First and foremost, the scare tissue complaint largely relies on a policy being applied to an extremely rare event. Unfortunately this kind of thing is almost certainly less rare than you think. If you run a large or frequent enough event, sexual harassment will happen. It really sucks, but it's a reality of the world that we live in that we need to deal with. To make things worse, it probably will go un-reported and the person that it happened to will simply feel uncomfortable with the event and the community as a whole.
By having an explicit policy that addresses sexual harassment you accomplish a number of things:
* You make attendees more mindful of their actions. Often people who commit sexual harassment don't really realized the full extent and consequences for what they are doing. By stating that this type of behavior is unacceptable, upfront, at least some people will be a bit more likely to think before they act.
* Should something happen, the path to action is clear. Running a conference is a bit of a crazy job. You're keeping track of a hundred things at once and dealing with a dozen people's problems. This is not the best state to be in when you need to decide how to handle a delicate situation. By stating upfront how this type of behavior will be handled, it takes a load off of the organizers' shoulders on the day off.
* A strong signal is communicated to people who are concerned and possibly afraid to attend an event. People go through all kinds of horrible things in life. Often those experiences leave people (understandably) cautious about situations that might lead to similar experiences. By having an explicit policy, people with fears and concerns are given a strong signal that the event in question will be a place where they are safe and welcome.
frankly i don't entirely trust women with the ability to cry sexual harassment and have men ejected from situations
having personally witnessed this twice in bars, and once by way of a female relative coming clean about abusing her privilege
note that i am not saying actual sexual harassment should not be called out.
just in response to your unconditionally endorsing such policies; there have to be damn good mechanism in place to prevent abuse.
That said, the OP is just calling for there to be some sort of policy in place, so people aren't improvising when a complaint does arise. The policy doesn't have to be 'mandatory kickban on the first complaint'.
There'd be no point in creating a code of conduct that explicitly bans defecating in the hallways because it's simply not an everyday problem. How women are treated in tech, however, is.
I'm saying this as a guy who is a strong believer in egalitarianism but highly sceptical of feminism, mind you.
If we had a defecation problem, yes, we should have a binding code of conduct for that. And as soon as the problem is gone, we should re-evaluate it, too.
This is a little different because: (1) it's probably a common occurrence (based on the general incidence of sexual harassment & assault -- I don't know about coding conferences in particular); (2) it's something that is often tolerated -- it doesn't actually go without saying that the conference will think it's their problem or do anything about it; and (3) it's an assault by one of your guests on another of your guests, so it reflects on the experience you provide.
So to go with your analogy, suppose it was common in the industry that a few people at any given conference would try to poop on other people, and the conference organizers wouldn't know what to do about it. Then yeah, unless you were trying to cater only to a small subset of programmers with unusual tastes, it would be pretty important to come up with some sort of explicit policy and plan to deal with conference-poopers. Or coming back to reality, if you run a conference, you do have to make it clear to your guests that you will actively try to stop sexual harassment/assault. Then second of all, you have to follow through.
"Having a policy" just means (1) letting people know that sexual harassment won't be tolerated at your conference; and (2) having a plan you can execute when it happens anyway. It's pretty much steps one and two of "finding solutions."
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/index.php?title=Conference_ant...
A good chunk of that is about how the working-to-fix part works. I think that's really valuable to have thought through in advance. I have banned people before (never for this, thank goodness) and in the moment it's incredibly hard to avoid over- or under-reacting if you have to think everything through from first principles.
But, you know, when that guy walked up to me when I was talking to my (male) colleagues and specifically singled me out to ask that I allow him to photograph my "tits" as part of a conference "scavenger hunt," I told him off. Then he came back, and I told him off again. I never felt "unsafe," just angry and humiliated. If you're looking at "reporting someone if you feel fear," then it's likely that poor guy had a high possibility of being the one reporting it had he come back a third time.
tl;dr: Most of these policies make women and minorities out to be victims vs. ensuring that people just treat each other with common decency and respect. Not a fan of singling any of us out and I don't think it's productive.