similarly facing a catastrophic risk that's got an entire movement behind the tools that make it work. They don't know odds of it happening but do know the cost is end-of-career and frequency is increasing. They are rightly thinking in terms of catastrophic, risk mitigation where the entire class of risk is mitigated since the cost is unbearable. Although I disagree on specifics, they're definitely right to mitigate a catastrophic risk increasing in frequency. It's what they usually do. Me too.
This is the most insightful response I've received this entire thread. Thanks for sharing.
I'm not sure how I feel about the idea that women are viewed as potential catastrophes. That's probably just where we're at with identity politics these days.
Thanks! It's not a good situation. I don't think it's identity politics so much as specific practices that leverage media, corporate and viral social, to severely punish people for alleged crimes without evidence other than presence and claims of a woman. Another commenter described it like a superweapon that women can use against men working with women. If folks are using a superweapon and it only works on men working with women, then the mere existence of it will lead to men aiming for prevention to remove the circumstance that gives the superweapon power: women's presence.
I'd rather the superweapon not exist or be used only based on stronger evidence given its catastrophic effects. Otherwise, we're back to men wanting control over their lives/careers minimizing catastrophes by treating women as potential catastrophes. If not in general, then they'll do it for private or couple-looking meetings with them. As we're seeing.
You're assuming those stats are correct. I've seen very different stats that say the problem is huge.
But realistically, regardless of what the stats are, if you read news stories about powerful men being shot down through false or trivial accusations every day, stats aren't going to be the main thing on your mind, are they?
When I was arrested many years ago, the news spun it as though I had hacked into millions of computers and used them to DDoS the FBI, and then somehow use that to take over their computers.
In reality, I had found that they had an unsecured arbitrary file upload (i.e. had zero authorization guarding it) and told them about it on Twitter. Not the best move, but a far cry from what the media accused me of.
If you expect me to take the word of reporters above that of scientists, well, that ain't happening.
You can't take an average and apply it to a specific situation.
In this context, if you believe that men are in dramatic positions of power, then you would have to find the # that shows how often powerful men are wrongly accused (vs. just the average man).
False accusations are a problem no matter what you do. Is it a better coping strategy to behave in a way that makes them believable or to be decent to the people around you?
Personally I pick decency. I don't really care if this view is down-voted.
Also isn't it the assholes getting all the consentual sex? It's the niceguys getting the rape accusations. Women are telling us in the media and also in person how they always regret sex with niceguys.
I would argue that what you're seeing is a pattern of women continually becoming involved with assholes, cause they're not complaining about the niceguys.
Anyway, the original post was a sarcastic extrapolation of what we see in the media and comments, I didn't exaggerate it enough but I agree with your 1 words answers, thanks for chiming in.
This sort of fear-based hypercorrection, a misguided but not necessarily ineffective form of risk avoidance, happens in many walks of life. The same calculus is at the root of non-lower-class whites (as well as nearly everyone of high status) in the US avoiding neighborhoods with blacks and latinos. To them, the visible race serves as a proxy to all sorts of unpleasantness they wish to avoid, purely on correlation, and even as racism has moved more and more towards being publicly unacceptable, the habits of racist behavior remain because, unfortunately, of their perceived utility by those who apply them.
The utility function here is similar. The men in these situations have a lot to lose because they're in positions of power, yet live in relative obscurity without the social support system afforded to well-known public figures. They may or may not engage in behavior that's actually sexist, and they may or may not engage in behavior that's sexual harassment. False accusations of sexual assault, by all indications, are rare, and any accusation is reputationally costly to accusers in many ways. Data about false accusations of sexual harassment is harder to come by, as it's rarely treated as a criminal matter. But the statistics don't matter when the drastic outcome is so dire: if any of these men were to be accused, the current political climate ensures their careers and reputations will meet a swift end. To many, this is an unacceptable risk that requires mitigation.
>False accusations of sexual assault, by all indications, are rare,
Personally I've seen just about as many false accusations as true ones. It's not always the woman that makes the accusation, some men use it to hurt other men they don't like.
>How many false and true accusations have you seen?
I've been accused by some random online that I never met.
A friend of mine rejected a woman on okcupid, she then made accounts both in his name and various women's names on the former site 'cheaterville' and reported that he gave her multiple sexually transmitted diseases including HIV which cost him an acting job becuase it was the first thing that came up when you googled his name and despite he and I both having screenshots of this psychotic individual attacking him via multiple forms of communication threatening him if he wouldn't go out with her they said 'get it removed or we can't have you be part of the production'.
A few years ago at my current employer a woman alleged I sent her all sorts of inappropriate text messages and provided screenshots. One problem, she used an iOS device and all of the messages allegedly from me, were in the color bubble of the recipient not the sender meaning she messaged herself then deleted the wrong color bubbles.
So there's 3, 2 of them involving me, all in the past decade.
Then Saturday on a friend's IG post about a candle sale at Bath & Body works I commented "Such a girl" a local newspaper reporter than replied to my comment:
"Oh ZANG, you sure diminished her! Girls are stupid, with their genders and stuff, lol, amiright?!"
To which I replied:
"..."
To which she replied:
"Yes? I'm here."
To which I replied:
"there's something wrong with you. I made a simple comment a friend that I've known for 8 years post being playful. Not because I'm some woman shaming toxic card carrying member of hte patriarchy. Maybe try enjoying your life instead of lashing out at complete strangers on the internet there slugger"
To which she replied: " Ah. Here, let me translate that for you: "I don't like being checked, so I'm going to gaslight and throw some phrases around to seem "woke" and then continue to diminish through patronizing name-calling".
At which point I then contacted her immediate supervisor at her publication, his supervisor, the editor in chief as well as an employee of the parent company that owns the newspaper as this woman's IG profile starts "Downtown reporter at @newspapersheworksatsinstagram" as what she did is entirely uncalled for and not at all professional and if she's done this once, she's done it many times.
So I have a local newspaper reporter putting words into my mouth, calling my character into question in a public forum, because I happen to have a penis and said 'such a girl' to a candle sale photograph on a post of someone that I've not only known for 8 years but have taken out several times over those years...
This year I was falsely accused of stealing a girl's phone while in line for a dance club.
A gaggle of probably-too-young girls started screaming about losing their phone, then they turned to me, who's alone in line, and loudly accuse me of stealing it. I screamed back at them and called them dumb, earning eyeballs from everyone around. After about a minute one of them finds their phone and they all just pretend like nothing happened.
In an alternate universe, I was assaulted by the jocks in line who believe women first without evidence.
> The same calculus is at the root of non-lower-class whites (as well as nearly everyone of high status) in the US avoiding neighborhoods with blacks and latinos.
You know what I'm black, my spouse is white, and what do I tell her? "better safe than sorry". Sure if my spouse acted that way, we would have never met. I believe in personal responsibility, I also believe we have a responsibility to display an image other than the one displayed by "statistics", Hollywood and other cheap entertainment. When a white woman changes sides of pavement when I walk toward her minding my own business, I understand. It breaks my heart but I understand.
Those who are against racial interbreeding will be huge #meToo proponents simply because it will obviously have this effect of drastically increasing the risk of interracial relations, it'll become more like it used to be, the threat of legal violence will re-justify the male fear of approaching a woman he's attracted to. Only the violence wont be another man with a club like it once was, but the state being wielded as a cudgel by women and racists in influential cultural positions.
You're not wrong, but business is different than personal life.
Within my family and the people I trust, I'll say and do things that outsiders might not approve of, and it's none of their business. However in a business, the entire point is just business, and whatever it takes to make it better. The intersection of business and personal-trust is the grey area. Should I be square all the time at work, and mitigate as much risk as possible? Or can I relax on my break and try starting a conversion with the attractive woman eating by herself?
The #meToo movement has shown that the grey area is certainly 'risky'.
It's not perceived. Certain neighborhoods don't want some white guy strolling through. I was raised on the naive liberal ideals of the 90s ("I don't see race," etc) was served a dose of reality when I moved to Philly. I had a black friend and coworker, and when I walked on Giraud she'd get nervous about me. People would grimace at me, and mutter "white bitch" under their breath.
