Lawsuit: Sexual harassment ‘victim’ was San Francisco business rival in disguise
mercurynews.com
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Conversely, people benefit on both sides of the equation; using sex to their advantage or weaponizing allegations like this.
Sexual assualt is REAL and should be punished. We need to focus on a balance between being human and being a predator. People are fucked up. You have rapists, liars, sociopaths and ladder climbers and guys and girls who get overwhelmed by greed, desperation or just stupidity and break their otherwise decent character. The media makes it fucking impossible to tell people apart.
Great example was the 500 startups thing. I am prepared to believe that there was some dodgy ass shit going on and he was being a scumbag; but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth not knowing the full extent of what happened and watching the accuser ride the publicity to raise a round.
This is so messy. Is this just how the game is played? Leverage on both sides used as a weapon instead of just treating humans like humans.
Sad to see false accusations. Sad to see real ones. Sad to see people capitalizing on this climate, and the most sad:
People who really really hurt (either reputation or physically) just getting killed in the crossfire on top of the horrible events.
This is sick.
I've witnessed this:
(concerned) Is x OK?
Huh?
Is she upset? She looks like she's been crying.
(realising) No, she's just not wearing any makeup. You normally see her with makeup on.but you can talk to men how you want, they won't care.
so yes you have to behave differently to both genders.
However, the reasoning for that is interesting - the primary reasons women get more upset when you speak about their appearance negatively when compared to men is that women constantly have it drilled into them that their appearance is one of the most important things about them, from a relatively early age. We have a combination of media and other people who do that - often even other women.
It's something to be solved, but as the situation stands right now, yeah, criticising women on their dress/makeup/haircut only serves to further that - because women have generally already had significantly different experiences than men by the time you meet them.
Or, in other words, if you think makeup is intended to replicate visual signs of arousal... then this is the culture you work in forcing women to appear sexually aroused in workplace environments. Which is, of course, also something that feminists have talked about for decades.
I recall reading that if a woman has no other female coworkers, the trend is a decrease use of such signals. With no one to compete with then there is no need to spend energy on it.
Like how "men" are claimed to be responsible for pressuring women into unrealistic body images, despite the fashion industry being run, and chosen by women.
Various celebs will back a "ban bossy" campaign, but millions of women are forced to feign sexual availability against their wishes, and barely any motivation to protests it?
Fact of the matter is, if you employ women who don't wear makeup, your clients and customers will think less of your business. You'll lose money and some positivity associated with your brand. Your managers will think less of your female workers - so will their coworkers, no matter the official policy. This isn't the sort of thing that gets changed by a line in a policy document - this is the sort of thing that needs widespread social change.
On that basis, the idea "women are socially pressured into wearing make-up" falls short. Women, themselves, are rejecting the idea.
> your clients and customers will think less of your business
This isn't all jobs, though.
A doctor, or back-end dev shouldn't feel any pressure to wear lipstick.
If you want to direct criticism at those roles/instances where there is a problem, and maybe suggest solutions, I'm fine with that, but broad strokes don't do much help.
Incidentally, I see fewer women in my own country wear as much make-up as those in America appears to do. I mentioned "doctor" specifically because I am surprised how much american doctor wear. As a further anecdote, whenever an american version of a European series is remade, the american actors are usually more attractive..
First, the heuristics. If it would be extraordinarily awkward and/or conceivably career impacting for someone to decline a romantic advance then that advance should not be made, period, because it represents exploiting a power imbalance (even if unknowingly!) and throwing sex and romance into the situation. The only time in any scenario related to the workplace that romance or sex should see the light of day is if every party is fully empowered to decline with not even the slightest hint of impact to the workplace, career, employment, etc.
A good rule of thumb: unless a coworker is inarguably already a personal friend outside of work then introducing even the hint of romance into an otherwise entirely professional relationship could be not just awkward but potentially compromising. In every situation, the balance of doubt should always fall on the side of not engaging in romantic behavior with coworkers. Another good rule of thumb: if there is a level or authority imbalance (enormously more so if there is a direct superior/inferior relationship between two coworkers) then everyone should tread ten times or a hundred times more carefully than they would with any other relationship.
Whoever is making a move should be hyper conscious of any signs of discomfort on the part of the recipient and should go the extra mile (or ten miles) to provide many more easily available "outs" than normal. In normal dating situations if an advance is not welcomed that's fine, two peers had an interaction, someone made a minor mistake, and probably no one will get hurt. In a dating situation with all the complexities, minefields, and pitfalls of a work environment if an overture is made that is unwanted that almost certainly means that the person making it fucked up royally. They failed to read the other person, and they made them uncomfortable, and they complicated their professional relationship.
The 500 startups thing is a near perfect case of the sort of sexual harassment that many get away with because it has just the thinnest thread of deniability[1]. People should not be inviting themselves into the room or home of a coworker, period. People should not be trying to get cozy, let alone try to date, people they have only casually met, especially if there is a power imbalance between them or if there is absolutely anything at stake in the professional relationship.
If this sounds like a lot of restrictions, it is, but it's the only way to make sure that people feel safe and comfortable in their workplace and in their career. The workplace is not a dating service. If you happen to make a friendship at work that turns into a romance, congratulations, but that's not what it's for.
If the first, or only, thought you jump to when thinking about a workplace where romantic overtures are a lot more difficult is "that sucks, how are dudes even gonna get with any ladies ever?" instead of "it would be nice if we could get to a workplace that wasn't so toxic it kept hemorrhaging female talent by the day" then you are part of the problem.
[1] https://cherylyeoh.com/2017/07/03/shedding-light-on-the-blac...
Yet the majority of marriages after college are formed exactly that way - a guy asks an acquaintance (not generally a friend) from work on a date.
If women want to fix the fact that men do all the legwork in starting relationships, and don't like that men do so in a way that offends them personally (even though most women seem OK with the system) then they're free to demand other women take up a bit of the slack.
Do you have any evidence of that at all? Because to me it sounds simply made up. A quick google, and the first link I got back also seems to disagree.
https://mic.com/articles/112062/the-way-most-people-meet-the...
It amazes me how much people push for responsibility for their actions - but for some reason when it comes to this topic its: I can't help myself, this isn't fair. I must impose a sexual relationship on my co-workers when the feeling strikes me.
And this alternative false excuse of pretending like these are "just misunderstandings". The absolute vast majority (even going by whats been in the news) are completely blatant, repeated, inappropriate approaches.
Most of the time an acquaintance is fully empowered to tell you to fuck all the way off if you make an unwanted advance. And their life goes on as normal afterward. The equation is vastly different if people are coworkers, especially if there is any sort of difference in authority, seniority, connectedness, or anything whatsoever on the line (deals, employment, career advancement, mentoring, opportunities, etc.)
Even something seemingly as banal as interactions between coworkers who are perfect peers with the same level of seniority and authority in a company and work under widely separated management structures is potentially problematic. Because of the pressure to "not cause a scene" or "not hurt anyone's feelings". As I said, it's not about not doing it, it's about being absolutely, positively ensuring that everyone is 100% fully empowered to respond to an advance with absolutely zero fear of any negative repercussions no matter how minor.
Sure, many marriages are made between people who met through work, but many people already follow these rules, it's the people who don't that are the problem. Ask all of your female friends, if you have any, how many of them have been sexually harassed in some way at work. I don't have a single female friend who has not experienced it, because it's absolutely ubiquitous. That doesn't mean every guy in the workplace is doing it, it means that it continues to be tolerated and ignored enough in the workplace to make the few who do it be able to harass a huge number of people. It has to stop, and the way it stops is with changing the norms of what is expected behavior.
She finally had to resort to flashing her boobs at the guy to get him to acknowledge and fulfill her desires.
Me personally, it would take that level of chutzpah from a female co-worker before I'd even consider and I still might be worried about the whole thing ending badly. Kind of funny where we're at with male/female relationship dynamics these days.
Presenting a coworker with a long legal document giving consent to be propositioned, signed with a notary present of course, wouldn't work. It would be sexual harassment to even present the contract for consideration!
