Sorry for the confusion. I didn’t mean to suggest the post violated the rules; I was only trying to request more information (my comment was the second in this thread—no one had posted a summary or workaround at the time).
Thanks to everyone who summarized or referred me elsewhere.
This was submitted a few days ago, and
thaumasiotes linked this article[1], which I endorse as being much more information-dense. The NY Times one is one of the usual droning long-form pieces that takes way too long to say anything relevant.
Unfortunate that a bad investigator made a professor's life difficult. I liken it to a bad boss who can make one ultimately lose one's job for entirely unclear reasons.
Without any evidence that this is a systemic problem, I wonder why it would justify my attention.
I view this more as like a publication of a vulnerability: "Hey, one major university believes they have to thoroughly investigate even the most bad-faith accusations against academic rivals for the same job, which is ripe for abuse."
It doesn't matter that only one (publicly known) case has happened, if there's the potential of others latching on.
The author makes the point that the investigator was sympathetic, but had to follow policy. It's the policy that is defective:
>Melanie also hadn’t been able to locate a current student named Rebecca James in Marta’s department, but she said that the name could always be an alias, and she was still obligated to investigate Marta now that a “credible” accusation had been made.
>“Good question,” Melanie responded, her voice bright again. “Because of the funding that we receive through Title IX, we’re required to investigate everything. And with that we want to really run everything to the ground.”
Why didn't the investigator subpoena the details about the accounts sending the accusations? That would have shown right away that the accusations were not "credible" and the university could have just dropped the investigation right away.
By the second go round, when the "y'all" message arrived, the credibility problem was obvious but the investigation didn't address it.
This sounds to me like a very limp bureaucratic response by someone just going through the motions, with no real effort to resolve matters.
The same could be said of a plethora of other industries that are government funded. Defense contractors, utilities, etc.
Furthermore, the last two points would make sense if Title IX only applied to teachers. But that's not the case. Even between students Title IX still applies.
From the article, it does not sound like much needs to change to prevent abuse of this level. Requirements of at least one non-anonymous source would do it.
I see this sentiment expressed a lot, but I can think of edge cases where it fails. One case is regular sexual harrassment from a peer (say 2 students in a class). It's not technically a crime, but it's easy to see that the educational experience of the victim is worsened. In that case, I would say it's the university's responsibility to investigate and step in.
Good luck with that. We had an attempted rape on campus. The suspect was from a well-connected local family and consequently the charges were dismissed. The local fishwrapper even published a correction to the weekly police report. Thankfully we have the parallel system and don't have to deal with that student any longer.
I fully understand why people don't want to use the legal system. Using national data, the resolve rate here for basically anything is in the single digit. If you get robbed, assaulted, home invaded, harassed, sexual harassed, threatened, defrauded, or are victim of any of a very long list of different crimes, your time is likely better spent doing something else then report a crime. The biggest reason to file a report is to give the government data that a problem exist, rather than expecting any resolution.
Personally I have made three such reports, including two home invasions, and it is not hard to guess how many have ended up in court.
In order to fix this we could change the law and the legal system to push the resolve rate up, but there is many good reasons why society have chosen not to do that. Parallel system is much easier as long the right persons get targeted.
The problem is that along with this one good outcome comes many bad ones. It's awful that we cannot make all outcomes good, but that's simply not possible.
For what it's worth, I don't think that perpetrators of violent crimes, including rape, should ever be allowed out in public. Their incarceration should be humane, but it should not be temporary. And this judgement should be made by the courts.
People like the system as it is. They could vote for a sheriff that upholds the law instead of local mores, and they could swap out the judge as well. But the majority doesn't want to. They prefer their "Trump Republicans" who "support law enforcement".
Is it? The goal ought to be reducing the number of these crimes, not shifting their location. Or worse yet, shifting them to communities of poor and downtrodden, where they can be conveniently ignored.
We all have a scope of control we can exercise. If you are part of the university system kicking the problem out of your sphere of control is rational and effective.
This isn't the best of all possible worlds obviously.