Being as naive as I was, I was completely unprepared for it. Worse, it seems that if you mention this on the internet people counter with "that's not half as bad as X group has it." As if there's some race to win the "who had the harder life" competition. And anyone who's not in 1st place doesn't have the right to complain.
I always wondered, why don't women get very harsh sentences if they get caught making up false rape allegations? I think that would discourage that sort of behavior and sort of balance things out.
It would lead to pretty much every man accused of rape with threatening to sue/press charges against their accuser and further stigmatize rape victims and lower the number who come forward.
Deeply-engrained cultural/societal biases that women can do no harm. You can see it in the trickle of sexual assault cases involving a woman teacher/underage male student; the women often get a relative wrist-slap of days in prison, if that. And let's not even get started on how routinely and holistically fucked men get in family/divorce courts.
You don't hear about these problems talked about though, simply because men are the affected parties.
it would be more effective if there was a wide-ranging public campaign in support of men who have been wronged, like a #NotMeToo . Escalating a war of the sexes is madness
Innocent until proven guilty applies to them too. What percentage of false allegations can be proven to be false, like the accused being in a different place at the time? Despite a couple of high profile exceptions I'd wager that's small enough to be a rounding error.
> Finally, he landed on the solution: “Just try not to be an asshole.” That’s pretty much the bottom line, said Ron Biscardi, chief executive officer of Context Capital Partners. “It’s really not that hard.”
Tell that to Neil Degrass Tyson! Would you ever consider him an asshole? And yet, here he is getting lambasted for pointing out a tattoo on a woman's arm and telling people he doesn't do hugs.
You literally can be the nicest man in the world and still get #MeToo'd
> Tell that to Neil Degrass Tyson! Would you ever consider him an asshole? And yet, here he is getting lambasted for pointing out a tattoo on a woman's arm and telling people he doesn't do hugs.
I thought he was being accused of physically touching a clothed area of the woman's arm without being granted consent, not merely "pointing out". The words "pointing out" imply a gesture, which can be done at a distance, not unwelcome physical contact.
> Is this really an offense worth ending someone's career over?
In isolation? No. It's a social faux pas that should be responded to with apology and remediation. Nobody is perfect, after all.
As one incident in an overall pattern of abuse stretching one's career? Different matter. If this pattern holds, the accused doesn't need to be propped up as a role model for science communication.
And herein lies the problem with #MeToo. NDT thought he was being curious and pointing something out, the woman thought she was being sexually harassed. This is the problem, that any action can be construed as sexual harassment.
> "If men avoid working or traveling with women alone, or stop mentoring women for fear of being accused of sexual harassment,” he said, “those men are going to back out of a sexual harassment complaint and right into a sex discrimination complaint."
This presents an interesting conundrum, and I wonder how it will complicate the process of proving sex discrimination related to mentoring disparities. Even if laws stay the same, I think some jurors will be more sympathetic to the "Pence approach" in the wake of #MeToo. This will make it harder for plaintiffs to win in mentoring discrimination cases, and will mean lower settlement offers as well.
This man-women discussion is incredibly confused - for many reasons including emotions and malevolence - and it took me quite long until I could say I have formed my opinion. If you are interested:
1/ In modern societies women are often wronged, in the form of discrimination, harassment, abuse, and violence.
2/ Some of the policies designed to help women are hurting man by default, for instance, positive discrimination or "guilty until proven innocent".
3/ Some think the amount of wrongness done to women is orders of magnitude bigger than the amount of wrongness done to man. (Including me)
4/ Some think this discrepancy between wrongness warrants the policies that hurt men by default.
5/ Some think the no amount of wrongness discrepancy warrants a policy that hurts someone by default. (Including me)
This was utterly, utterly predictable, and I'm sure the same dynamic is playing out in milder, more insidious forms in industries that are less openly regressive than Wall Street. I said as much to many of my friends during the nascency of the movement, and was baffled at how novel a concept it seemed to all of them.
This isn't fair to women, of course. But Water flows downhill, and people follow incentives. If you create a no-due-process superweapon that a class of people can point at another class, expect the latter to avoid situations where the former can use it. Duh. (In theory, women wouldn't be considered potential false accusers any more than men would, but the fact that the breakdown of gender roles has been intentionally lopsided means that a female accuser is both more likely and more likely to be taken seriously).
As die-hard a liberal as I am, I'm still sympathetic to the idea of examining whether we should shift the burden of proof for cases with characteristics that are systematically difficult to prove (not in the criminal justice system, of course; I think society-sanctioned state violence does and should have a much, much higher bar for protecting the innocent). But as a left-liberal, one of my primary points of departure with the contemporary left is that it seems to believe to its core that wishing on a star is all it takes for a policy to be effective, with no attention paid to the _actual_ way that a policy is expected to play out in the real world[1].
[1] I don't mean to suggest that the left uniquely has this problem, but I've got less exposure to the man-on-the-street version of the right, since I live in a deep Blue bubble and most of my friends form their beliefs based on whatever the Atlantic et al have on their front page.
> I'm still sympathetic to the idea of examining whether we should shift the burden of proof for cases with characteristics that are systematically difficult to prove (not in the criminal justice system, of course; I think society-sanctioned state violence does and should have a much, much higher bar for protecting the innocent).
Could you explain this? It almost sounds like you're interested in foregoing proof to decide cases where 'proof is hard'.
It's not a very well-formed idea, but it comes from the fact that I think that carefully-considered pragmatic exceptions to general rules can be valuable.
For a simple example, many people don't understand what it is about markets that make them powerful[1]. That doesn't preclude any economic role for government, since markets aren't perfect and there are cases where govt action is more suited to the situation.
Along the same lines, and taking a set of claims at face value: if there's an epidemic of rape and various institutions are systematically underserving victims, then it may make sense to shift that burden. I wouldn't say "forgoing" proof when proof is hard, but changing the standard of evidence. Proof isn't binary: for example, the "preponderance of evidence" and "beyond a reasonable doubt" standards for civil and criminal trials are pretty different. For a directly relevant example, I'm not very incensed by institutions cutting ties with Dr. Cosby and Harvey Weinstein despite the lack of a criminal conviction, and I don't think it's very controversial that decades of independent accusations may reasonably add up to a bit more than the initial presumed innocence. It's the formalization of this new standard (which many/most already agree to) that I'm open to.
Of course, this is all theoretical. I don't think most people are remotely capable of handling even the bare minimum of nuance we're talking about here, so it's much more likely that we end up overshooting the target and doing blind damage to the concept of due process. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[1] I've had conversations with people on HN itself about how Uber's pricing would be more just and just as effective if they did it manually instead of using the distributed pricing system we call supply and demand
> decades of independent accusations may reasonably add up to a bit more than the initial presumed innocence. It's the formalization of this new standard (which many/most already agree to) that I'm open to.
How much is 'a bit more' then?
You're essentially saying we should be allowed to substitute evidence if enough people vouch for a claim. In which case, to what degree of guilt can we attribute a person based on this metric?
If the degree has any significance, how is this different than mob-rule Justice?
And you're claiming many/most people already agree to this standard?
I think you're taking my openness to the idea as advocacy. I don't have any stronger a belief in it than your "I see your point now" remark implies. I'm saying I'm open to the idea that there's a problem in the evidentiary standard on pragmatic grounds, and am waiting to see if the movement has any detailed suggestions for a new standard. I'm _not_ claiming that I myself have the details for this new standard, and as I already said, I tend to be a bit of classical-liberal absolutist, so it's not my preferred policy.
I'm simply trying to be charitable to a viewpoint that I'm not personally a fan of; none of your questions about the details of how this would be implemented are relevant to me.
> If the degree has any significance, how is this different than mob-rule Justice?
As I said, I'm talking about in non-justice-system institutions. I don't see why you think the choices here are "use the same bar as criminal justice" and "mob rule". Do you think the civil case bar I mentioned is "mob-rule" justice? Given that there are bars for assigning guilt that are even more stringent than "beyond a reasonable doubt", what prevents those from being the ideal and what makes you refrain from calling BARD "mob rule"? The binary that you're framing this in is not one whose existence I accept; in fact, I don't even think it's logically consistent.
> And you're claiming many/most people already agree to this standard?