They would have to use something like Tinder where they could be both unaware of the others interest until both parties had signed the legal agreement consenting to be propositioned by the other. They would then be directed to do some sort of custom secret society hand sign in the others presence to verify that they had actually consented. The hand sign would be innocuous when seen by someone who hadn't actually signed the contract via the app and seen the secret hand sign the other would display to acknowledge they had signed the contract.
The next billion dollar startup idea?! A cross between Linkedin, LegalZoom and Tinder. The idea would at least make for a hilarious episode of "The IT Crowd" or "Silicon Valley".
Well, there has been this Slack app[0].
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/slack...
"He gave several very obvious hints to the woman he was interested in with no response. He finally had to resort to flashing his muscled chest at the woman to get her to acknowledge and fulfill his desires."
Or they rarely report it (partly because they afraid they won't be believed)?
[1] I don't like the idea of coworkers dating because if they break up, it can be messy and cause all sorts of problems for them and for their other coworkers. Having said that, if I really liked a coworker and she was interested in me, I probably wouldn't let that stand in my way either, but it is something I'm conscious about. If she were on my team, I would at least ask to move to another team.
Nevertheless, even this shows that the work place is a significant factor to meet a partner - even if it has lost relevancy. Which leads to the question why. Is it because the other places somehow got more effective for that purpose, or is it fear of being perceived as crossing boundaries which makes people hesitant to try. Both (or other) explanations seem imaginable to me.
So easily said than done. You make it seem that "making a move" is so clear, but it isn't. Many times people are not even "making a move" and someone will think they are "making a move" and then get uncomfortable. It is very hard to realize that you are making someone uncomfortable when you aren't even thinking in that direction and the recipients (for a lack of a better word) aren't being vocally clear. In such a case, I'm siding against the one that wasn't vocally clear.
The fact is we live in a society that is still in an extended hangover from a multi-centuries long binge of incomparable misogyny. There is a burden on those who still hold positions of privilege from that legacy to make everyone in society feel safe, wanted, and free. Do the work or it's not going to get done.
If people are feeling uncomfortable but not speaking up, they are going to have to come to terms with the fact that a large segment of the programmer community is going to be incapable of identifying their discomfort when interacting with them. Getting them to speak up might be a more tractable problem than trying to teach everyone to identify non-verbal subtext.
(I agree with your comment insofar as it applies to people who are capable of doing it, and I aspire to being able to interact with people so fluently.)
Second, those who find it harder to read social cues may just need to follow the rules more carefully. For example, don't try to make romantic or sexual advances towards someone who is in some way (directly or indirectly) subordinate to you.
Implicit in this statement is that your view on this issue is the truth, and anyone who disagrees with you is ignorant. If you want to have a genuine discussion with people, that attitude does not invite dialogue. You're not going to change anyone's mind.
I (and I think everyone else) is strongly disagreeing with you that your unvoiced emotions are my responsibility.
But, you're right, in that it's a chicken-and-the-egg style scenario; how do you voice the emotion that you're not comfortable voicing your emotions? And, how does anyone (including yourself) tell if that discomfort is all in your head, or real?
I wonder if people who believe that prostitution should be legalized consider sexual harassment in the workplace to be a lesser problem, since one of the arguments is struck from the table. #2 doesn't seem to be a major concern, since you claim it's already in the existing system and isn't important(or is that just a matter of degree? That would imply it's more wrong to hit on someone shy than someone outspoken)
If exploiting a power imbalance is wrong, I wonder if employing a homeless person is wrong because you profit off of the labor of the helpless.
I don't think so, and I don't believe the 3rd argument is struck at all. There's a gaping difference between accepting an advance fully willingly (whether the motivations behind acceptance are romantic, sexual or economic) and feeling pressured into accepting the advance (regardless of whether such pressure is intended or accidental). A happily employed prostitute in a perfect well-regulated industry will still never feel that they can't turn down a prospective client, no matter how well they're paying. In any workplace, if accepting an advance is necessary to succeed professionally, that's a systemic problem.
> If exploiting a power imbalance is wrong, I wonder if employing a homeless person is wrong because you profit off of the labor of the helpless.
Again, this comes down to pressure. A homeless person might be under disproportionate economic pressure to take a job they would otherwise decline, so I'd say that from a purely moral standpoint this needs to be taken into account and if you're not ensuring the job is taken willingly, then yes, it is wrong to profit from that labour.
1. Be attractive.
2. Don't be unattractive.
Two simple rules to not commit sexual harassment.
I'd avoid it generally, as you just failed both your stated rules by repeating it.
That's an interesting and incendiary interpretation. Do you know for a fact that this person views women as prizes to be won or are you perhaps ascribing more meaning to the comment than can reasonably be inferred?
It is an impossible argument to make it you assume that the other party has a right to make a choice about who continues to pursue them for whatever damn reason they please.
How? There's no connection between what was said and the conclusion you drew from it.
arkh's post observes that women often apply different standards to men's behaviour based on whether they find them attractive or not. That's not really in dispute, it's the origin of the "hot women being attracted to asshole boyfriends" cultural cliche.
I'd dispute it in this sense: women, like humans of any gender, are more likely to apply different standards based on pre-existing status (e.g. whether they're friends already or not) but not to the degree that as a rule they'd welcome a sexual advance from one co-worker and not an identical one from another based simply on attractiveness, or that they'd consider the unwanted one harassment.
This isn't hard: women are humans and capable of rational thought, just like men. Your comment diminishes them.
This would directly translate to welcome a sexual advance from one co-worker but not an identical one from another based simply on attractiveness. Social setting (e.g. workplace) may drive the lower limit below skirting board for some individuals, but that does not make certain social settings universally irrationality free grounds where evaluation as potential mate has no effect on social (and even professional) interactions.
While both men and women are capable of rational thought, likewise both are not individuality, emotion and desires free.
Your comment reads to me as asserting that women are basically incapable of moderating their behavior based on sexual desire.
Viewing social interaction as a series of rules/steps to follow in order to "succeed" or "win" is how you view being attractive as a form of "cheating" or unfairness. This doesn't account for the other party having agency, since the only perspective taken is that of one side of a two sided issue.
Even in your post you say "women often apply different standards to men's behaviour based on whether they find them attractive or not".
Let's be damn clear: there are no different standards at play, there are two completely different behaviours at play - welcome romantic advances and unwelcome romantic advances.
Where did you read the word women in my post? I wrote about sexual harassment which can come from a person of any gender unto a person from any other gender.
The attractiveness also mean a lot of things to different persons.
A man who does not like tattoos may react differently to the same behavior coming from someone with a face tattoo or someone without.
But I hope you can reflect on how many things you unconsciously assumed from one comment and where it was posted and how it can relate to its content (double-standard due to bias).
We can move on, and now you know that this is a rather famous thing to say among people who are angry that women are allowed to choose who they wish to pursue them romantically.
Actually. It really is. It really is. You can't brush the enormous complexities of life, human perception, self-image, misunderstanding, varying life experiences and social norms under the carpet with a wave of the hand.
It really, really is hard for normal decent human beings to get this right even if you don't throw bad actors and out-and-out sociopaths into the mix.
The problem is that sexual harassment does exist. But so does horrific misunderstand or outright false accusation. The latter two are probably an order of magnitude less common than the former but they are potentially life-destroying and shouldn't be brushed aside.
Also - it fuels the crazy men's rights types and lends credence to their sense of persecution. If you vacate the center of the debate then the other side will claim it.
Can you elaborate on this? Did I miss part of the story—did one of the accuser actually do that?
Persistent attacks and criticism causing worry and distress or deliberate pestering or annoying.
The making of unwanted and offensive sexual advances or of sexually offensive remarks or acts, especially by one in a superior or supervisory position or when acquiescence to such behavior is a condition of continued employment, promotion, or satisfactory evaluation.
I can talk about the many bizarre and fascinating parasites that exist in the world that many people will find far more unwanted and offensive than any casual sexual joke. Surgeries, the making of some foods, the history and ongoing saga of torture, and other topics all fall in the same category. However, you will not be accused of harassment for constantly talking about how people contract Noro virus although people will generally ask you not to talk about it during a meal.