The matter is not as simple as "Devos is against it, so we must support it"; also one could say recent revisions aren't attempts to "dismantle" it. Criticism has come from all sides:
I don't think DeVos wants to (or even can) repeal Title IX. I think her proposed changes are limited to the "Dear Colleague" letter sent by Obama which, among other things, mandated that colleges use a preponderance of evidence standard rather than clear and convincing or beyond a reasonable doubt.
How easily could this story* happen in other fields besides University faculties? Could this all be avoided by just not telling anyone that you are in the running for a job, until you have the written offer in hand?
*(1:frenemy finds out you are a candidate for a job; 2: frenemy anonymously send unsubstantiated rumors to decisionmakers; 3: decisionmakers take the rumors seriously)
> Could this all be avoided by just not telling anyone that you are in the running for a job, until you have the written offer in hand?
Probably not in U.S. academia. When a U.S. department is thinking of hiring you as a professor, you give a public talk in front of that department's faculty. At that point, it becomes more or less public knowledge that you are in the running for a job.
Private individuals at businesses have incentives and the opportunity to exercise basic judgment, ask the accuser for more facts, or ask the accused for his or her side of the story.
On the other hand, from 2011-2017, most schools reading the federal Title IX guidance were not only discouraged from listening to the defendant, they found themselves discouraged from listening to the victim. Thus you see a black athlete Grant Neal who was expelled from Colorado State University-Pueblo for raping a trainer, despite the trainer saying that she was fine and not at all raped. (You can't believe her! She's a battered woman.)
Of course, when Betsy DeVos announced changes in 2014, all the commentary you could find was "this is rape culture at work!" but if you're willing to actually look at the cases she cited, I can point you at https://reason.com/2017/09/07/devos-title-ix-example-cases-r...
100% can’t. Schools have their own secret police for investigation for no reason that make stories like this possible. If they just deferred to the normal police like literally every other profession, then everything would be fine.
Instead, universities made what happens off-campus into their business. I’m sure there’s a conspiracy theory to be found here.
Title IX has always had these problems and has had these abuses since inception. Numerous lawsuits have been brought about this kind of thing and even won. Why is this case different?
No, really, I am asking. Why is the New York Times writing about it now? Why for these people?
Women were victimized by a system that was designed to help women. In this case it's even more juicy because its gay women. Even better because its a gay man as the perpetrator.
This gets reads, this gets people's attention, and its less common then the typical case of abuse, making it interesting. It helps that they have more concrete proof the accusations were a lie, so the news paper doesn't have to worry about being on the wrong side of a sensitive topic.
but don't forget about the empathy gap. Not in the news paper, but in society at large. The idea of an innocent man getting caught up in the system is uncomfortable, but people push that thought to the back of their mind and subconsciously rationalise it away as a necessary evil to protect women (and some men) because they can't think of a way to protect the falsely accused that doesn't make it easier to get away with abusing women. In this view the potentially abused women gets more empathy over the potentially innocent man.
Title IX is an entirely Kafkaesque system that has ruined the lives of countless innocent people. This is quite widely accepted most of the time, when it’s simply being used to persecute innocent men, however it amounts to a serious controversy when its turned against a well respected lesbian academic. It’s just ordinary identity politics at work.
Rather ironic considering the NYT again and again gave platform to people arguing for Title IX and complaining about De Vos trying to reign it in. Lives ruined. But a woman being falsely accused? That's international-news worthy.
Because they are lesbian women so they are the "good ones", it is simple as that. The NY Times is not different to Fox or CNN or any other media outlet in the US. They all have some agenda which they try to push, that's all.
For "political/cultural" topics, I generally ask does the article align with the company's/editorial staff's biases.
For important geopolitical topics, I generally ask does the article align with the company's masters' biases.
What a company chooses to cover or not cover and how a company chooses to cover a story becomes rather obvious. After a while, you can pretty much tell whether a story will be cover by a company and how they are going to spin it.
> Numerous lawsuits have been brought about this kind of thing and even won. Why is this case different?
It's hard to say. If the situation isn't special since we had numerous lawsuits like this before, then I guess we can ask what else is special? Maybe we can run down the "who,what,when,where,why". Lets start with who. Is there anything special there?