Yes, at an intuitive level, I think many/most people agree that Cosby and Weinstein were guilty, despite not being convictable because they don't meet the criminal justice bar (excluding the one accuser that actually was able to take Cosby to court).
> and am waiting to see if the movement has any detailed suggestions for a new standard
We can actually start to evaluate those already since many have already been created in specific places and nations.
Lets start with university policy and Title IX where accusation directly leading to suspension while investigation is on going. No evidence needed, and the later hearing panel that make a judgment is conducted by the school administrators and not the legal system.
Is this a good system? From what I have read it has every possible problem with it, among them being that most accused students can't afford a lawyer or even staying at campus while suspended so cases usually resolve itself automatically since the accuse has to leave regardless of the merit of the case. We also get cases where A accuse B, whose friend C then accuse A, with both A and B now suspended.
This happened to me. I started on a journey of transitioning to a woman and gathered a group of friends at work composed of women. They supported me for a few years helping me through the process.
Then recently (as of this year), a woman came forward claiming I was harassing, intimidating, and sexually abusing her. This woman was one of the people who had supported me previously. She had been gunning for my position (she was just below me) and we had joked about her taking my position after I moved up. I'm still guessing to this day that was why she made those claims.
We go to HR, her sister presides over the case. I filed a complaint due to conflict of interest. The woman filing the claim threatened to open up to the media about this if the company went forward with replacing the woman in charge of the case.
It's probably no surprise, but they ruled against me and terminated my employment. I had no violations beforehand, no concerns, no performance issues, nothing. I was told to confess, just say it, was hinted at many times to just confess, just confess, we have evidence, anything else you say is a lie, don't drag it out, but I didn't.
I felt as if my career was over. I was a trans freak who assaulted women as far as I knew it. Who would want to hire one of me?
Thankfully, I got some good advice to fight it in court, and I did, and I won, thankfully. And that's when I learned, it's not about the truth, it's about image.
The company didn't care what the actual ruling was, in fact the company came from having a very bad image in the past just now forming a new one. And even though I won the court case, that didn't matter. I still had to explain it to future employers and that was all it took to shut the door on me.
I'm a die-hard liberal too. But that really shook my faith in the goodness of people. I had several suicidal episodes after that, only to be barely pulled out of it by my wonderful husband. It's so easy for someone to point a finger and that's essentially the only word to say in the matter.
And I guess what I'm saying is, I hope this never happens to anyone. I'm sure women aren't anything special when it comes to being evil or twisted. That's a silly thought to me. I fully believe most of the women coming out on the #MeToo movement are being honest and truthful. But when you can mold the situation in a way that you know no-one will question you, it only takes one to flip the world upside down. That's a lot of power to just give someone.
Many liberal sentiments can be weaponized against marginalized people. Just Google "Speaker's Corner anti-feminism", or for a more recent example, "Eli Erlick Ariana Grande"
I think the only viable resolution is: providing help for victims should be a very low bar, in ways which don't hurt anyone else including an accused, and punishment should retain a higher bar (although you certainly don't need to meet criminal conviction standards to fire someone accused of certain behavior.) And as with a lot of things, focus on prevention/rapid intervention as early as possible, rather than waiting until serious harm has been done.
I had to deal with this crap more than once. It's a real thing. The article doesn't mention a helpful strategy that kept false claims off my own record: having a diverse team with plenty of women who respect you and will have your back. Even some that don't like you but have character that they won't lie about you. They told the truth about me to anyone that asked. That included what they liked, shrugged over, or really hated (about 99% shit I'd say). The world of difference between what a few women claimed and what my coworkers said spending years with me in private got those claims discarded before they could touch my record. One I had to hold back so she didn't do something crazy since women hate false claims about this stuff about as much as men. Those claims create false perceptions that undermine attempts to deal with actual harassment and sex crimes. So, a certain percentage of women working with me go all out fighting any BS they see like that.
So, that led to a generic solution building on what I was already doing. Just bring more women (and minorities) into your workplace, treat your workers well, spend time with them (in public if you're worried), build relationships, have their back where they need it, and they'll probably have yours, too. I actually don't have much charisma or management skill only working one job like that. I was the favorite boss of most of my people for years, though, just doing the above surviving all false claims of all types. It probably helps that I'm pretty genuine where they just knew what I would or wouldn't do.
The people, men or women, who my bosses thought weren't motivated would sometimes work hardest for me. It's just because I treated them respectfully. Also, helping them would where I could. Such tiny things go so far to bring out the best in people. As a side effect, they also reduce the number and effectiveness of false claims. So, I recommend companies just do more of that. Treating people well, inclusive behavior, and so on. Every company I know like that out here gets good results of some kind.
I mean you see Neil Degrasse Tyson reputation completely destroyed on the news, mentioning he invited his assistant home for wine and cheese and doing some awkward handshake. This could happen to anyone. Better be safe than sorry.
244 comments
[ 649 ms ] story [ 4175 ms ] threadInnocent until proven guilty with a trial by peers. We enshrine these in our public justice system; it needs to be spread to private companies as well.
If a crime has been committed, there is a judicial system that can and will deal with that, with established standards regarding presumption of innocence and burden of proof.
What is missing is a suggestion for how you could avoid that. If business and institution are free to handle these things as they please, which they generally would be granted under labor law and free speech, there are those that are going to disagree with you and there are those that are going to be outright bad at it. Just like they are at handling a lot of other things.
If sexual harassment is as important as not being deemed "a team player" at a company or the right of colleges to design their own admissions process (sometimes to the detriment of Asian students) we can expect people to be mistreated, at the least subjectively so, for this as well.
You can certainly can judge those involved, but I think it is hard to make a case against the problem as such. Because if you have e.g. extensive rights for companies and extensive free speech, there will be downsides as society changes. But that is an expected part of the process, unless you want to change the process and thereby labor law and the rights of colleges or introduce something like the right to be forgotten.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Police-domestic-viole...
I would probably agree with an argument, if you were to make it, that the punishments in some of these cases that are driven by the reaction of larger social groups are too quick and too harsh. However, it sounds to me like you're making a much more extreme case that I have to disagree with.
In any case, it is my understanding that 'innocent until proven guilty' is part of criminal law. In other kinds of law the burden of proof is lower.
Of course these claims have to be investigated carefully. But I think it is wrong to try to copy elements of criminal procedures to civil matters.
It is important to strike a sensible balance. We cannot have a situation where women would always lose because of lack of hard evidence.
When you serve jury duty and the case involves domestic violence, you are explicitly reminded of this because most people will assume it is not.
Still, we end up with cases like Brock Turner where he does get convicted not with the victim's testimony but a mountain of corroborating evidence and national media scrutiny. And then receives what is essentially a non-punishment.
But maybe there are such places.
Every case is different: witness testimony can be far more credible than photo evidence, dna evidence can be less credible than video evidence.
There is — as far as I know — no legal system in the world that measures the validity of a case based on the amount or type of evidence. You can absolutely be convicted on witness testimony alone in the US. That’s very unlikely but entirely possible under the law.
Of course, it helps if there is corroborating evidence, but there is no rule that says one cannot be convicted (in the US) based on a victim's testimony alone. It just doesn't happen often because usually there is some sort of corroborating evidence of a crime, and because it's hard to eliminate all reasonable doubt without any.
(I would be really scared to live in such a country, that strikes me a a recipe for disaster)
Is there evidence that this is more likely in sexual assault cases than others? Your post here [1] (and the post you are replying to) seem to suggest that it is actually less likely in these cases.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18590977
How can we know what specific pieces of evidence led to his conviction? I would assume the jury took into account the victim's testimony and the testimony of the onlookers who stopped him. What makes you say he was "convicted not with the victim's testimony but a mountain of corroborating evidence and national media scrutiny"?
Really? I think the reasons for the requirements of evidence are justified in civil matters just as they are in criminal.
We cannot have a situation where men always have no defence because of a lack of requirement of evidence.
In a criminal case, if the defendant remains silent then it is up to the prosecution to present enough evidence.
In a civil case, any argument made by the plaintiff that is not rejected or corrected can be accepted as true.
Of course, legal systems vary, but in general there is no right to remain silent during a civil case.
