Serious question

[liv]

So jenett is being a superhero-librarian. She conspired with her friend elisem [ETA: and others] to get a really well written post about being sexually harassed at an SF con posted simultaneously on six highly trafficked blogs. And now she's curating the conversation and reactions that are arising from this bombshell.

Conversation, both in comment threads and response posts, is going somewhat less badly than these things sometimes do. I think this is partly because elisem's post has been carefully constructed to head off some of the obvious awful responses. I'm reminded of Livesey's BSFA talk at Eastercon: even though this is sexual harassment of an adult, not sexual abuse of children, there is still the expectation that Elise's post must be either confession, hence people clamouring for more details of what exactly happened, or testimony, hence people mouthing off about innocent until proven guilty. elisem has quite intentionally chosen not to discuss the details of what happened to her, so she's not confessing anything, and she's published the post on other people's blogs so she's not dealing with people trying to police her emotions. And she's done exactly the right thing in terms of making a formal report of harassment to the perp's employer, precisely so that they can follow the appropriate processes to determine whether he really did the things he's accused of. That hasn't entirely headed off commenters trying to set themselves up as amateur, unbriefed defence lawyers, including tearing down the character of the accuser to undermine her credibility, but it's somewhat mitigated this problem.

More speculatively, I think another reason that the conversation is going relatively well is that elisem is pretty much the ideal victim. She's extremely well-connected within fandom, in fact she possibly even outranks the status of the rather influential person she's making an accusation against. I mean, the fact she was even able to get her post on Whatever and other very prominent blogs speaks volumes about her being friends with the movers and shakers. Even other senior people at Tor, colleagues of the editor who is accused of harassment, are willing to push the envelope legally speaking by linking approvingly to elisem's post. I think it also helps that elisem is middle-aged, white, and averagely good-looking (but not notoriously "sexy"). Which is a depressing thought, but there you go. As Elise describes herself:

The thing is, though, that I’m fifty-two years old, familiar with the field and the world of conventions, moderately well known to many professionals in the field, and relatively well-liked. I’ve got a lot of social credit.

But in spite of starting from a relatively ideal situation, in spite of being backed up by some really big names, the usual pattern of minimizing responses hasn't been eliminated completely. One thing that always always seems to come up in these discussions is, but what if he was just a bit socially clueless and now he's getting lynched [sic] by the internet for an honest mistake? I mean, that could hardly be less relevant in this case: for a start, we're talking about a guy who holds a senior job at an influential publisher, and one who has a decades-long history of making women uncomfortable and being the sort of guy those in the know warn eachother about.

I'm sort of interested in why people always jump to worrying about that possibility, though. One interpretation is that it's part of a great misogynist conspiracy to stop women from taking any effective action when they get harassed. I don't find that very likely, because I don't believe in conspiracy theories, and because while I'm seen some unambiguous misogynist troll comments, I have definitely seen more that look to me completely sincere. There does seem to be a great terror that if sexual harassment of women at cons is taken at all seriously, it will lead to disaster for socially clueless men.

So the question I have is, how many people reading this personally know someone who has ever been falsely / inappropriately accused of sexual harassment? Just how widespread is this problem, really? I'm particularly concentrating on accusations made against men, but judge for yourselves whether accusations against socially clueless people of other genders are relevant to this conversation. Anon comments are on, and in many ways I'd prefer anonymous comments if personal anecdotes are involved.

Comments

[vatine]

Part of the problem with "falsely accused of sexual harassment" is that 'sexual harassment' is, and must be, in the eyes of the person harassed, not in the intent of the person doing the harassing.

I have certainly been the recipient of behaviour that would qualify, although it has been one-offs, rather than repeated behaviour and I have no idea about the intent behind the actions.

In one case, a woman I was having a conversation with kept standing in such a position that one of her breasts (left, or right, dependinding on the exact moment in time) was pressing up against me, but that may well have been just so she could actually hear what I was saying (it was a bit noisy, after all). It did, however, make me feel a bit uncomfortable.

[liv]

That makes sense. I don't entirely like the term "false" in this context, I just couldn't think of a better one. I mean, the facts might not be in dispute, the harasser might indeed have done something that made the victim feel uncomfortable or threatened, and it might also be the case that the harasser acted out of innocent intentions and was too socially clueless to realize that their actions were problematic. I have no doubt this happens, humans being imperfect at communication and all!

But I am curious to know how often it actually leads to a serious accusation with actual consequences. To judge by some of the conversations going on around elisem's piece, this outcome happens all the time, every time someone misjudges a flirt or accidentally touches someone in a crowded room or something. To judge by my personal experience, the misjudgements happen a lot, the accusations happen essentially never. But it's a mistake to generalize from my own personal experience, which is why I'm inviting other perspectives here.