I’m a bit ratted by their inability to press criminal charges. They got a lot of hard evidence and I’d be really amazed if someone crazed enough to do this is going to be an outstanding citizen for the rest of their life. There’s a public interest in that person being named, having this history attached to their name, and restitution to be paid.
I was just thinking... the state pays ungodly amounts of money to put away criminals. How is this different? Why are these two financially on the hook for justice to be served?
This is why the idea that it's never ok to question an accuser is really dangerous. "J" obviously discovered something that way too many people have now discovered: if you drape yourself in the cloak of the victim, you make yourself socially impervious to any critical inquiry. We can and should be disgusted by "J", but it's less about an individual and more about a vulnerability in our system: mob justice and crucifying people outside of the legal system is a very very bad idea. And no, I'm not suggesting we should never take victims seriously, since in discussions of this nature people always want to create strawmen. But I don't think we should just take anonymous commentary with no contact with actual law enforcement seriously.
There's a really good reason we have an innocent-until-proven-guilty system. False accusations can be just as harmful as actual crimes.
You've got it backwards. All non-anonymous accusations should be taken seriously. The problem in the story described by this article was the weight being given to anonymous accusations, which should not be given much weight. As a general rule, justice is well served so long as the accused have certain rights, in particular:
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense."
Anonymous accusations have not played a very large role in the more dramatic cases we've seen over the last two years.
Amber Anderson is a real person. Kate Beckinsale is a real person. Angelina Jolie is a real person. All of them made public accusations against Harvey Weinstein.
E. Jean Carroll is a well-known journalist who accuses President Trump of raping her.
Andrea Constand is a real person. Her accusations against Bill Cosby were not anonymous.
Most of these people are well-known, and are putting their reputations on the line by accusing Weinstein, Trump, and Cosby. Such accusations need to be carefully investigated. In the past, these accusations have not been taken seriously and a new seriousness on these matters is overdue.
You're arguing different things here. They're saying that we have to question allegations, you're saying that we have to take them seriously. The way we should take them seriously is to investigate them, which means questioning both sides of the story.
We will probably never make a perfect system, but we can't leave large vulnerabilities that are easily gamed or they will be. We should investigate all of these accusations and shut down operations like NXIVM. We need to seriously look at allegations by Juanita Broderick and co. But we can't believe either side until we actually investigate the evidence.
If anything, we need to do what we can to make it safer for victims to come out earlier while there's still enough evidence to investigate and to take the allegations seriously enough so that they don't remain obscured for decades, or there will be nothing left to investigate when the allegation is finally made public.
This comment would be stronger if it dropped the leading “You've got it backwards.” Especially since the content is not incompatible with the previous comment.
My comment is incompatible with "If you drape yourself in the cloak of the victim, you make yourself socially impervious to any critical inquiry."
Victims are not socially impervious to any critical inquiry. Anonymous accusers might be socially impervious to any critical inquiry, because they are anonymous. But the distinction clearly belongs to "anonymous" and not to "victim".
I'd agree with you, but only where standard constitutional courtrooms are involved. Any system that allows anonymous accusers to negatively affect anyone's life is going to be turned into a weapon against innocent people, again and again and again.
I don't really have any critique of what you're saying, other than that you seem to think I disagree. My issue is only with anonymous accusations and people deciding guilt before an actual trial is held.
I read up on Fowler and Wikipedia says this which is very very different from your take.
> Fowler's role in changing Uber made her into a business world celebrity. She has received book and Hollywood film deals and continues to work towards legislation and workplace protections for women.
Good for her that she got a book deal out of the experience and got on the speaking circuit. For most people it doesn't work like that. (The other problem is that labour rights in the US would be a nice to have and Title IX is the only law with teeth.)
Especially now that the speaking circuit / conference presentation / business world celebrity career path has come to a sudden unexpected dead end due to COVID.
You keep stating that Susan Fowler can no longer be an engineer. This is not substantiated. Can you provide examples where she is being denied employment? From what I can tell, she was hired by Stripe after leaving google. Did Stripe fire her as for sharing her experience at Uber?
If people would pay me $50K for a speech (https://www.allamericanspeakers.com/celebritytalentbios/Susa...) I'd seriously think about it. I mean I could work 10 days a year (ok, let's say I need 3 days to prepare the speech - 30 days a year!) and get much more than I am getting now. What's not to like?