Until recently, the women/victim side was assumed guilty... still are in many places/circumstances.
We're leaving judge and jury duty to the public, social media, old media, individuals and (above all) corporate policy. None of these operate on a presumption of innocence.
> Until recently, the women/victim side was assumed guilty... still are in many places/circumstances.
The victim being "assumed guilty" is just an awkward phrasing of "innocent until proven guilty" for the perpetrator. What do you see as the difference?
If someone robs your house and you see them running away, television strapped to your back, you call the police and give testemony. You say what you saw and the jury judges on the merits of the case.
What doesn't happen, in a robbery, is the defense team lining up a slew of witnesses talking about all the times you left your house unlocked, all the times you invited other suspicious people over, all the times you sold something on Craigslist and all the times you Googled the price of the TV that got stolen. The defence doesn't use this testemony to show that you really wanted to give your TV away, and it wasn't actually stolen, and even if it was, weren't you sorta asking for it anyway?
I'm not saying that prejudice is right, it's just.. evidently hard to shake.
White woman accuses black man -> accused is guilty.
rich woman accuses poor man -> accused is guilty
black woman accuses white man ->accused is not guilty
poor woman accuses rich man -> accused is not guilty
It's still that way, sometimes. The difference is now is that "who has more power" suddenly varies a ton based on who's making the decision and the political optics of the situation. So some people on wall street (statistically richer and whiter than average) are scared (rationally or not, you decide) that they're now potentially vulnerable to false accusation when they were previously insulated to some degree by being (mostly) rich and white.
If I've come to appreciate anything-among many things-in the last few years of this cultural evolution full of "social justice" debate, discussion and forums-it's that there are pockets of the social fabric who seem very eager to suspend elements of the public justice system or eagerness to put a moratorium on certain 'memes' inherent to our system of adjudicating wrong deemed absolutely necessary or otherwise considered baked in, incontrovertible features of Western "justice" (because fairness, equanimity, better 100 guilty go free than 1 innocent go to jail etc) in just about every realm that isn't a court room where they would beholden to certain burdens and requirements to satisfy other 'memes' inherent to our system of adjudicating wrong.
Edit: I really wish the people who have such an issue trying to explore and openly discuss these ideas (even if you personally disagree with them) would step forward and actually offer a counter response versus driveby downvotes of myself and wutbrodo who replied here-and other comments here in the thread trying to actually explore the issue on a level that isn't surface level, shooting from the hip reactions. Barely fresh for 20 minutes and we're both nearly greyed out.
That isn't to say that Enlightenment liberalism is unquestionably correct, but the conversation has shifted such that the hoi polloi have started to reject liberalism without having even done the basic work to consider the pitfalls and the counter-arguments to those pitfalls (you will, of course, find more radical strains of thought that reject liberalism, and while I disagree with them, I don't have the same problem, in that they tend to be sincerely held and supported).
To be clear, I don't mean "hoi polloi" to refer to some caricature of an uneducated lower class. It was probably five years ago that I had an argument with someone on an internal board at Google, wherein he claimed the presumption of innocence was irrelevant, since it was a legal constraint by which we weren't bound. Again, not saying that its incontrovertibly correct, but the guy had no concept of why it existed in the justice system and whether those principles were generalizable.
I have served on a jury in a sexual assault trial and after what I’ve seen of the process first hand I would rather work for a company that doesn’t roleplay as the judicial system and instead believes the victim and uses the preponderance of evidence approach for determining guilt.
Most people guilty of sexual assault (in the literal sense not the legal sense) will never face any legal consequences because of how the judicial system works: I would never want to work in an office where the same was true.
If you flip this statement, you find yourself in a similarly bad situation: if you always assume the perpetrator is innocent, the victim is now in a world of hurt until / if they can get a conviction. Unfortunately a lot of times for various reasons (many to do with the psychology of being a _person_, e.g. shame / no report, shock / slow to report) it devolves into "he said she said" because there's no physical evidence anymore << even if multiple people have stories about the same offender.
The result is that women live in a state of _perpetual fear of men_. And that's current state.
^ That's not even to mention that women are disproportionately likely to be assaulted / hurt by men than the other way around.
I'm not saying _presuming guilt_ is good. But that's not what happens, and your statement is a bit misleading. When you mention "firing/expelling/crucifying" you must remember these are usually done with pretty thorough investigation / good reason to believe the victim; there are far and away more cases of offenders getting away with their misdeeds.
Hyperbole does not help at all, and this statement is several levels beyond hyperbole. A bit of nuance, please.
Do women try to bow out gracefully from relationships even if the onus shouldn't be on them, sometimes from fear of men potentially harming them? Do men do this at all?
Do you tell your daughter to watch out for predators before college? Do you tell your son the same thing, or different? Which one are you more worried for? Do you tell your daughter to stop being vigilant in <any scenario> because creeps aren't a threat?
Do women try to bow out gracefully from relationships even if the onus shouldn't be on them, sometimes from fear of men potentially harming them? Do men do this at all?
That's what the entire Bloomberg article is about! Yes, men apparently now routinely bow out gracefully from relationships with women, because they fear the woman will harm them.
And the article is showing this because it is a massive, unheard of change.
Of course we do. Btw statistically men are assaulted more often than women.
Yes, "innocent until proven guilty" is a terrible and fearful situation.
Result, the only thing she could do was filing a report at the police station, and now she have to wait for another girl to get raped and go to the police. I still scream "rapist!" when i pass by his restaurant though, twice this year and will do that too at Christmas, and will continue until i get arrested or until i pardon him. I also gave his picture and contact information to all my highschool friends so they can avoid him, as it's a small city and we are around the same age (luckily i'm no living there anymore). My sister's former cooking school now forbid female student to take apprenticeship there (a bit cynical, but well, better than nothing).
I was all for "innocent until proven guilty", and still am, but maybe because it's still fresh, i really can't condamn public shaming anymore.
[0]I might have the wrong word: she was working on her cooking diploma while working in a restaurant
In many types of sex crime cases, the prosecution must also prove that (3) the behavior engaged in by the parties was not consensual.
People do not generally consensually enagege in battery, theft, or murder. People consensually engage in sexual activities all the time. Also, sexual activities often have no third-party witnesses, which makes proof more difficult.
Colleges don't almost always simply believe the victim. It's quite the opposite: “Alarmingly, many universities are compounding this trauma by failing to support survivors and, in some cases, actively seeking to silence them.” [1]
Businesses don't almost always simply believe the victim. In fact, "often employees fear that human resources will help the company lash out at the accuser rather than punish the accused." [2]
Online communities don't almost always simply believe the victim. Take Twitter for example and how a chunk of that online community turned against Christine Blasey Ford. [3]
In the last case involving the accuser and the accused, the accuser had to move several times, hired her own private security detail, and continued to receive death threats [4], all the while the accused got the promotion of a lifetime. Hardly the case of — as you put it — "the accused is vindicated, the accused has already been fired, expelled, or crucified by public opinion."
I know that what you said is personal opinion, but as far as the data supporting that opinion, I just didn't find it.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/feb/27/unive... 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/business/sexual-harassmen... 3: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/conservative-rea... 4: https://www.npr.org/2018/11/08/665407589/kavanaugh-accuser-c...
In a way it is like Game of Thrones. If you take something to HR, you better win. And sometimes both of you lose.
> A late-40-something in private equity said he has a new rule, established on the advice of his wife, an attorney: no business dinner with a woman 35 or younger.
This is something completely different than having dinner with a group of people.
Would you give it a second thought if it were two men or two women?
To be clear: Numerous (to me) means approaching 20% of all accusations. That's only 1 in every 5 accusations. Does numerous mean something else to you?
Even the very definitions of what counts as sexual harassment / assault / rape / hate speech etc are deeply controversial. A most prominent example are radical feminists like Dworkin who essentially say that all heterosexual intercourse is rape.
That's a stupid argument. Can we please not equivocate exceptionally dumb arguments with serious ones?
(Also, while we basically live in a post-satire society, I still like to call Poe's Law on exceptionally dumb arguments.)
In the UK, official government research put the figure at 10% of all (rape) accusations being false. But if you read the reports, you'll see that the true figure must be much higher, as the methodology reclassifies lots of data points to avoid them being considered false.