[vatine]

Yep, one thing to keep in mind re the experiences alluded to above is that while they made me uncomfortable, they didn't actually make me feel threatened, so there's that as well (if there had been a repeated pattern, I may have reported, but in all cases it's been essentially one-offs).

[liv]

Quite. I had some older guy give me slightly inappropriate compliments on my appearance at a professional conference; it was sexist, it was treating me as if I was there as an ornament rather than as a professional colleague, but it wasn't harassment because he did it once and walked away. There's plenty of minor things that don't become harassment unless they're part of a pattern, definitely.

[jenett]

There's a discussion in the long Scalzi thread and also reblogged separately later (here: http://undulantfever.blogspot.com/2013/06/reporting-convention-harassment.html, of someone who was at a convention where he was accused, and it was *because* it was reported he was definitively cleared. (The creep in question gave a name/where from that only matched his badge info, but the young women in question confirmed he wasn't the one who'd been a problem.)

Which is a different side of the same issue, really.

[liv]

I was really happy to see that response come up in the discussion. All the foofaraw about how people shouldn't ever report anything or make accusations because of "innocent until proven guilty" seems really counter-productive. Innocent people who get accused, whether from misunderstanding or malice, are far better off if there is a proper process for reporting and handling reports. Expecting people to meet criminal court standards of proof before they even start the process of reporting and addressing harassment isn't the right way to protect people from false accusations, I think.

[(Anonymous)]

I know one person who was falsely accused. She was not "socially clueless". The accusation was made up out of whole cloth by an unhinged person with a grudge.

There was a male student who accused a female lecturer of sexually harassing him. The university took the accusations extremely seriously. Everybody agreed this was the right thing to do, though very distressing indeed for the lecturer. Thorough investigation uncovered that she had simply never done the things he said she had done or even been in the places where the harassing actions were alleged to have happened. That is, there was no misunderstanding and no anti-harassment policy applied too enthusiastically, just a completely fabricated accusation.

[liv]

Thanks for contributing this story.

[lilacsigil]

I know of two incidences of false accusation as part of a campaign of harrassment, but none between relative strangers that were because someone was being socially clueless. Certainly harrassment has occurred (including of me) because someone was socially clueless; there doesn't have to be "positive intent to harrass" to be harrassing! In one case involving me, the man in question was informed by mutual friends to back off and he did, so I'd take that as someone who genuinely didn't realise what he was doing, but it was still scary and unwanted harrassment. I did not, however, feel threatened after the fact. In the other case there was an immediate tantrum and ongoing accusations of "fat dyke bitch", so I think that this was harrassment under the cover of social ineptitude. Both took place in D&D groups so pretty much everyone was socially inept, including me.

[liv]

That's a really important point; I'm sorry to hear you went through those awful experiences to be able to make the distinction, though.

I think you're absolutely right that the socially clueless person backs off and apologizes when he gets a negative response, the harasser using socially clueless as a cover gets angry and vengeful. And I can quite see that getting a relatively good response to telling someone to stop harassing you doesn't make the original incident less unpleasant. I guess the harassing guy who didn't realize did get some degree of punishment, at least social punishment, for his actions. I do think he had some responsibility not to do unwanted things that make people feel scared, even if he was socially inept. If someone like that faced no consequences at all just because he meant well, that would be a worse outcome, I think. But I imagine if this guy were reading this thread he might feel aggrieved at having been accused or scared of making a similar mistake again, or generally sympathize with the commenters who go around saying, but what if he was just socially clueless!

I also hadn't thought of false accusations of harassment as part of harassment, that's incredibly depressing but definitely worth being aware of.

[lilacsigil]

I was and am okay because people around me were supportive, which i know is far from the norm.

As with the anon post above mine, both the false accusations I know of were levelled at women. One accuser was female, one male. It made me wonder if the (blatantly untrue, as the accused were not even at said events) accusation was a way of making the alleged harasser seem like a bad, sexualised woman in a way that wouldn't work for a man. Whether or not the accusation stood up, it would diminish the accused woman in the eyes of others.

[liv]

Really glad you're ok. I think part of what this conversation is doing is that it's changing the social expectation, so that if someone does report sexual harassment, the done thing is to support them, not to shun them or go digging for any possible or imagined flaws they may have. Some people will go against the social norm, of course, but lots won't, so I think there's real value in making it clear that the social expectation is that you should be supportive, not close ranks against the victim.