Is this based on non-public information? Professionally, it seemed like she had kept a job at Stripe during the post and at least its immediate aftermath. I am sure she dealt with a lot of personal harassment though, since our law enforcement doesn’t seem to care about crimes online.
> Susan Fowler's career was destroyed twice when she came out with accusations.
What do you mean by this? She was working at another company when she published her story, and as far as I know was not fired or otherwise had action taken.
Fowler's story of abuse at the hands of the physics department at UPenn is absolutely harrowing. The way that they realiated against her was only half of the story though-the other student (who the department had, absurdly, charged her with taking care of) made false complaints against her and those where taken seriously in a situation not totally unlike the one in the article.
Most people and by extension most abusers aren't the very powerful. A majority of abuse is probably committed by people who have only slightly more power than the people they abuse.
It's entirely possible that our society makes it very hard to touch high status people and easy to destroy low status people. We can easily have the worst of both worlds.
Yeah, I feel the tension with this. We have people like Susan who are genuine victims and then we have all of the Title IX “victims” and university administrators who wielded the law to ruin the lives of their (largely male) targets. Seems like due process and due diligence offer the best of all worlds.
One other aspect that is important to the innocent-until-proven-guilty system: literally everyone is capable of lying. Who knows how bad it gets in accusations with power differentials involved - pretty much impossible to study. I personally believe that in a family law case it is likely that everyone involved is lying. It is even more common that people are trying to be truthful but just are wrong (consider that in formal testing, people are doing their best to be right and typically get a whole bunch of things they were actively taught wrong - how much worse does it get when they aren't trying to remember?).
There has to be a minimum standard of evidence before we can assume someone is guilty of something; even if bad apples are getting away with crimes. Otherwise the system can only fail.
Fucking amazing that a "credible accusation" can be made under a provably false name. I know more than one person whose life has been destroyed by baseless accusations of campus sexual misconduct. The only difference was that the people I knew weren't respected faculty members with the financial resources to hire a lawyer and the connections to speak personally with the president of the university, and they lost a lot more than a single job offer.
Ah, it's so visceral, but there's people with virtual pitchforks screaming for his head on Twitter, and it's satisfying to watch...
Edit: I wonder if Ms. Viren planned for the discovery by Twitterers. I'm sure (and hope) she cleared the article with their lawyer. If that is the case (that she knew there's a way for the public to get person's name through hints in the article), that is an amazing way to get back at the accuser.
Could the university investigation subpoena the information behind the email accounts? If not, why not? This seems like a basic investigative move, and unless they are not allowed to do it, makes me doubt very much that they were serious about the investigation.
As our founders knew there is no way to reconcile justice with anonymity. Any accusation that is to be taken as credible must necessarily provide the information needed to obtain physical evidence or names of individuals who can be questioned.
Without a way to credibly proceed such investigations should be expeditiously closed and sealed. With an avenue to proceed they should be investigated with intelligence and diligence.
With that said although author isn't allowed to name J I suggest that the populace is under no such constraint. I will not herein speculate nor suggest such but I have to hope that the interests of justice will be better served in the future than they are presently.
Lots of people commentating on the innocent/guilt dilemma and who to believe, but what I have noticed that a lot of these cases that are incindiary, in particular in the United States seem to emerge from the university system and I don't think this is an accident.
It seems outright byzantine to me. There appears to be a parallel justice system at work where complaints about serious crimes are brought to faculty or peers or title IX compliance officers rather than state authority directly. There are countless of informal relationships between students and teachers and people who are economically dependent in ways that are ripe for abuse. There appears to be a culture of brushing serious crimes under the carpet on one hand and a reaction of vigilante justice as a response.
98 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] thread(Title of the reason.com post linked above)
This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
Thanks to everyone who summarized or referred me elsewhere.
Have you tried blocking JavaScript? It works fine here in Firefox with NoScript and in Dillo (which has no JS support).
[1] https://reason.com/2020/03/18/title-ix-arizona-state-univers...
Without any evidence that this is a systemic problem, I wonder why it would justify my attention.