Which paper do you mean by Jan and what replications have you got in mind? And where do you recommend I look for the UK figures?
A word of warning. I've found that there is a shocking rate of lying about these studies, both in other academic papers and the media. Moreover you have to read the papers carefully because they're often written by people with an explicit agenda (to minimise the false reporting rate - exception is Kanin who appers to have no agenda). You really have to watch out and not take any claims at face value, even when they'd appear to be in credible reports from credible sources. It's very sad but it appears that in a rather meta way, the topic of false reports of rape is dogged by false reports about studies of false reports about rape!
The idea that the rate of false reporting is very high is probably once of the most controversial and dangerous topics in our society today. If you write your paper you are very likely to be attacked for it, at least if your paper is based on police report data. Good luck!
Kanin, 1994
https://ia800209.us.archive.org/4/items/FalseRapeAllegations...
He reviews police reports for every single rape allegation in an unnamed American town, selected because the police department had the time and resources to investigate every allegation thoroughly. In 41% of the cases, the allegation was false. In this study, for a report to be considered false the accuser had to agree it was false. Thus the true rate must be higher, as there was no real incentive for the women to admit they lied to the police. The study provides data on the motives for why the false allegations were made.
Note the appendix. The original Kanin study was done on an unnamed American town. In the appendix they replicate the findings in a US university. Actually the percentage there is slightly higher at exactly 50% false reports (admitted false by the accuser).
The data Kanin provides on why false allegations are made has been replicated by the Dutch police:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313830325_Motives_f...
This Dutch replication doesn't examine the percentage of all claims that are false, just the motives for cases proven false.
Jan Jordan, 2004
http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/jhamlin/3925/4925HomeComput...
This study examines New Zealand police reports and replicates Kanin, by finding a 41% false reporting rate. The paper is horrendously biased, but nonetheless contains useful ground truth data about the NZ police conclusions in a large number of rape reports. The breakdown is:
- Genuine cases, 21%
- Uncertain/insufficient evidence, 38%
- Police investigated and concluded the complaint was false, 33%
- The complainant themselves said their own report was false, 8%
If we add together 33% and 8% we get 41%.
The paper goes into a lot of detail if you're looking for material.
Finally, the UK study is here:
https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110218141141/ht...
It states that in 9% of cases the claims were considered false by the police. This is quite far off Kanin and Jan, so what's going on? Again, it requires careful reading. About 20% of all reports are "no crimed", that is, the police classify the report as "no crime occurred". This classification is intended for very narrow and unusual situations like the ...
Shockingly, the UK government document you cite explicitly suggests "Expanding the concept of ‘real rape’".
If that’s not enough to clear his name, how can anyone ever escape the stain of a credible accusation? It seems prudent given that problem to ensure that no accusation will be credible.
People refer to Kavanaugh as a rapist when he wasn't even accused of rape. 50% (or more) of the country still thinks of him as such. His family and children received death threats.
The case of Brian Banks is an example that should meet your standard. Black man with a potential professional football career goes to jail, DNA evidence exonerates years later.
Your past is still vital to who you are, both in your own eyes and in the eyes of others. Your comment is ignorant of the trauma that these circumstances bring to the accused - if you can have empathy for the victim, you should be able to carry the same empathy for the accused.
Again Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina-Lisa_Lohfink
The matress stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University_rape_contr...
But we know of those only because they were public figures or have been carried out in public. You don't hear about the private ones.
Also people here really seem to be assuming any case where someone is found not guilty means the accusation was false, which is not how it works. Just ask OJ Simpson.
>Also people here really seem to be assuming any case where someone is found not guilty means the accusation was false, which is not how it works. Just ask OJ Simpson.
For a third person this is kinda how it works.
The last I heard about Kavanaugh he'd been totally exonerated. There's no reason to believe he did anything to this woman.
First, his name was Mark Judge not "Mike" Judge - so get off the high horse about being factually correct when you can't even get one name right.
Zero corroborating eyewitnesses, zero recollection of the location of the "party" from 35 years ago.
You know that Kavanaugh was shortlisted by Romney during the 2012 presidential campaign? Predating Dr. Ford's timeline for documenting the alleged abuse during therapy.
I don't think this is any different. The chance of being falsely accused is probably very small, but I know I'd absolutely crushed, both mentally and physically (lack of sleep for months in a row) if it happened to me. Even if, a year or two later, they'd clear my name. It's sufficient to have just a few high profile cases to increase that fear.
That doesn't mean that I'd go out of my way to avoid hiring women...
*Citation needed on that claim.
The reality is that "false" sexual assault/harassment claims are around 2% to 10%. And that number is likely higher than reality because some law enforcement agencies will call a claim "false" simply because they could not find enough corroborating evidence. [1]
If anything, there is a disincentive to report sexual harassment/assault, because the victim has HISTORICALLY been victimized again in the media. The vast majority of sexual assault crimes go unreported because of this and other reasons. [2, 3]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/03/health/sexual-assault-false-r...
[2] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/vnrp0610.pdf
[3] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-compassion-chron...
Why run the risk that you get a sociopath who will make a false claim for their own gain?
Side note: How many women have been accused of sexual harassment?
In my experience, the "position of power" reply is a canned response that is being used to deflect a question. It is in my experience never accompanied by a substantial understanding of what power actually means, and of an awareness of the long tradition of difficulties of defining the concept of power.
In order to help you get away from this naive position, let me invite you to consider reflecting on the fact that the ability falsely to accuse others of heinous crimes and get away with it might be a power in itself. (Cf how the Khashoggi murderes are likely to get away with it -- would you or I get away with murder?)
Stanford: Myths about false accusation [0] BBC: The truth about false assault accusations by women [1] CNN: Sexual assault false reporting: What the statistics say [2]
[0] https://web.stanford.edu/group/maan/cgi-bin/?page_id=297 [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45565684 [2] https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/03/health/sexual-assault-false-r...
- "only about 40% of rapes are ever reported" [0]
- "the number of rapes and sexual assaults which are never reported or prosecuted far outweighs ..." [1]
Pretty much by definition of "not reported", it is difficult to believe that one can confidently make statements about the number of rapes that are not reported. Another shortcoming of [0, 1] is that they don't in fact say what they mean by rape. The very definition of this term is controversial (e.g. statutory rape, which is nonforcible sexual activity in which one of the individuals is below the age of consent. Note also that the age of consent varies between different legal systems). This is a serious omission.
Given this, why should one take the rest of the articles serious?
This sort of willful misunderstanding of concerns feels like a subtle gaslighting campaign.
The vast majority of men being discussed here have zero problems in their treatment of women. They quite rationally have calculated that being around women at work is now a significant risk to them, with little or no upside in return, so they're bowing out.
You can preach all you like, but in my experience it's almost impossible to get people to act against their own self-interest, especially when the welfare of their loved ones is on the line.
Welcome to the new normal.
However, I think public figure/political circumstances are the outlier and don’t agree with the concept of avoiding women. That’s just dumb on a number of levels. But I can understand the risk-adverse thinking. Ironically, the crowd screaming to “believe her” despite a lack of evidence actually caused more harm to women in the long run since the implication is that a women accusing anyone of anything is going to be “believed” regardless of evidence and without a consideration of due process. That’s a scary place to be as a man, knowing that a mere accusation and public flogging awaits even if there is no evidence of any wrongdoing having occurred.
They're not worried they don't know how to treat women with respect. They're worried that in 5, 10 or 15 years they they'll be put on the spot to defend their behavior in an interaction they don't even remember happening.
Men are now protecting themselves against possible accusations of wrong doing by women, in professional settings, conferences, school... because now anybody can accuse them of abuse on Twitter with a simple hashtag and the world will never believe they are innocent even they have been deemed innocent by a court of law.
I personally refuse to be with alone with a female coworker in any situation, even elevators. And any private meeting is done with the door open.
Most of women also treat men like the humans they are.
The problem lies in the fact that bad women treat all men badly and bad men treat all women badly.[citation needed]
Hence, fear results in good men and women having to avoid eachother, for lack of a better response.
But you just assumed yourself that these men are somehow flawed.