Nudity is still rare but not really like it was 20 years ago. Religious nuts will protest "think of the children" and no politician will want to seem like they dislike children so they play along to get votes.
Not going to touch breastfeeding, media fuled firestorm. Who cares?
How many of those kids are now adults who voted for Donald Trump?
Goes back further than that; I'm pretty sure in 80s it was likely Madonna or something - I also know there was a frenzy around 2 Live Crew in the late 1980s/early 90s.
But I'd be willing to bet that there was also talk about Elvis in congress back in the day...
Pop culture from the states often looks like a role model for sexuality across the rest of the world. Don't those K-pop music videos with gyrating women kind of remind you of Britney Spears? I don't think they got the idea from Europe.
I will admit we have a confusing relationship toward sex here, where a non-sexual image of a nipple is unacceptable, but suggestive gyrating and sexual symbolism (commercials where beer is spraying out of a can like an orgasm, I don't know) are normal to the point that we don't even notice. We can see this as suppression in a way, where we can only talk about sex in metaphors, and only "the media" (Hollywood, advertisers) is allowed to do it for the rest of us.
Yes, but the two sides aren't equal. If you have a knife and we have a nuclear weapon, that we can both hurt each other does not mean that there is a balance, or that both sides need equal protection. Women get sexually harassed or assaulted much more than they fabricate allegations for personal gain (and note that this is not what happened in this case), as a woman rarely gains from making allegations, either true or false. So there may be two problems, both sad, but one is orders of magnitude bigger than the other.
I don't understand the logic here, are you saying that men gain more from sexually harassing women than women gain from falsely accusing men? I think you would have a hard time finding a man who would be in a better position if he just started sexually harassing women.
Edit: Note that I believe that honest accusations are far more common than false ones, I am just criticizing this explanation.
But did any of you notice that the alleged false accuser in this case is actually a man?
Given the evidence, I think you're confused about who actually has a nuclear weapon. Like in real world, "knife attacks" are much more frequent, but a "nuclear weapon" tends to be much more devastating :).
The fact is that the justice system is not perfect. Occasionally a guilty person will be acquitted, and it would really be best not to also punish an innocent as a result of that.
"admits" can be a loaded word. The accuser claims. Hopefully, their accusation was not the only evidence in the first place.
but in some cases when evidence was manufactured the defence can come up with something that implicates the accuser.
That's not how criminal justice works. That's not even how torts work.
That's not how it works, is it? it is not a battle where someone has to be guilty - either the accused or the accuser. Someone can be acquitted without anyone lying, or making false statements, or anything else. Just a few examples: insufficient evidence to prosecute, contradictory timelines.
It is bizarre that anyone thinks that this could be the system - get a conviction or suffer a conviction yourself.
There is a spectrum between provable accusations and demonstrably false claims that includes uncertainty, doubt and poor evidence. It isn't like going all-in in poker!
However, I still think that the kind of 'eye for an eye' approach proposed by the comment I was relying to would have a non-trivial, negative impact on the reporting of crimes. Just as guilty people can be acquitted, innocent people can be found guilty (even if it's not automatic), and this means that the accuser is exposing themselves to risk.
Fundamentally, no one should ever have to worry about the consequences of reporting a crime.
The rub is, they should have to worry about the consequences, if they're making a bad-faith false report. They should have to worry a lot, because they themselves are committing a wrong by reporting a false crime in such a way.
It's an incredibly hard problem, though.
I think you mean crime, not wrong.
Personally I prefer the old system of innocent until proven guilty. You loose the mob justice, and you can't demand a lower standard of evidence, but in return people can report crimes without fear of repercussions. It is a fair trade, with the only drawback that a guilty person will have their punishment delayed until the justice system concludes with a guilty verdict.
I hear it has effectively no privacy.
See for example https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=2054&ar...
And then you have just singled yourself out as someone with something to hide and in small towns that is usually a problem.
- true accusation - punish the perpetrator
- false accusation - punish the accuser
- unable to confirm either way - nothing happens
I still don't understand why some people have so much trouble with this concept and want to bias towards "guilty until proven innocent" thinking.
And yes, I know that in civil cases in the US, it's "preponderance of the evidence" and not "presumption of innocence". It still means you should get punished only if your deed is proven (in Bayesian sense) more likely to be true than false.
Witch hunts are exciting. It's also empowering to believe that you're one of the "good guys", going after those dastardly "bad guys".
TBH, it's the same thinking behind any pogrom. "Those people" are rich, so breaking in and stealing everything is on the side of justice. "Those people" have secret cabals which rule the world, so it's OK to abuse and attack any individual you see.
The people with that attitude aren't aware of history. That attitude has been tried before in many countries. The end result is genocide.
It doesn't start out that way. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
> suggests an obvious
> course of action
It does happen, but it's so rare that it generally makes headlines when it does.
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/04/28/how-many-...
The rate for those sentenced for lesser crimes is likely much higher, due to plea bargaining ("plead guilty to petty theft or we'll charge you with grand theft").
That's not really what we're talking about here, though. We're talking about the rate of conviction of those who are proven conclusively to have lied resulting in someone else being convicted of a crime.
Generally such people receive no consequences at all.
For instance, as far as I know the woman in this case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus
has not been charged with anything, despite falsely accusing an entire fraternity house of rape.
I still don't understand why some people have so
much trouble with this concept
From there it's a simple question of our willingness to let the guilty go free vs. our willingness to see the innocent wrongly punished. This is known as Blackstone's Ratio [1] and it dates to the 1760s.
Needless to say, there's a certain political equilibrium here; if you'll let off 1000 guilty people to avoid 1 wrongful conviction, you'll have a thousand victims and their families campaigning for tougher punishments for every 1 wrongfully convicted person campaigning in the opposite direction.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation
Also, note - you mention filing charges. But the problem with sexual harassment cases is, they don't even get to that level. It's usually enough to "file charges" on a blog and post it to Twitter to do 90% of damage.
> It cuts both ways
Nonsense.
Corrupting the justice system should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. How can you have justice when the justice system goes along willingly with abuse?
There are cases where claimants are proven beyond any doubt to have lied. Lied knowingly, egregiously, and with malice aforethought. The idea that those people should be let off with a polite smile of "we don't want to put off the real victims" is horrific.
I think the misunderstanding is that you think I'm saying insurance claims are equal in scope to sexual assault. That is (TBH) ridiculous. To the extent of deliberate blindness.
What I'm actually doing is making a statement about the fraudsters. Not the victims.
FALSE sexual assault charges do not involve sexual assault. False sexual assault charges do not have real victims. So false sexual assault charges are, in fact, entirely equivalent to false insurance claims. Both are false. Both do not involve real victims.
Your reaction comes across as an un-thinking knee-jerk "OMFG sexual assault is bad"... to the point where we can't have a rational discussion about anything related to the subject.
Look, there are fraudsters. See "Jackie" at the University of Virginia. Or the Duke Lacrosse case. In both situations, "wishful thinking" people came damned close to lynching the accused, facts be damned. And in both cases, every single aspect of the claimants story turned out to be provably false.
You have an implicit claim that sexual assault is somehow magical, and deserving of different standards than insurance fraud. All possible evidence shows that this attitude is not just wrong, it is actively dangerous. It denies reality. It denies justice. It hurts innocent people.
For the crime of perjury to be proven, you also need more. Substantive proof of lying, not just 'the guy did not get convicted'.
I don't think there is a chilling effect when you use a standard of proof to admit a claim of fraud.
But for matters adjudicated by universities, it's possible that neither of these apply, since official police reports are not necessarily filed, and testimony is not given in a courtroom, under oath.
More generally, you could claim defamation. This is not a crime though — it is a civil matter. If the defamer has no assets, it would be an expensive way to make a point ("I didn't do it!") and could lead to the Streisand Effect.
> You have an implicit claim
> that sexual assault is
> somehow magical, and
> deserving of different
> standards than insurance
> fraud
Specifically I believe sexual assaults are under-reported, and that more assaults happen because they're under-reported.