It doesn't matter that only one (publicly known) case has happened, if there's the potential of others latching on.
>Melanie also hadn’t been able to locate a current student named Rebecca James in Marta’s department, but she said that the name could always be an alias, and she was still obligated to investigate Marta now that a “credible” accusation had been made.
>“Good question,” Melanie responded, her voice bright again. “Because of the funding that we receive through Title IX, we’re required to investigate everything. And with that we want to really run everything to the ground.”
> in the future, anonymous accusations would be fact-checked before new investigations were opened
policy allowed for this..
By the second go round, when the "y'all" message arrived, the credibility problem was obvious but the investigation didn't address it.
This sounds to me like a very limp bureaucratic response by someone just going through the motions, with no real effort to resolve matters.
Why should the university start paying detectives to investigate crimes that it can’t prosecute?
Instead, shouldn’t the police have subpoenaed the documents and pressed criminal charges?
The article shows a very troubling abuse of the system, but it should be a prompt to fix it rather than destroy it.
1) Ubiquitous government funding
2) Student-teacher power asymmetry
3) Strength of tenure
Furthermore, the last two points would make sense if Title IX only applied to teachers. But that's not the case. Even between students Title IX still applies.
Dismantlement seems pretty unnecessary.
We have real laws and courts. Let them work.
Personally I have made three such reports, including two home invasions, and it is not hard to guess how many have ended up in court.
In order to fix this we could change the law and the legal system to push the resolve rate up, but there is many good reasons why society have chosen not to do that. Parallel system is much easier as long the right persons get targeted.
If we knew how to do that reliably, we could just hang people from trees.
Unfortunately, we don't.
For what it's worth, I don't think that perpetrators of violent crimes, including rape, should ever be allowed out in public. Their incarceration should be humane, but it should not be temporary. And this judgement should be made by the courts.
This isn't the best of all possible worlds obviously.
(You see my point.)
AAUP: https://www.aaup.org/article/trouble-title-ix
Harvard Law: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/9/1/law-faculty-titl...
More law professors: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/05/17/professors-ur...
This current administration engenders no trust in me, but I'm open to rare possibilities of them doing something right on rare occasion.
*(1:frenemy finds out you are a candidate for a job; 2: frenemy anonymously send unsubstantiated rumors to decisionmakers; 3: decisionmakers take the rumors seriously)
Probably not in U.S. academia. When a U.S. department is thinking of hiring you as a professor, you give a public talk in front of that department's faculty. At that point, it becomes more or less public knowledge that you are in the running for a job.
On the other hand, from 2011-2017, most schools reading the federal Title IX guidance were not only discouraged from listening to the defendant, they found themselves discouraged from listening to the victim. Thus you see a black athlete Grant Neal who was expelled from Colorado State University-Pueblo for raping a trainer, despite the trainer saying that she was fine and not at all raped. (You can't believe her! She's a battered woman.)
Of course, when Betsy DeVos announced changes in 2014, all the commentary you could find was "this is rape culture at work!" but if you're willing to actually look at the cases she cited, I can point you at https://reason.com/2017/09/07/devos-title-ix-example-cases-r...
Instead, universities made what happens off-campus into their business. I’m sure there’s a conspiracy theory to be found here.
No, really, I am asking. Why is the New York Times writing about it now? Why for these people?
Title IX isn’t supposed to convict women or provide rights to downtrodden men.
It must be a miscarriage of justice when men benefit from civil rights!
This gets reads, this gets people's attention, and its less common then the typical case of abuse, making it interesting. It helps that they have more concrete proof the accusations were a lie, so the news paper doesn't have to worry about being on the wrong side of a sensitive topic.
but don't forget about the empathy gap. Not in the news paper, but in society at large. The idea of an innocent man getting caught up in the system is uncomfortable, but people push that thought to the back of their mind and subconsciously rationalise it away as a necessary evil to protect women (and some men) because they can't think of a way to protect the falsely accused that doesn't make it easier to get away with abusing women. In this view the potentially abused women gets more empathy over the potentially innocent man.
I think in this kind of story, where the accused are women, they're pretty much always going to be gay women.