Just because one is wearing a seatbelt doesn't mean she s a bad driver.
The article focuses on the self-preservation concerns and it would be a lie to suggest that there's no CYA involved.
But it's not the only dynamic. As a senior exec I both legally represent my employer and am seen to represent it by many employees. If how I act or communicate is misconstrued this could have far reaching consequences.
But more important to both of these (because the real risk of something going pear-shaped isn't that large), is the effect that, seemingly inconsequential, actions can have on the recipient.
As an example, a mentee of mine received an email from a senior colleague asking her to go for drinks. She asked my advice as she felt obliged to go but didn't want to give the wrong impression. She was quite concerned. Turns out, he had invited a number of people who had performed well on a project but had omitted to be clear about why they were invited. Entirely innocent, easily misconstrued.
In my view, if senior folk get more thoughtful about their actions, it's likely to be net positive. There may be some unintended consequences (there usually are) but I don't believe the real risk is especially high.
I agree with your conclusion that "if senior folk get more thoughtful about their actions, it's likely to be net positive".
You also mentioned that "If how I act or communicate is misconstrued this could have far reaching consequences". I agree -- and this also cuts both ways.
The original point I was trying to (clumsily) make was: One could easily see the men in the original article as actively excluding women from positions of power. The 'far reaching consequences' in this case would be punishing women who have legitimate grievances for raising those grievances and emphasizing a power gap between genders.
Chance of getting falsely accused of anything sexual is on average probably very slim, but the fallout of such an accusation can be devastating.
https://scatteredquotes.com/everything-word-horse-shit/
"Sex predator/Abuser" will be the label placed on a guy who violently rapes a woman, just as it will be applied to the guy who said something PERCEIVED to be inappropriate (or who might have had consenting sex with a employee)
My sister the other day refereed to a guy who cat called her as "Violating her integrity".
When there is little distinction in describing: 1- someone saying bad things 2- an act of violently forcing yourself on someone and scarring them for life 3- Inappropriate, but consensual sexual behavior It can be a little worrisome to be accused of saying bad things or of being even perceived as possibly having a relationship with someone.
As men it’s easy to think of harassment as isolated but for many women it’s a constant day to day threat and successfully managing that risk means quickly identifying potential threats even if they may not escalate beyond verbal harassment.
Verbal harassment can put someone already on edge in fear for their life. He absolutely violated her if that’s how she feels.
1- The first woman's gang rape where she spent months in the hospital recuperating. 2- An upper middle class woman getting told in a loud manner "uuuuhhh girl, you're looking finnnnneeee today"
Really? You can't see the difference between 1 and 2? You can't see the need for different terminology?
That's on you. I find it silly, and I find the confounding hurts everyone involved. Including girl #2, who has a legitimate complaint, but seems ridiculous using the terminology that is used for #1.
It also creates an environment of emotions and hysteria instead of reason and logic applied to resolving problems.
I am arguing that any form of sexual assault is predatory behaviour engaged in by an abuser and it is completely appropriate for a woman to consider someone who verbally harasses them to be a sexual assault risk.
Sexual assault is woefully under reported and woefully under prosecuted, you cannot possibly argue that we have ever applied “logic and reason” to this issue. The progress that has been made in the last decade has improved the logic and reason applied to this issue but we have a long way still to go. A few decades ago you could not legally rape your wife, how is that logical? Or well reasoned?
According to you, both 1 and 2 can be described that way.
Listen you are right in part. Like when people talk about drugs being ba-a-a-a-d.
Is cocaine bad? Yes
Is the war on drugs justified by this? No
Same here. You are talking about a real problem. You are suggesting solutions that hurt everyone involved and then acting like if someone doesn't agree with you they are denying the problem.
I'm not denying the problem. I pointed out issue with an applied solution and instead of addressing them, you bring up the problem the issues were supposed to address, while ignoring the point.
If you mean “physically violated” then sure, you cannot be physically violated by words, but I don’t see the value in making that distinction. If a woman is afraid to go to work because her colleague shouts obscene remarks at her every time he sees her, why does it matter (in the context of ensuring she feels safe at work) if he hasn’t escalated to committing the acts he threatens yet?
Every situation is different, for some women a physical assault can be far less violating than a daily campaign of verbal harassment.
...
You are the reason for the article above. Congrats. Now celebrate your victory.
There are physical assaults that are far less consequential than verbal assaults, that’s an indisputable fact. Anyone who has experience with victims, has been a victim _or_ even just someone who uses “logic and reason” would understand that.
Stop moving the goal posts. Stop your whataboutisms. My original post comparing #1 to #2 stands. You confound such situations. This hurts everyone.
If a person is being harassed by a colleague and they're not cool with it, then the next step is reporting it and trying to get that person out of their life.
> You cannot be physically violated by words, but I don't see the value in making that distinction.
Maybe I can point out the value for you... Americans and humans in general have an inalienable natural born human right to say, in general, whatever they wish. There's value in human rights. On the other hand, any kind of physical touch can be interpreted as assault if the recieving party doesn't consent.
> Why does it matter if he hasn't escalated to committing the acts he threatens yet?
Because expressing their rights to speech isn't illegal. Not only is it not assault, but it's not even close to assault. You're miles away from actual physical assault. In terms of logical progression.
Edit:
> for some women a physical assault can be far less violating than a daily campaign of verbal harassment.
Can you explain this, because I'm entirely unconvinced.
I don’t think it’s hard to imagine being more threatened and traumatised and violated by someone in a position of privilege detailing the ways they want to have sex with you in graphic detail every day you interact with them, than threatened/violated/traumatised by a drunk person at a party grabbing at your body without permission.
Verbal harassment doesn't get any more violent than putting the idea of assault in your head. Actual assault is the manifestation of the idea brought by the verbal harassment. It's an entire order of magnitude worse than verbal harassment! It's not even in the same league!
I don’t know what your life is like, whether you’re friends with many women, but if you ever have an opportunity to listen to someone speak about abuse I really recommend it. You will learn so much. Abuse is so much more than what you think it is.
If you make the comparison of horrific verbal abuse to nearly-innocent physical abuse, I could see what you mean. But if you keep the degree of assault identical between physical and verbal assault, physical will always be worse.
> “Some men have voiced concerns to me that a false accusation is what they fear,” said Zweig, the lawyer. “These men fear what they cannot control.”
This reveals so much about the mentality of the people being interviewed.
The statistics of false rape accusations do not justify this concern. I would expect that an industry that copes with risk as part of their job to understand this.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180101025446/https://icdv.idah...
Some of the men are demonstrating a rational argument (albeit based on flawed statistics), but they're using it to justify running away from the problem rather than addressing it.
That's offensive. These men have the right to do displays of virtue (such as only talking with an open door). Why do you presume that men must risk their jobs ? It sounds like some some macho-requirement.
One of the cornerstones of their entire industry accounting for the uncertainty of the future. They're already risking their jobs (and, indeed, their companies) every day.
Contrast that with a statistically insignificant number of false accusations.
If they are truly afraid of false accusations (like they say) rather than true accusations, then they haven't clearly done the math.
(If, on the other hand, they're afraid of true accusations, they should proactively cease to sexually harass women and maybe they'll have a less guilty conscience.)
I'm not imposing a macho-requirement on anyone, just asking that they exercise some sense of consistency here.
One company's head of security at WTC started doing evacuation drills after the 1990's bombing thinking something destructive to whole building is worth having a plan for. He said all but 5 people got out in 2001. In same place, a bank was running OpenVMS clusters on high-quality hardware with a far-away site in case something happened to the building (standard concern, too). They claimed those nodes were the last thing that failed with no transactions lost. Everything else was destroyed.
People often consider hurricanes, tornados, flood levels, wild fires, and earthquakes before moving into an area. Lots of folks avoid Tornado Alley and the Southern/Southeastern Coast for that reason. One person thinking floods might get bad in Texas put an inflatable, rubber circle filled with water around their house. It was only one floodwaters went around instead of through. Likewise, the Hurricane Architecture article said author [statistically-unnecessarily] went with dedicated servers and architecture for super-high volume. Became main source for news during flood for entire state with tons of traffic. Kept folks informed.