Taking those back-to-front, an insurance claim that's unreported doesn't endanger wider society, where a serial rapist abusing his position of power does.
As to under-reporting of sexual crimes, evidence is easily Googleable. But even if it wasn't, one looks at cases like Jimmy Saville where alleged victims didn't come out until others did; largely due to their feeling they wouldn't be believed.
Because it didn't happen. But you're free to feel superior to me based on lies about what I said.
> Specifically I believe sexual assaults are under-reported,
Yes... look at the numbers from Statistics Canada for one. In interviews, people claim sexual assault rates that are about 10x the rate of police reports.
Why are those crimes not reported? Statistics Canada asked... the #1 answer is "because the assault was too minor to bother with".
i.e. grabbing an ass in a bar is legally sexual assault. But few people are going to file a police report about it.
> and that more assaults happen because they're under-reported.
No such evidence exists.
There is evidence that there are massive programs to encourage people to report sexual assault. All such programs have not increased the reporting rate to police.
Which makes it look like the rate of police reports of serious crimes is pretty close to the real rate of serious crimes.
You seem to have taken it as a prescriptive one: "We should do the exact opposite of this policy, as hard as we can."
That claim is provably false. I explained why, using examples.
> You seem to have taken it as a prescriptive one: "We should do the exact opposite of this policy, as hard as we can."
That cannot possibly be concluded from what I said.
My claim is that when it's proven that people lie (i.e. fraudster, as I said), ignoring those lies is corrupting the justice system.
The thing is, perjury is a criminal offence. I don't think you'd disagree.
The mistake you're making is assuming that because I say some people are proven to lie, you think I'm claiming that all people lie. That's a logical fallacy, and basically assumes I'm an asshole or an idiot.
Your claim seems to be that we should never prosecute liars, because it will dissuade real victims from coming forward. I think that claim is horrific, for reasons I explained.
To counter your next comment.. no, I don't think claimants should be charged when their claims cannot be proven to be true. Again, making an unsubstantiated claim is not legally perjury, and is not a criminal offence.
My claim is that provably false claims should be punished.
Is that really so difficult to understand?
> That claim is provably false. I explained why, using examples.
No you didn't. You gave some examples where the proposed policy would not have the side effect. You didn't show that it would never have the side effect.
> That cannot possibly be concluded from what I said.
"The exact opposite of this policy", in context, would be letting people off for false accusations. Why were you talking about "the idea that those people should be let off" if you agree that peteretep never suggested letting people off?
I used the example of insurance fraud. Please pay attention.
Do we prosecute insurance fraud? Yes. Do such prosecutions dissuade victims from making real claims? No.
Or maybe you think that sexual assault is somehow magic. That prosecuting proven fraudsters in that case will somehow dissuade real victims from making claims. If so, you have to prove your position.
I've already proven that no such correlation exists in other situations.
> Why were you talking about "the idea that those people should be let off" if you agree that peteretep never suggested letting people off?
He did implicitly. If he's against charging fraudsters (for whatever reason), he's for letting them off.
> Or maybe you think
I'm deliberately avoiding taking an object-level position.
> If he's against charging fraudsters
You're still turning a descriptive statement into a prescriptive one. peteretep did not advocate any policy in the comment you replied to. Among the policies he did not advocate is "we should never charge any fraudster". Another policy he did not advocate is "we should be extremely careful which fraudsters we prosecute, to avoid of chilling effects".
He did not advocate a policy, but you took his comment as advocating an extreme policy.
That's pedantically true, and more honestly false.
Are you honestly going to claim that his description of "putting off victims" advocates for no position? That's ridiculous. He explicitly said ... which is generally thought to be not a good thing.
Are you next going to claim that he thinks putting off victims is not a good thing... but he isn't really advocating against punishing fraudsters even if it "puts off" victims?
And this is all ignoring the point that his claim was false.
Honestly, I find this nit-picking to be utterly ludicrous, to the point of irrational.
No specific policy, certainly. There are many policies consistent with what he said. I gave one already; another would be we should punish false accusations of sexual assault, but not as severely as sexual assault itself.
But you leapt to the most indefensible one. And you didn't even seem to notice that you were making this leap. I don't think it's nitpicking of me to point this out.
Nonsense.
His position was that any punishment of false claims was "putting off" victims from making real claims.
Which is what I reacted to.
Given the upvotes for my position and the downvotes for yours, I suspect the majority of people came to the same conclusion I did.
Please stop grasping at straws. Your insistence on taking me at an extreme position while accusing me of the same is unsupported by facts.
Not true. He was replying to a post that said "False accusations should be punished with the same penalty as the accuser tried to put upon the innocent." He said "This has the side-effect..." The referent of "this" is clearly not "any punishment of false claims".
And even if true, that is still not a policy proposal. I've given two alternative interpretations of the original comment. Here's a third: I have no particular policy proposal myself, but I wonder whether you've thought through the implications of yours?
> downvotes
Not that it matters, but right now my comments are all upvoted/neutral.
> Your insistence on taking me at an extreme position
I don't think we disagree on what your position is? We just disagree about whether or not you're correct.
That is, I'm accusing you of accusing peteretep of making a specific policy proposal. You insist that your accusation is correct. So I don't think I'm taking you at a position that you'd call extreme; I think I'm taking you at a position that you actually openly hold. If you disagree then we're wildly talking past each other.
Yes, we do. Go back and read the history. I started off with a particular position, that you then misconstrued, and mis-characterized.
> I think I'm taking you at a position that you actually openly hold
No, you're not. You've managed to twist what I say, and my defense of my position, to an extreme position.
My position is that people should be punished for breaking the law. And, that saying such punishment (whatever the form) somehow "puts off" innocent people from making claims is wrong.
So long as enforcement does not perfectly avoid false positives even in beginning prosecution (even if no false convictions occur) it increases the expected cost of a true report, and is a rational disincentive.
It may be that the particular punishment regime minimizes this cost and/or has benefits that offset the cost, but it's implausible that any real punishment scheme could avoid it altogether.
And I think you've been pretty explicitly talking about what he originally said. E.g. "His position was that..."
But now you seem to be denying that you said anything about what he originally said, or you seem to think that what you said about what he said isn't relevant, or... I don't know. Your comment does not make sense to me. All I can think is that you seem to be mixing meta-levels.
Anyway, I'm not exactly proud of how easily I get sucked into crap like this, so I'm going to try to tap out after this comment.
Why do people not see men as victims? His reputation could be ruined for the rest of his life, even if he is innocent. People take the law into their own hands and could physically hurt him as a result of a false accusation amid a system that disregards due process.
This community -- Hacker News -- is considering creating a list to name people accused of harassment without due process -- in other words, a vigilante system that could lead to innocent people, generally men, being victimized like this man, a real victim.
> Why do people not see
> men as victims?
> This has the side-effect that real victims are put off from filing charges, which is generally thought to be not a good thing.
Well, this man appears to be a victim who is filing charges. You seem not to consider him a real victim. Don't we want victims such as him to defend themselves? As I understand your quote, you can answer your question better than I can: why didn't you consider him a victim?
You may have other reasons not to consider him a victim than that he is male, but I'm just using your quote to illustrate. A quick search returned this page at the top -- http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/domviol/men.htm. I don't know its credibility, only that it suggests a trend, cites many sources, took less than 1 minute to find, and there seemed plenty more such pages.
> You seem not to consider
> him a real victim
... so he needs protection in case his lawsuit fails for lack of evidence and the defamer maliciously counter-sues him for defamation.
That's exactly parent's point. "Real" victims refers to victims of crime that actually happened and wasn't just made up, not some classification of crimes as serious or not.
Basically, the OP forgot to mention that harsh punishment should be reserved for cases where it can be solidly proven that allegations were made up and people started to nitpick on it.
If you locked a person in a cage for 10 years, you would be considered a horrible person. It's no different if you get other people to do it for you. A truly false accusation is a terrible crime that must be punished like any other. But it must be proven false beyond reasonable doubt just like any other crime.