It could well be that a false accusation in some ways does more harm to a woman than a man. People sort of sympathize with men who are trying to get attention and / or sex from attractive women and maybe crossed a line with being too pushy, but women get substantially reduced status from being seen as aggressively sexual. This is kind of a horrible comparison, but men who prey on very young children, severely disabled women and the elderly are often portrayed as monsters, sickos, perverts etc in the media. Whereas men who sexually assault teenage girls and women of their own age are much more likely to be defended, because to some extent it's expected that men will be sexually aggressive towards the sorts of women who are assumed to be sexual beings.

same anon

[(Anonymous)]

The lecturer who was targeted was younger than most of the faculty, and less conservatively dressed than most academics. Maybe those were relevant factors.

[jenett]

Thanks for the larger discussion! (I feel I ought to clarify your first paragraph, though: Elise talked to a sizeable number of people before deciding on posting and *how* she posted. I'm only one of them.

(That said, I've been Elise's occasional External Brain for a number of years, for organising tasks and wrangling data, and this is certainly another one of them.)

The six bloggers who volunteered to help are all friends of hers: the idea was definitely to have conversation going in multiple places (and so that Elise would not have to be the one moderating the conversation when necessary.) They all were exceedingly glad to help (from the comments she's made to me, the longest back and forth was about when and how to release it, everyone said "Oh, yes, absolutely" very quickly when she asked.)

To answer your question: I don't think I know anyone who has been falsely accused, nor do I think I know of anyone (people I know directly - people I consider friends, not just 'vague overlap in online space without a lot of individual interaction') who's made an accusation without having a fair bit of backup for it (whether that's witnesses or evidence in some form or whatever.)

[liv]

Thank you, I think you're seriously awesome spearheading this! It's starting to look like a watershed moment where the community as a whole comes to a consensus that this kind of behaviour is not acceptable. Really amazing to watch actual positive change happening in front of my eyes. And thanks for the clarification that other people also helped Elise write her magnificent post; I've edited my post. But yes, the wrangling data thing is amazing, that's why I think you're a superhero.

I'm really glad the six bloggers have been so supportive, and yes, keeping the moderation duties away from Elise herself seems like an extremely good idea.

[liv]

Huh, nobody who has been falsely accused or made a false accusation among your immediate circle. I sincerely doubt anyone could ever say "nobody I know has been harassed or perpetrated harassment".

[jenett]

It's also true that I don't have a very large number of people who've made accusations. (which is to say, I'm not entirely sure how usefully applicable my data set is in the first place.)

[liv]

Yeah, it's always impossible to get good data about rare events (short of actually doing an expensive formal study). Straw polls like this one don't improve things very much in terms of dataset, but hopefully will be a way to get discussion going.

[adrian_turtle]

I know a lot of people who have been harassed. Before this year, I don't think I knew anybody who had made a formal accusation of harassment.

[liv]

That's a really good point, actually. I didn't think who ask, who knows someone who has reported harassment? I feel sure I must know some people who have done, but I really can't think who now I think of it.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

I sincerely doubt anyone could ever say "nobody I know has been harassed or perpetrated harassment".

I can, at least in the sense that I don't know about it. I guess statistically there are probably some cases among people I know, but I can't bring any to mind.

(Assuming we're still talking about sexual harassment. There was someone at sixth form who behaved towards me and a couple of my friends in a way I'd describe as harassing, but not sexually.)

[liv]

Wow, that's a really heartening counter-example, I'm so glad you don't know anyone who has been sexually harassed. I certainly know people who haven't been, myself included, but probably a minority among my female friends.

[crystalpyramid]

I know people who, every time people talk about the rules of social interaction that sexual harassers are violating, get very concerned that they will be misinterpreted or falsely accused just because e.g. they invited a friend they knew well back to their room for tea at a conference. I don't know how much this kind of fear is typical among sincere people who don't trust their own social skills, but it may be part of what drives this argument.

And no, I don't actually know anyone who has ever been falsely accused of sexual harassment. Although I have heard of one case in which it happened, at a school I worked at, a couple years before I started working there. (Related to me as a cautionary tale to be exceptionally scrupulous in my work emails to students.)

[liv]

Hm. Some of the knee-jerk reaction does look a lot like rules-lawyering. Like, but what if I did something with superficial similarity to the issue being discussed, would that be harassment, even if all the salient features of the situation were different? It's amazingly hard to tell if it's sincere; it's certainly very prevalent. I mean, rules-lawyering is a bit of a pejorative term, maybe it's people who really can't tell the difference between a creepy guy "inviting" (with a leer) a vulnerable woman back to his room, and simply asking your friend to come and hang out with you at a conference, so they want some explicit discussion of what the differences are.

Harassment accusations in a school context are really tough, whether they're true or made-up, and it's not surprising that teachers fear accusations, without reference to how rare they may be. I suppose with a teacher and underage students, there's not really an issue of a socially clueless person trying to be friendly and having it misinterpreted, because there's never going to be a good reason for a teacher to make overtures towards their student.