Lots of people either don't put political/religious/relationship/work information social media or periodically delete it to make digging up previous dirt on them harder. It either takes no effort (former) or small effort (latter). The endless volume of folks getting quoted before being slammed online or being fired at work suggests this is a rational practice. Also, as Schneier says about crypto, the number and effectiveness of such attacks seem to go up overtime where traditional, risk assessment is nearly impossible.
Certain appliances, like toasters and tumble dryers, cause a disproportionate amount of homes to be destroyed. Many homeowners make sure they're only used when someone is there to react to damage. For toasters, some people also unplug them when not in use (idk if that matters). At least "person is there" is a costless precaution that prevent loss of entire home.
Another which is sometimes labeled discrimination is folks staying out of the hood to avoid being violently assaulted. There's quite a few hoods in Memphis, TN near me. Most people, regardless of race or gender, avoid them if they can since they don't want to be mugged, raped, beaten, or killed. When weighing that, people consider the psychological effect it would have on them. If they don't live there, the choice is (a) go meet people, do stuff, etc where I almost certainly won't experience violence or (b) go do same stuff where said violence is reported (or not) several times a day in those same places. Most people, again all groups, do (a) to avoid cost of (b) since it's never worth it to them. Some do (b), though, for a variety of reasons. Just saying it to acknowledge they exist.
In the main article, these are rational, successful people are similarly facing a catastrophic risk that's got an entire movement behind the tools that make it work. They don't know odds of it happening but do know the cost is end-of-career and frequency is increasing. They are rightly thinking in terms of catastrophic, risk mitigation where the entire class of risk is mitigated since the cost is unbearable. Although I disagree on specifics, they're definitely right to mitigate a catastrophic risk increasing in frequency. It's what they usually do. Me too.
I'm not sure how I feel about the idea that women are viewed as potential catastrophes. That's probably just where we're at with identity politics these days.
I'd rather the superweapon not exist or be used only based on stronger evidence given its catastrophic effects. Otherwise, we're back to men wanting control over their lives/careers minimizing catastrophes by treating women as potential catastrophes. If not in general, then they'll do it for private or couple-looking meetings with them. As we're seeing.
But realistically, regardless of what the stats are, if you read news stories about powerful men being shot down through false or trivial accusations every day, stats aren't going to be the main thing on your mind, are they?
When I was arrested many years ago, the news spun it as though I had hacked into millions of computers and used them to DDoS the FBI, and then somehow use that to take over their computers.
In reality, I had found that they had an unsecured arbitrary file upload (i.e. had zero authorization guarding it) and told them about it on Twitter. Not the best move, but a far cry from what the media accused me of.
If you expect me to take the word of reporters above that of scientists, well, that ain't happening.
It's kind of astonishing how long it takes some people see this obvious answer.
Expert hint: It also solves a lot of other workplace issues as well.
In this context, if you believe that men are in dramatic positions of power, then you would have to find the # that shows how often powerful men are wrongly accused (vs. just the average man).
In the absence of a more focused study, it's the best we have.
Do you have an alternative study to link to?
To that end, I refuse to make perfect the enemy of good.
Personally I pick decency. I don't really care if this view is down-voted.
No.
> It's the niceguys getting the rape accusations.
Also, very much no.
> Women are telling us in the media and also in person how they always regret sex with niceguys.
Never heard that. Heard a lot of women say they regret involvement, physical and otherwise, with assholes, though.
The utility function here is similar. The men in these situations have a lot to lose because they're in positions of power, yet live in relative obscurity without the social support system afforded to well-known public figures. They may or may not engage in behavior that's actually sexist, and they may or may not engage in behavior that's sexual harassment. False accusations of sexual assault, by all indications, are rare, and any accusation is reputationally costly to accusers in many ways. Data about false accusations of sexual harassment is harder to come by, as it's rarely treated as a criminal matter. But the statistics don't matter when the drastic outcome is so dire: if any of these men were to be accused, the current political climate ensures their careers and reputations will meet a swift end. To many, this is an unacceptable risk that requires mitigation.
Personally I've seen just about as many false accusations as true ones. It's not always the woman that makes the accusation, some men use it to hurt other men they don't like.
I've been accused by some random online that I never met.
A friend of mine rejected a woman on okcupid, she then made accounts both in his name and various women's names on the former site 'cheaterville' and reported that he gave her multiple sexually transmitted diseases including HIV which cost him an acting job becuase it was the first thing that came up when you googled his name and despite he and I both having screenshots of this psychotic individual attacking him via multiple forms of communication threatening him if he wouldn't go out with her they said 'get it removed or we can't have you be part of the production'.
A few years ago at my current employer a woman alleged I sent her all sorts of inappropriate text messages and provided screenshots. One problem, she used an iOS device and all of the messages allegedly from me, were in the color bubble of the recipient not the sender meaning she messaged herself then deleted the wrong color bubbles.
So there's 3, 2 of them involving me, all in the past decade.
Then Saturday on a friend's IG post about a candle sale at Bath & Body works I commented "Such a girl" a local newspaper reporter than replied to my comment:
"Oh ZANG, you sure diminished her! Girls are stupid, with their genders and stuff, lol, amiright?!"
To which I replied:
"..."
To which she replied:
"Yes? I'm here."
To which I replied:
"there's something wrong with you. I made a simple comment a friend that I've known for 8 years post being playful. Not because I'm some woman shaming toxic card carrying member of hte patriarchy. Maybe try enjoying your life instead of lashing out at complete strangers on the internet there slugger"
To which she replied: " Ah. Here, let me translate that for you: "I don't like being checked, so I'm going to gaslight and throw some phrases around to seem "woke" and then continue to diminish through patronizing name-calling".
At which point I then contacted her immediate supervisor at her publication, his supervisor, the editor in chief as well as an employee of the parent company that owns the newspaper as this woman's IG profile starts "Downtown reporter at @newspapersheworksatsinstagram" as what she did is entirely uncalled for and not at all professional and if she's done this once, she's done it many times.
So I have a local newspaper reporter putting words into my mouth, calling my character into question in a public forum, because I happen to have a penis and said 'such a girl' to a candle sale photograph on a post of someone that I've not only known for 8 years but have taken out several times over those years...
A gaggle of probably-too-young girls started screaming about losing their phone, then they turned to me, who's alone in line, and loudly accuse me of stealing it. I screamed back at them and called them dumb, earning eyeballs from everyone around. After about a minute one of them finds their phone and they all just pretend like nothing happened.
In an alternate universe, I was assaulted by the jocks in line who believe women first without evidence.
You know what I'm black, my spouse is white, and what do I tell her? "better safe than sorry". Sure if my spouse acted that way, we would have never met. I believe in personal responsibility, I also believe we have a responsibility to display an image other than the one displayed by "statistics", Hollywood and other cheap entertainment. When a white woman changes sides of pavement when I walk toward her minding my own business, I understand. It breaks my heart but I understand.
Within my family and the people I trust, I'll say and do things that outsiders might not approve of, and it's none of their business. However in a business, the entire point is just business, and whatever it takes to make it better. The intersection of business and personal-trust is the grey area. Should I be square all the time at work, and mitigate as much risk as possible? Or can I relax on my break and try starting a conversion with the attractive woman eating by herself?
The #meToo movement has shown that the grey area is certainly 'risky'.
Being as naive as I was, I was completely unprepared for it. Worse, it seems that if you mention this on the internet people counter with "that's not half as bad as X group has it." As if there's some race to win the "who had the harder life" competition. And anyone who's not in 1st place doesn't have the right to complain.
You don't hear about these problems talked about though, simply because men are the affected parties.
Tell that to Neil Degrass Tyson! Would you ever consider him an asshole? And yet, here he is getting lambasted for pointing out a tattoo on a woman's arm and telling people he doesn't do hugs.
You literally can be the nicest man in the world and still get #MeToo'd
I thought he was being accused of physically touching a clothed area of the woman's arm without being granted consent, not merely "pointing out". The words "pointing out" imply a gesture, which can be done at a distance, not unwelcome physical contact.
Is this really an offense worth ending someone's career over?
(And is it any surprise that we might all deduce the lesson if it is?)
In isolation? No. It's a social faux pas that should be responded to with apology and remediation. Nobody is perfect, after all.