I'd actually tend to "yes", but it's probably impossible to answer. People react very different, and the prevalence of suicide is actually higher among rape victims than for people sentenced to long prison sentences.
But the real problem is: The penalty in your comparison would be for rape, whereas the accusation was just a failed attempt. Yes, that is usually harmful as well, but it's no longer comparable.
People are quick to throw around guilt, once that's in the room your reputation will be sullied forever as everybody still has this nagging "Well, he could still have done it" thought.
Case in point: The German teacher Horst Arnold. In 2001 a female coworker accused him of having raped her during a break at school. He denied the charges and in 2002 he was sentenced to 5 years in jail.
He served his time and, due to a series of random events, in 2008 it came to light that the female coworker, who got him into jail, has a rather long history of lying and misrepresenting facts.
In 2011 he was declared innocent, but he was denied rehabilitation into his job as a teacher and any monetary compensation for the time spent in jail. He fought for this until 2012, when he was found dead on the street due to cardiac arrest.
I don't think it's cultural. Most men have an innate desire to protect women, and treat them with special favor. This was the historical way women were protected before they had voting rights. Now, they have both political power, and men still tend to give them the special favor they had before. So it leads to an imbalance in society
I would guess this is confounded by the difficulty of committing suicide in prison? (Attempts might be less confounded, but still somewhat.)
The reason we don't punish people for retracting wrongful allegations is because we want people to retract wrongful allegations.
If you're in jail on a false rape claim, you'd rather the accuser went free and you were released; than that you stayed in jail because the accuser didn't want to take your place.
Another interesting concept during the inquisition was that the accused, before he knew who accused him, had the opportunity to list all his mortal enemies, and if the accuser was among them he was set free.
but also if merely (awkwardly trying) being nice is considered harassment bosses will be less willing to hire (attractive) women.
But what you've said rings true: there's something really wrong here, and it has to do with the internet.
I've come to the conclusion -- and I may certainly be wrong -- that good policy and good laws depend on a logical and unemotional view of things. As a human being, you can and should acknowledge and feel for people in pain. You should not, however, make decisions based on how you feel about things. And I mean that in the extreme: whether something makes you personally happy or disgusted shouldn't play any role at all in which polices you support or advocate.
The problem is, that's not how the internet or public discourse happens. The internet is all about the feels - the mob, the pain, the sadness, the outrage. Everybody is a publisher and emotion sells eyeballs. There's simply too much attention to be gained by having some outrage-of-the-week. Now that we're all instantly connected, this means that any public discourse that has the potential to manipulate people emotionally will manipulate people emotionally. That's great for publishers, but not so much for trying to have a just society.
The only solution I've come up with is to simply disengage from public conversations about things people get really upset about, which is kinda the default stance on HN. Or at least it used to be. But even that approach is problematic, because the larger your audience, the more topics and subtopics become off-limits.
In this area, how to have a fair, just, and decent society, the internet is not helping things. Just the opposite, in fact.
For example, in case of this "sexual harassment in tech", I really think it's a matter of significant lack of understanding between the parties involved. Apparently it's not the case that most women would agree to have sex with just any random dude, but nevertheless some men seem to expect exactly that. OTOH, I very much doubt that they would be willing to take them by force, but nevertheless women end up worrying about all the possible things that may have happened.
> good policy and good laws depend on a logical and unemotional view of things
That's plausible. Good policy probably benefits from understanding, which seems to be improved by familiarity, which reduces emotional reactions, particularly the negative ones.
> You should not, however, make decisions based on how you feel about things.
But OTOH, if for whatever reason you can't obtain familiarity and understanding, it probably may be safer to follow your gut feeling. I think that's what guides many people and they probably don't think about it much.
> The internet is all about the feels - the mob, the pain, the sadness, the outrage.
THB, you could equally well describe Bolsheviks or Nazis that way. And they have this curious property of predating the Internet by several decades ;)
Did you notice that the false accuser is also a man?
Because it appears that there are simply no women anywhere in your "equation".
The world is bigger than US. And for the rest of us, we don't really seem to have this problem.
I repeat: you didn't read the article.
it already is. Just visit parts of Mexico
[1] https://www.axios.com/500-startups-partner-elizabeth-yin-res...
[2] https://cherylyeoh.com/2017/07/03/shedding-light-on-the-blac...
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/20/the-long-term-cost-of-sexu...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/technology/women-entrepre...
[5] https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/23/dear-tech-dudes-stop-being...
“Obviously you don’t want people to be able to make up things about other people and harm their reputations,” Smallets said, “but there’s also obviously a concern that if you have women who are accusing powerful, wealthy men of sexual harassment, that a defamation lawsuit can have a chilling effect.”
This is just a ridiculous and offensive thing to say, and way to end the article, given the circumstances and evidence. It would be akin to commenting on a case with blatant evidence of harassment that "obviously there's a concern that a harassment lawsuit can have a chilling effect on office interpersonal relationships."
A situation where a man was blatantly lying to abuse the law and defame a competitor isn't the moment to make the "chilling effect" argument.
If it hasn't dawned on you, this is a political strategy, not a tool for the downtrodden. I have quite literally heard people talking about these things as "the way we'll close the gender participation gap", as in, they'll burn men's careers until things equal out. As stupid as this sounds, the fact that people are thinking it is alarming.
Where? Any transcripts/ video?
How does your quote imply your interpretation of malicious intent at all? If someone believes (rightly or wrongly) that the gap in participation in certain industries is because women feel unsafe participating in those industries from harassment etc, reducing harassment and providing avenues for those women to address that problem would naturally act to "close the gender participation gap".
I wouldn't care to speculate what proportion of the gender participation gap is in fact due to women's experiences of harassment and/or anxieties about such -as I simply don't know, and would prefer to defer to women and the people who research these things-, but there is a pretty obvious and quite benign interpretation to your quote that you are choosing to ignore.
Also something that occurred to me - if I was an SJW, I'd encourage "guilty until proven innocent" mob reactions against sexual harassment accusations by women to create a powerful leverage for them - the ability to threaten someone with an accusation.
All the while, the public grows more jaded to all trials of these heinous crimes, which casts more public doubt on the allegations of genuine victims.
I am Aaron Muir Hamilton and I'm not afraid of words.
Perhaps it's possible that there's more than one source of advice?
And if you look around - even on HN - there's plenty of people who seem to have got the same idea.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14694045
No "leader of YC" I know would value their time so miserably as to spend it that way (or be so dumb as to feed every troll forever).
How exactly do you propose to deal with them, without a chilling effect on reporting real rapes? It is a crime that is notoriously hard to convict, to the point where most victims keep silent.
As with any crime, the evidentiary standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt" -- to convict someone for false testimony, you would need to conclusively prove that they did so willfully. This is already the law, the crime is called perjury -- it's just that the punishments are so mild that they are not serious deterrents. Imagine if making willfully false allegations of a crime was punished by twice the prison sentence of the crime being accused -- I bet one VC wouldn't try to poke another in the eye with a false sexual harassment blog post.
Rape and sexual harassment are problems that are both serious, and incredibly wide-spread. They are also under-reported and under-prosecuted, and even when they are, well, that young gentleman is such a good athlete, and has such a bright future, we can't destroy his life over something minor like that.
You could also bet that actual rape victims would not come forward. Why the would they, if they could end up in jail, if the case against their rapist falls apart for any one of a million reasons.
> Rape and sexual harassment are problems that are both serious, and incredibly wide-spread
Are you being intentionally obtuse or just didn't read the comment before replying? Giving you the benefit of doubt in case you were wondering about the down votes, the parent was talking about false claims of rape/harassment being less widespread.
OP was saying that you should go to jail if you manufacture a rape accusation, and that is proven to the usual standards of the criminal trial (i.e. "beyond a reasonable doubt"), not if the case against rapist falls apart for any random reason.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape#Rum...
This seems like almost certainly an exaggeration, and I think an unhelpful one.
Also, just for rape, or for any crime? If I falsely accuse the President of treason, and he is found innocent, should I be convicted of treason?