Not for reasons of any particular animus, but because that means the putative victims are female, which people will take a lot more seriously.
For "political/cultural" topics, I generally ask does the article align with the company's/editorial staff's biases.
For important geopolitical topics, I generally ask does the article align with the company's masters' biases.
What a company chooses to cover or not cover and how a company chooses to cover a story becomes rather obvious. After a while, you can pretty much tell whether a story will be cover by a company and how they are going to spin it.
> Numerous lawsuits have been brought about this kind of thing and even won. Why is this case different?
It's hard to say. If the situation isn't special since we had numerous lawsuits like this before, then I guess we can ask what else is special? Maybe we can run down the "who,what,when,where,why". Lets start with who. Is there anything special there?
That would be a non-starter for me. I think I would burn about half my net worth to let the world know about a scumbag on the level of "J".
There's a really good reason we have an innocent-until-proven-guilty system. False accusations can be just as harmful as actual crimes.
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense."
Anonymous accusations have not played a very large role in the more dramatic cases we've seen over the last two years.
Amber Anderson is a real person. Kate Beckinsale is a real person. Angelina Jolie is a real person. All of them made public accusations against Harvey Weinstein.
E. Jean Carroll is a well-known journalist who accuses President Trump of raping her.
Andrea Constand is a real person. Her accusations against Bill Cosby were not anonymous.
Most of these people are well-known, and are putting their reputations on the line by accusing Weinstein, Trump, and Cosby. Such accusations need to be carefully investigated. In the past, these accusations have not been taken seriously and a new seriousness on these matters is overdue.
We will probably never make a perfect system, but we can't leave large vulnerabilities that are easily gamed or they will be. We should investigate all of these accusations and shut down operations like NXIVM. We need to seriously look at allegations by Juanita Broderick and co. But we can't believe either side until we actually investigate the evidence.
If anything, we need to do what we can to make it safer for victims to come out earlier while there's still enough evidence to investigate and to take the allegations seriously enough so that they don't remain obscured for decades, or there will be nothing left to investigate when the allegation is finally made public.
Victims are not socially impervious to any critical inquiry. Anonymous accusers might be socially impervious to any critical inquiry, because they are anonymous. But the distinction clearly belongs to "anonymous" and not to "victim".
You seem to live in a parallel reality. Susan Fowler's career was destroyed twice when she came out with accusations.
For the victim, it's not even an uphill battle, in most of the cases it's a guaranteed losing battle.
In response, processes were created to instead suppress & destroy the accused regardless of fault.
Now cases take the shape of one or the other, depending on the context under which they are processed.
> Fowler's role in changing Uber made her into a business world celebrity. She has received book and Hollywood film deals and continues to work towards legislation and workplace protections for women.
How is that "getting her career destroyed"?
What do you mean by this? She was working at another company when she published her story, and as far as I know was not fired or otherwise had action taken.
It's entirely possible that our society makes it very hard to touch high status people and easy to destroy low status people. We can easily have the worst of both worlds.
There has to be a minimum standard of evidence before we can assume someone is guilty of something; even if bad apples are getting away with crimes. Otherwise the system can only fail.
Edit: I wonder if Ms. Viren planned for the discovery by Twitterers. I'm sure (and hope) she cleared the article with their lawyer. If that is the case (that she knew there's a way for the public to get person's name through hints in the article), that is an amazing way to get back at the accuser.
http://www.superiorcourt.maricopa.gov/docket/CivilCourtCases...
Second I submitted a complaint to university where the perp teaches. No response so far.
Without a way to credibly proceed such investigations should be expeditiously closed and sealed. With an avenue to proceed they should be investigated with intelligence and diligence.
With that said although author isn't allowed to name J I suggest that the populace is under no such constraint. I will not herein speculate nor suggest such but I have to hope that the interests of justice will be better served in the future than they are presently.
It seems outright byzantine to me. There appears to be a parallel justice system at work where complaints about serious crimes are brought to faculty or peers or title IX compliance officers rather than state authority directly. There are countless of informal relationships between students and teachers and people who are economically dependent in ways that are ripe for abuse. There appears to be a culture of brushing serious crimes under the carpet on one hand and a reaction of vigilante justice as a response.