As one incident in an overall pattern of abuse stretching one's career? Different matter. If this pattern holds, the accused doesn't need to be propped up as a role model for science communication.
If he did in fact physically touch her, then this isn't an ambiguous "he said/she said" problem, this is a violation of her personal boundaries.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/nosacredcows/2018/11/two-more-...
This presents an interesting conundrum, and I wonder how it will complicate the process of proving sex discrimination related to mentoring disparities. Even if laws stay the same, I think some jurors will be more sympathetic to the "Pence approach" in the wake of #MeToo. This will make it harder for plaintiffs to win in mentoring discrimination cases, and will mean lower settlement offers as well.
1/ In modern societies women are often wronged, in the form of discrimination, harassment, abuse, and violence.
2/ Some of the policies designed to help women are hurting man by default, for instance, positive discrimination or "guilty until proven innocent".
3/ Some think the amount of wrongness done to women is orders of magnitude bigger than the amount of wrongness done to man. (Including me)
4/ Some think this discrepancy between wrongness warrants the policies that hurt men by default.
5/ Some think the no amount of wrongness discrepancy warrants a policy that hurts someone by default. (Including me)
2/ Most of the policies designed to help women actually hurt them. Positive discrimination usually ends up being much worse than doing nothing.
This isn't fair to women, of course. But Water flows downhill, and people follow incentives. If you create a no-due-process superweapon that a class of people can point at another class, expect the latter to avoid situations where the former can use it. Duh. (In theory, women wouldn't be considered potential false accusers any more than men would, but the fact that the breakdown of gender roles has been intentionally lopsided means that a female accuser is both more likely and more likely to be taken seriously).
As die-hard a liberal as I am, I'm still sympathetic to the idea of examining whether we should shift the burden of proof for cases with characteristics that are systematically difficult to prove (not in the criminal justice system, of course; I think society-sanctioned state violence does and should have a much, much higher bar for protecting the innocent). But as a left-liberal, one of my primary points of departure with the contemporary left is that it seems to believe to its core that wishing on a star is all it takes for a policy to be effective, with no attention paid to the _actual_ way that a policy is expected to play out in the real world[1].
[1] I don't mean to suggest that the left uniquely has this problem, but I've got less exposure to the man-on-the-street version of the right, since I live in a deep Blue bubble and most of my friends form their beliefs based on whatever the Atlantic et al have on their front page.
Could you explain this? It almost sounds like you're interested in foregoing proof to decide cases where 'proof is hard'.
For a simple example, many people don't understand what it is about markets that make them powerful[1]. That doesn't preclude any economic role for government, since markets aren't perfect and there are cases where govt action is more suited to the situation.
Along the same lines, and taking a set of claims at face value: if there's an epidemic of rape and various institutions are systematically underserving victims, then it may make sense to shift that burden. I wouldn't say "forgoing" proof when proof is hard, but changing the standard of evidence. Proof isn't binary: for example, the "preponderance of evidence" and "beyond a reasonable doubt" standards for civil and criminal trials are pretty different. For a directly relevant example, I'm not very incensed by institutions cutting ties with Dr. Cosby and Harvey Weinstein despite the lack of a criminal conviction, and I don't think it's very controversial that decades of independent accusations may reasonably add up to a bit more than the initial presumed innocence. It's the formalization of this new standard (which many/most already agree to) that I'm open to.
Of course, this is all theoretical. I don't think most people are remotely capable of handling even the bare minimum of nuance we're talking about here, so it's much more likely that we end up overshooting the target and doing blind damage to the concept of due process. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[1] I've had conversations with people on HN itself about how Uber's pricing would be more just and just as effective if they did it manually instead of using the distributed pricing system we call supply and demand
I see your point now.
> decades of independent accusations may reasonably add up to a bit more than the initial presumed innocence. It's the formalization of this new standard (which many/most already agree to) that I'm open to.
How much is 'a bit more' then?
You're essentially saying we should be allowed to substitute evidence if enough people vouch for a claim. In which case, to what degree of guilt can we attribute a person based on this metric?
If the degree has any significance, how is this different than mob-rule Justice?
And you're claiming many/most people already agree to this standard?
I'm simply trying to be charitable to a viewpoint that I'm not personally a fan of; none of your questions about the details of how this would be implemented are relevant to me.
> If the degree has any significance, how is this different than mob-rule Justice?
As I said, I'm talking about in non-justice-system institutions. I don't see why you think the choices here are "use the same bar as criminal justice" and "mob rule". Do you think the civil case bar I mentioned is "mob-rule" justice? Given that there are bars for assigning guilt that are even more stringent than "beyond a reasonable doubt", what prevents those from being the ideal and what makes you refrain from calling BARD "mob rule"? The binary that you're framing this in is not one whose existence I accept; in fact, I don't even think it's logically consistent.
> And you're claiming many/most people already agree to this standard?
Yes, at an intuitive level, I think many/most people agree that Cosby and Weinstein were guilty, despite not being convictable because they don't meet the criminal justice bar (excluding the one accuser that actually was able to take Cosby to court).
We can actually start to evaluate those already since many have already been created in specific places and nations.
Lets start with university policy and Title IX where accusation directly leading to suspension while investigation is on going. No evidence needed, and the later hearing panel that make a judgment is conducted by the school administrators and not the legal system.
Is this a good system? From what I have read it has every possible problem with it, among them being that most accused students can't afford a lawyer or even staying at campus while suspended so cases usually resolve itself automatically since the accuse has to leave regardless of the merit of the case. We also get cases where A accuse B, whose friend C then accuse A, with both A and B now suspended.
Then recently (as of this year), a woman came forward claiming I was harassing, intimidating, and sexually abusing her. This woman was one of the people who had supported me previously. She had been gunning for my position (she was just below me) and we had joked about her taking my position after I moved up. I'm still guessing to this day that was why she made those claims.
We go to HR, her sister presides over the case. I filed a complaint due to conflict of interest. The woman filing the claim threatened to open up to the media about this if the company went forward with replacing the woman in charge of the case.
It's probably no surprise, but they ruled against me and terminated my employment. I had no violations beforehand, no concerns, no performance issues, nothing. I was told to confess, just say it, was hinted at many times to just confess, just confess, we have evidence, anything else you say is a lie, don't drag it out, but I didn't.
I felt as if my career was over. I was a trans freak who assaulted women as far as I knew it. Who would want to hire one of me?
Thankfully, I got some good advice to fight it in court, and I did, and I won, thankfully. And that's when I learned, it's not about the truth, it's about image.
The company didn't care what the actual ruling was, in fact the company came from having a very bad image in the past just now forming a new one. And even though I won the court case, that didn't matter. I still had to explain it to future employers and that was all it took to shut the door on me.
I'm a die-hard liberal too. But that really shook my faith in the goodness of people. I had several suicidal episodes after that, only to be barely pulled out of it by my wonderful husband. It's so easy for someone to point a finger and that's essentially the only word to say in the matter.
And I guess what I'm saying is, I hope this never happens to anyone. I'm sure women aren't anything special when it comes to being evil or twisted. That's a silly thought to me. I fully believe most of the women coming out on the #MeToo movement are being honest and truthful. But when you can mold the situation in a way that you know no-one will question you, it only takes one to flip the world upside down. That's a lot of power to just give someone.
I wish the author spent some time on elaborating what the right thing is. The right thing might be too obvious for me to realize what it is.
So, that led to a generic solution building on what I was already doing. Just bring more women (and minorities) into your workplace, treat your workers well, spend time with them (in public if you're worried), build relationships, have their back where they need it, and they'll probably have yours, too. I actually don't have much charisma or management skill only working one job like that. I was the favorite boss of most of my people for years, though, just doing the above surviving all false claims of all types. It probably helps that I'm pretty genuine where they just knew what I would or wouldn't do.
The people, men or women, who my bosses thought weren't motivated would sometimes work hardest for me. It's just because I treated them respectfully. Also, helping them would where I could. Such tiny things go so far to bring out the best in people. As a side effect, they also reduce the number and effectiveness of false claims. So, I recommend companies just do more of that. Treating people well, inclusive behavior, and so on. Every company I know like that out here gets good results of some kind.