(Note that it didn't say "same crime", only "same sentence".)
Perhaps I'm being too literal and the call for "same sentence" is just for effect.
>If I falsely accuse the President of treason, and he is found innocent, should I be convicted of treason?
Please go into detail in regards to how this hypothetical scenario would unfold. I can't wait to hear your explanation for how some random person accusing the President of treason could possibly lead to any sort of trial.
There can be reasonable doubt in both directions.
It's also wrong. Even assuming rape and false accusation being equally harmful, the rape penalty would have been for a crime that actually succeeded, whereas the false accusation would have only been an attempt.
This is not a statement of fact, that's an assumption you've made.
Actual studies of this are rare and usually bitterly disputed, but part of the reason they're rare is that they tend to reveal alarmingly high false reporting rates. I mean truly disturbingly high.
If you look at cases which are proven to be false, the rate is usually suggested to be somewhere between 5% and 10% of all claims depending on the study.
But this does not imply 90% of accusations have merit. The definition of "false claim" is extremely strict, such that a case that does not proceed because e.g. the alleged victim is caught lying about the events does not count as "false" on the grounds that they might just genuinely be confused. Virtually all claims of rape or sexual assault fail to proceed to actual charges.
The most famous study (by Kanin) examined every single allegation of rape reported to the police department of a small midwestern city. It defined a false accusation to be "any accusation in which the victim admitted it was false". It reported a rate of around 40% of all allegations being false.
> It is a crime that is notoriously hard to convict, to the point where most victims keep silent.
You can't know that. Given that false reporting definitely occurs, victims that keep silent may or may not be real victims. Only investigations can resolve that question. And one reason it's a hard crime to convict is the rate at which accusers recant their accusations or stop cooperating with investigations as they proceed.
And that study is deeply flawed: that one small midwestern police department used polygraphs on accusers. That's a practice that has long been shunned because (a) polygraphs are (now) known to usually find the investigator's opinion reflected in statistical noise, and (b) the victims (rightfully) see the test as an accusation and prefer to recant for fear of prosecution.
The study mostly used the investigator's judgement, and used the victims admission only when it that was given. Question: if you go to 100 actual false accusers ten years after that incident, and ask them "Did you falsely accuse X of rape back then?". Do you really believe that 40% would be stupid enough to tell you?
If the USA believes polygraphs are unreliable they should be banned from all usage, for all types of crimes and government screening. That hasn't happened.
Instead, people who didn't like Kanin's conclusions - and noted that many rape accusers prefer to drop their accusations rather than take a polygraph test - decided it should be banned for that specific crime only. This is not internally consistent but is consistent with the long-term trend towards trying to increase the number of rape reports.
The critics then retroactively claimed the usage of this technique made the entire study invalid, which it does not do. These people are actually trying to subtly argue something different and much more extreme - that US police statistics and records for rape accusations in that entire period are completely worthless due to the use of polygraphs and therefore no conclusions can be drawn about the accuracy of rape reports during this time at all. This also isn't the case. Attrition between rape reports and prosecution is extremely high in other western countries that don't use lie detectors, and there is attrition at every stage of the pipeline. Offering to use a polygraph and having some complainants decide to drop their cooperation entirely is just one source of attrition amongst many.
The Kanin study is utterly damning on many levels and aligns with the self-reported perceptions of police (that false accusations are very common), not just in that study town but across the USA and in other countries as well, like the UK.
> The study mostly used the investigator's judgement
That is not correct. The study only marked a rape complaint as false if the accuser stated it was false. Cases where the investigator concluded it was false were not counted.
This standard is clearly far too strict - women who made provably false claims and steadfastly refuse to ever admit it would not be counted in this statistic, thus the 40% figure for that study must be too low when using a more reasonable definition of false claim.
> Question: if you go to 100 actual false accusers ten years after that incident, and ask them "Did you falsely accuse X of rape back then?". Do you really believe that 40% would be stupid enough to tell you?
It might be worth reading the original study. It is here:
https://ia800209.us.archive.org/4/items/FalseRapeAllegations...
The answer is yes, 41% said they lied. I don't know where your 10 year requirement came from. Most cases were resolved as false far quicker than that, usually because inconsistencies in the stories surfaced very quickly. As you can see from the case files the study quotes directly, admission that the story was false is usually accompanied by an explanation of why they did it and the study shows almost all false accusations were motivated by just three reasons.
I don't know why you think this requires stupidity. Prosecution for making false rape claims nearly never happens. It is extremely safe to admit you lied. But irritating the police makes it much less safe. It makes more sense to admit you lied quickly than to drag it out and risk the police deciding to prosecute for perversion of justice.
UK police are pretty clear that false allegations of rape are very rare, and are much rarer than either occurances of rape or true reports.
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100408125722/htt...
The study is deeply biased, doesn't try to hide it and quite clearly tries to tell politicians what they want to hear. Nonetheless it has a lot of useful data and states two things of interest in this thread:
1 - the false reporting rate is stated as being about 10% in the UK.
2 - all police interviewed for the the study believed that figure was far too low.
With respect to point (1) - once again this is a very, very generous definition of "false". For instance it doesn't include cases where someone reports a rape on behalf of the alleged victim and the alleged victim later states that no rape in fact took place. This is clearly a false accusation and it'd be just as distressing to the accused, but isn't counted as false.
The inconsistency between the figures the study reports and the perception of police themselves is noted and discussed in the study:
"Even if all those designated false by the police were accepted (a figure of approximately ten per cent), this is still much lower than the rate perceived by police officers interviewed in this study"
Example quotes from working police officers:
"I do deal with a lot of allegations that don’t go anywhere, because it transpires that it’s not quite a rape, certainly with juveniles ... we spend a lot of time dealing with allegations of rape that really aren’t rape, that take a lot of time up. I would say a good half that come through are not genuine ones."
A different officer:
"We have a lot of allegations that are then retracted, we have a lot of allegations that it comes out in the wash one way or another that it was consensual."
And a different one:
"Well, honestly, it’s because most of them are not telling the truth ... I mean I have dealt with hundreds and hundreds of rapes in the last few years, and I can honestly probably count on both hands the ones that I believe are truly genuine."
There are no quotes or interviews with police officers who believe the 10% figure is accurate or think it's too high.
Polygraphs are unreliable. Countries are aggregates to which beliefs can be attribute only by misleading anthropomorphization, however.
> they should be banned from all usage, for all types of crimes and government screening.
They should be. We're not actually there, though a majority of state and federal courts hold them as inadmissible per se, IIRC, largely due to their unreliability.
edit: I should note something else here. Kanin's study has an appendix where he reports a similar analysis on two university campuses. In this case polygraphs were not used and were thus not a factor. They also used the same definition of false (only the accuser can render an accusation false). The false reporting rate in both these cases was 50% - higher!
One might reasonably expect that if I wanted to comment on the broader issue of the study rather than the issues of polygraphs, I would.have done so.
HN discussion threads aren't simple two-sided structured debates, and there are reasons to respond to comments besides rebuttal to the central thesis of the comment to which a response is offered.
It is well known that polygraphs are completely unreliable. It is also well known that they are useful for tricking people into admitting things that they wouldn't otherwise admit. That is why they are still in use.
Can you provide a source for that?
Other numbers:
- 7% (of all women) had been raped,
- Around 75% of those cases were reported to police
- only 14% of cases resulted in a trial
- less than half of trials resulted in conviction
- Police officers guess that 30% of reported rapes are false accusations when asked in general terms, even though these same officers came to such a conclusion in only 9% of specific cases they handled.
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110218141141/htt...
The only real data that you provided is that 5.25% of all claimed rapes (1 x 75% x 14% x 50%) are actually proven to be true in a court of law, which means that the only real data you have is that, according to justice only 0.37% of all woman have been found victims of rape. You know absolutely nothing about of what are the real numbers, just that the lower limit is those 0.37%, yet you claim that 7% of all woman have been raped, based on exactly what?
Do you have access to some data that we don't (and that isn't present in the numbers you just provided)? If so, what data is that?
In any case, it'd be quite strange to personally know two cases where such a false accusation was proven, considering how rare both false accusations are, and how difficult it is to prove them.
You data would furthermore suffer from the fact that almost no one will tell you they were raped, whereas accusations of rape and a trial are usually widely known.
It doesn't, though. Those cases are all civil.
Edit: why is it all about "accusation is not the same as guilt" when a supposed anonymous woman accuses man A, but when man A accuses man B of staging the whole thing, HN believes it 100%? I apologize to fragile HN readers who see me saying we have courts to figure out these things, that HN is not a courtroom, and they get offended and downvote me.
Having read the OP, we now have actual evidence submitted to a court of law, in the form of Comcast resolving the IP of the "anonymous blogger" to the home of Brandon Katayama Hill, a business rival of Uzzaman's.
I'm not sure what doubt is left to give to the "anonymous blogger" -- unless you are thinking either the evidence submitted to the court is fabricated (a felony) or somehow an actual anonymous woman who was harassed by Uzzaman just happened to blog about it from Hill's IP address?!
The victim in this case is Uzzaman.
Moral of the story -- be highly suspicious of anything claimed by anonymous bloggers (or, by the way, anonymous sources).
Without links this post is useless to everybody besides people who know about this case. Both of them.
So let's count: the OP is one and I'm another. It follows that nobody else knows ;)
How would you feel if someone fraudulently accused you of something you didn't do that could ruin your career, open you to violent attack, the majority of people didn't believe you, even those who did still wondered what you may have done to provoke the accusation (even if you were completely innocent), that stuck with you for the rest of your life...
and then someone on line implied you weren't a real victim?
The former implies there was greater harm/effect to X, the latter that Y isn't really a victim.
This is what happens when a culture encourages people to use any opportunity to get ahead - and it's those with real claims that suffer from this crying wolf.
The reality, in my eyes, would be something like this:
- People walk around looking more or less intelligently, but almost all have primal sexual urges that they are frequently seeking or at least thinking about to fulfill. That applies to women and men.
- Society is built in a way which only allows people to make subtle hints about this desire. It is unacceptable to display too much sexual desires in most contexts of public and professional life. There is an animal in everyone but it must not come out.
- The dynamics that play out during the process of finding a mate are complex, happen in parts unconsciously, and are the result of evolutionary biology and psychology. Meaning, everyone does things to attract a mate which he/she might not be "aware" of - and which sometimes appear extremely stupid in hindsight (Bill Clinton or Dave McClure anyone?!).
- There is a gender difference in the heterosexual mating process. Men impress women with power, status (often = money), display of dominance, achievements, and often make the first approach (sometimes after they think they saw a behavior from her side which correctly or wrongly suggested them that she might be interested). Women select the men who they go on a date with. This does not apply always, you can find different variations of this and also the occasional woman who takes pride in having been the one who did the approach. I also don't make a statement about whether this behavior is learned or innate, or both; but based on the current information I have I feel comfortable enough to generalize this dynamic. I suggest that one can even see this behavior in apps like Tinder where most women let a man write first after a match (sadly I don't have a scientific study about this - it is just personal observation, own experience, from talks with friends and observations of cultural norms) - therefore, I am curious about how Bumble will do on the market. If it becomes a big hit with the current concept to require women to write first after a match, what I wrote in the last sentences will prove to be wrong.
- If we want awareness and a change of behavior, everyone needs to learn to understand these dynamics, and needs to understand that regardless of gender, he/she also operating to some extend outside of the normal rational and reasonable thought procedure.
Seriously, I don't get how this is hard for folks. It's unbelievably simple. Be aware that you may have professional power over other people, and if you do, make an active effort not to flirt with them. Have the self-restraint not to mix an investment/supervisory relationship with romance or sex. Either it will feel coercive, or it's a conflict of interest waiting to happen.
Avoiding trying to sleep with your subordinates is not rocket surgery.
If someone else had applied for the position as your father's secretary and had been refused, they could have complained about it by pointing to the conflict of interest.
If you want to avoid the negative consequences of mixing work and romance, you'd better not only focus on the best-case result, but also keep the worst case in mind and accordingly tread carefully.
It's still incredibly inappropriate to ask someone out when you can fire her. How do you know she really wants to say yes?
Whoever gives publicity to accusations like this for the clicks, without checking their sources at all, should rightfully be persecuted for defamation.
It is when they are suing for harassment; there was no formal accusation in this case, just an anonymous blog post.
Because there is often a massive power imbalance between the harasser and the victim.
Either way, for any legal consequences to take place, the victim must prove his/her accusation.
There is no system in the world that can protect people's careers and reputations. If a false accusation is made and the accused person can prove it, then a lawsuit will often be filed (as in the case above).
Otherwise, it is reminiscent of the false accusations about political candidates in the 1940s/1950s making wildly false accusations, which forced their opponents to spend time and money to defend the claims. It still happens today as well although it seems easier to defend claims via social media and the 24hr news cycle having to keep up with all sorts of stories that draw people's attention.
Now I am not familiar with the US or Japenese Criminal Code but there must be something that criminalizes such behavior, but prosecution is at the discretion of the DA (or in this case where the incident crosses international borders even the US Attorney could prosecute)
[citation needed].
It's actually fairly rare for such awards in the US, according to all data i see. (certainly, they get highlighted by the media, but seem to be uncommon, since the average is something < 100k from the law review articles and data i can find )
Where are you licensed that the usual is multi-million?
One hundred thousand dollar sounds right in the ball park for General damages in usual cases though it'll increase depending on how much publicity the accusation got or if business reputation was harmed. That's just general damages. There's also attorneys fee in two countries and then there are special damages (economic harm caused), and finally, pre and post judgment interest.
Add on top of all that possible punitive damages imposed by a jury. I am a lawyer in India but these are usual common law principles followed everywhere.
What gets Hacker News as excited as the end of Flash? The rare false accusation.
(Although, and it bears repeating: in this case everyone is hating on those women running around falsely accusing good upstanding men just for the fun of it, without ever realising that the false accuser in this case is actually a man)
If you are concerned about this topic, perhaps you should aim your complaints at the people caught time and time again carrying water for girls who cried wolf, even after their lies fell apart. Mattress girl comes to mind.
Drop the obsessive notion of treating women as automatic victims and start seeking actual gender equality, and you will stop seeing a gender-based backlash.
I also don't really see the point of complaining that people assume the accuser is female, when you bring up women as victims yourself without context.
The accused must usually be given the benefit of doubt in cases of anonymous allegations without any corroborating evidence. But cases like these should not be used to cast doubt on the motive/credibility of women brave enough to risk their identity and careers to come out.
The accused must always be given the benefit of the doubt in case of any allegations without corroborating evidence. This current trend of "anyone accused of sexual harassment is guilty unless proven innocent" is not justice.
The sheer number of people who react emotionally to allegations of sexual harassment is truly astounding. All rationality goes out the window with men throwing themselves over each other to proclaim "I BELIEVE YOU" instead of asking for the least bit of corroborating evidence.
Because of the very nature of sexual assault, providing evidence up to the standards of the US criminal legal system is very hard to do. It likely means that more harassers get off and very few get wrongful sentences. The logic in supporting a standard that requires less than the US criminal legal system currently is that it will help put away many more guilty people and put away few/none non-guilty people given the rarity of false accusations with evidence that would say, pass a 50/50 guilt test.
The lack of criminal recourse leads to a court of public opinion being the victim's only option often. The court of public opinion is far from fair, which leads back to the idea of working on the criminal recourse options to allow for more victims to actually report and fix this.
You can disagree with some of the premises of that argument, but it's a valid one (philosophically speaking).
In this case, someone was wrongly accused, and even under a 50/50 system, it's clear the charges would not go through, and yes obviously the pre-meditated wrongful accuser should face a punishment. I think some jail time for a pre-meditated false accusation is more than fair. But a discussion and a call for a different legal standard given the uniqueness of these types of cases is perfectly logical.
Instead of complaining about the public lynch mob and blaming the mass of people who likely won't stop, discuss and focus on the problems that prevent it. Like actually getting rape kits tested, creating more avenues for sexual assault reporting via a calmer system than anonymous blog posts, etc.
We're already putting away non-guilty people, and we know about it - check out Innocence Project some time. So lowering those standards is guaranteed to increase that number.
A huge problem is that in US, the prosecutors have a lot of incentives to pursue convictions regardless of actual guilt or innocence. If you give them a tool to convict more people, they will use it, because more convictions look good on their resume. And in many cases, the minority demographics are the ones disproportionally targeted. So, until the problem with prosecutorial misconduct is fixed, I don't think it's the right time to talk about making it easier to imprison people.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/01/21/...
Philosophically speaking, If I reject some of the premises, this would be a classic ex falso quodlibet, so - unless I subscribe to the use of paraconsistent logic - no, it would actually not be valid.
I fully agree that everything should be done to make reporting crimes and presenting evidence as easy as possible and to root out problems preventing this.
But: Loosening the standards of presumption of innocence, one of the cornerstone achievements of human rights, can never be part of this. Especially in the age of social media.
Everything else is a slippery slope (and one that has been written about in every concievable context on thousands of pages over the centuries). It's easy to say "it will help put away many more guilty people" if you simply redefine what it means to be guilty to be slightly more likely than a coin toss (or what do you mean by "pass a 50/50 guilt test"?).
http://www.iep.utm.edu/val-snd/
An argument can still be valid with false premises. The point of using this definition is to say that if person A disagrees with the premises and person B agrees with them, that is the source of your difference, not a lack of logic like the parent comment implied.
My redefinition is not a simplification or hand waving - it is exactly the standard we use in civil cases in the US justice system. Looking up the term, it's "preponderance of the evidence" - it boils down basically to the 50/50 above. It is not at all synonymous with a coin toss.
> Preponderance of the evidence, also known as balance of probabilities, is the standard required in most civil cases and in family court determinations solely involving money, such as child support under the Child Support Standards Act. It is also the burden of proof of which the defendant must prove affirmative defenses or mitigating circumstances in civil or criminal court. In civil court, aggravating circumstances also only have to be proven by a preponderance of the evidence, as opposed to beyond reasonable doubt (as they do in criminal court).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(law)
I'm not working with the assumption that the US criminal system ever had the 100% correct definition in the first place. It is not the only legal standard in existence and questioning it should not be seen as "simply redefining" but examining further.
I agree with the caution, but the whole post is directly addressing the idea that there isn't logic in what's happening with the general trend.
To the matter at hand: How on earth is it not handwaving/simplification when you are arguing with civil law standards for criminal cases?! Do you really not see the fundamental issue here? There's nothing to "examine further" - this has been examined to death and beyond!
And yes, I'm aware that the US criminal system is not the only system in question. But I dare you to show me one (from a democratic system, at least) that has a significantly lesser definition. (And please, don't argue with well known exceptions/reversals, those are all positioned after the general burden of proof has been met.)
Where is the straw man? I simply argue that accusations should be substantiated. Once upon a time, this viewpoint would have been considered common sense and not something controversial. And yet here we are.
> The logic in supporting a standard that requires less than the US criminal legal system currently is that it will help put away many more guilty people and put away few/none non-guilty people given the rarity of false accusations with evidence that would say, pass a 50/50 guilt test.
However inefficient it may be, we have a legal system for a reason. The accused are entitled to due process. IMHO there is no greater travesty than an innocent person having their life ruined because we as a society are unwilling to give them fair and reason based judgement.
> The lack of criminal recourse leads to a court of public opinion being the victim's only option often. The court of public opinion is far from fair, which leads back to the idea of working on the criminal recourse options to allow for more victims to actually report and fix this.
You're proposing extra-judicial recourse as the path forward. That may be a possible solution, but the basic mechanisms do not change. Evidence will have to be presented and corroborated one way or another.
> In this case, someone was wrongly accused, and even under a 50/50 system, it's clear the charges would not go through, and yes obviously the pre-meditated wrongful accuser should face a punishment.
Just put yourself in the accused's shoes for one moment. Let's take this specific case. If the accuser had not been so incompetent and exposed himself by using his home IP address, or had the accuser not been so wily in discovering the link between the IP address and the accuser, what would have happened? At best his VC career would be over and his marriage destroyed.
> Instead of complaining about the public lynch mob and blaming the mass of people who likely won't stop, discuss and focus on the problems that prevent it. Like actually getting rape kits tested, creating more avenues for sexual assault reporting via a calmer system than anonymous blog posts, etc.
I don't claim to have the solution to our problems, but blame must be allocated where blame is due. It is far more fashionable nowadays to virtue signal than to be objective, which is the precisely cause of situations like these. If you have a proposal for an effective extra-judicial system that is not based on facts, evidence and due process, I would be more more than interested in reading it.
You can have due process with different legal standards. See preponderance of the evidence above. I agree, due process, of course. I'm saying the root of the social backlash is that the legal system is failing.
> I don't claim to have the solution to our problems, but blame must be allocated where blame is due. It is far more fashionable nowadays to virtue signal than to be objective, which is the precisely cause of situations like these. If you have a proposal for an effective extra-judicial system that is not based on facts, evidence and due process, I would be more than interested in reading it.
That is absolutely not what I am saying. I am advocating for the use of a different legal standard, one already being used in the US justice system. I'm also advocating for focusing on the victims over the rarer cases of false accusations, which while they should be remedied, should be the secondary focus between the two issues. See below the line for more.
I also think to classify it as virtue signaling is missing the point. That is one of the straw men I see here. The reason people's lives are affected so strongly by rape accusations is because regardless of guilt, people would rather not take a risk in most situations. It has nothing to do with virtue signaling.
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The thing I find more frustrating here is that when you have many people suffering from rape and sexual harassment and a few suffering from false accusations, people in this thread seem far more concerned with shifting focus to the falsely accused rather than the victims of the true crimes when there are numbers showing that one is the much more widespread problem. I see it equivalent to complaining about people blocking the highway to protest BLM stuff (and generally the response to BLM in general about the message not being conveyed perfectly, which for sure it wasn't), or the 60's with the black panthers.
If you see a large injustice that needs correction and you're focusing on a smaller injustice that hinders the larger correction, I think that practically amounts to implicitly supporting the larger injustice. It's a disturbing pattern you can find with pretty much every social movement.
The reason we don't lower the standard of proof is that we've been down that road already - and it leads to bad places.
The slippery slope argument isn't invalid in all cases, but I would say it's quite a stretch here considering the argument I presented already exists in civil court in the US.
But we should stop using legal terms like innocent, guilty or liable in our discussions on the subject since they act as a subtle framing of the issue in ways that are not accurate. By saying someone is guilty of sexual harassment, you're implicitly saying that the determination of guilt should be made based on criminal procedure. People hear guilty and think "innocent until proven guilty." People hear liable and they think of monetary damages. These kinds of accusations will almost always exist on the continuum between true and false and, unlike the instance in the story, will rarely be as black and white as a legal verdict is. There are subtle forms of harassment and there are more blatant forms of harassment. And our court of public opinion should be more nuanced and be able to come down harder on individuals based on how much proof is provided. There's no sentence or fine being imposed, only social stigma and it's up to every individual to determine how much to stigmatize the wrongful parties, either when they are the accused, or in the rare cases like this one, the accuser.
If there are no procedures and we leave justice to public opinion then it's nothing more than a witchhunt.
"It's not a crime "
It is in pretty much any modern country.
And, by the way, we do rely on public opinion to do our bidding in the justice system. They're called juries.
Legally speaking, sure, because it's a statutory tort rather than a crime, but “guilt” and “innocence” each have a non-legal-jargon meaning which precedes and is the source of the legal meaning, and which is clearly what is usually meant in non-technical discussions.
> It's not a crime and only companies can be liable for anything related to it, not the actual people doing the harassment.
Correct under federal law (at least, that's how most courts have applied the law), explicitly not true for some state (including California) sexual harassment laws, at least when the harasser is a supervisor, as personal liability of supervisors for harassment exists.