[nameandnature]

One person's rules lawyering is another's concern for due process, I suppose. A policy looks like a quasi-legal document, so it then gets scrutinised to see whether it's a good law. A vague policy means you must trust the people implementing it.

As expressed in the Mefi thread on the Adria Richards nonsense, there are consequences of a conference applying its policy if they also tell your employer (the Mefi thread had a comment from an employer saying that they would expect to be told) and you live somewhere where you can be fired "at will". At that point, if you're accused, you're into "never talk to the police" territory (see my contribution to the thread) and the precise definition of harassment and the process for investigating it will matter very much.

None of which explains why people (mainly men) worry about this more than any other behavioural standard a con might introduce (as Popehat wonders). I guess that is the worry that it might mean you break the law without knowing or intending it.

[liv]

That's not what "due process" actually is, though. Taking phrases out of context and finding some extremely contrived hypothetical situation where the same phrase might be used to describe an innocent behaviour rather than a banned or illegal behaviour is not "due process". Does US law have a "reasonable person" standard? Because I really think a reasonable person can tell the difference between inviting your friend back to your room and this sort of thing: deliberate intimidation, stalking, following [...] sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention.

Due process isn't people saying, but the anti-harassment policy uses the word "following" and what if you happened to be going in the same direction as someone and you walked behind them in the corridor, and what if you got banned or lost your job because you were following someone?!!! I wouldn't expect a jury to take that seriously, I wouldn't expect a business HR department to take that seriously.

I also, frankly, wouldn't expect my employer to look favourably on my turning up to a professional conference and making dick jokes in public, and I work for a university, not a business that needs to project a squeaky-clean corporate image. I do agree with you that at-will employment laws are part of the problem here, and I do agree with you that people accused of harassment in that sort of climate should lawyer up.

The Popehat thread is really a depressingly good example of how the comments on feminist articles completely justify the feminist points. The MeFi thread on the recent harassment incident impressed me, though, as discussing reasonable opinions that aren't in line with the online feminist consensus without amplifying the voices of ridiculous MRAs.

[nameandnature]

That's not what "due process" actually is, though.

It's making sure you did what you're accused of, which is apparently what folk are worried about. (The phrase was in my head from one of Popehat's links from the article I mentioned, discussing a rape case which failed to convict because the prosecutors pressed the wrong charges, and the outrage from some people that the court didn't just convict anyway on the grounds that the accused had certainly done something).

I'm personally not concerned about a policy against "deliberate intimidation, stalking, following [...] sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention" because I think that those things are pretty clearly defined and obviously bad things.

I agree that "what if I happen to be walking in the same direction" is silly, although perhaps it shows that whoever said it really thinks the con security people are out to get them. The only reason I can think that someone might believe that is the large amount of outrage surrounding previous cases. If I'm con security, perhaps I now have an incentive to be more severe in case someone tweets about me?

I also, frankly, wouldn't expect my employer to look favourably on my turning up to a professional conference and making dick jokes in public, and I work for a university, not a business that needs to project a squeaky-clean corporate image.

Meh, it's an engineering get together. People make silly jokes and puns. I'm much more sanguine about "hehe, dongles" and "I'd fork his repository" than I would be about "I'd fork her repository" or the "I like it bare" comment which Richards refers to from earlier in the con (I'm sure I don't have to explain why the two sorts of joke aren't equivalent). It sounds like Richards taking out her frustration on Mr Dongle after those other nastier incidents (which more clearly merited Pycon's intervention). Of course, she didn't deserve what happened next: the other thing that stood out from the Mefi thread on that is that deploying Internet outrage in these marginal cases risks Mutually Assured Destruction.

The current case started out as a good HOWTO from elisem, where what the guy actually did was irrelevant. Once someone named the guy, in some places it has turned into outrage against the bad person (testimony, as you called it), at which point what he did becomes very relevant. I've seen a lot of threads mixing up these two things and saying it doesn't matter what he did.

[liv]

Yeah, ok, there are some people out there expressing opinions like, oh, they should have just pinned something on him, everyone knows he's a villain. Those people are so very much not on my side, and I can quite see why their presence in the discussion is making people defensive. I think that people can be legitimately outraged about acquittals if they feel that there's a systematic problem (whether that's bad law, police bias, jury ignorance or whatever) leading to criminals getting away with it, but that's not at all the same as arguing that a particular individual should be convicted if there isn't a watertight case against him.

The "following" example was one I made up; what I was actually parodying was discussion somewhere in the Popehat comments where people were saying, harassment shouldn't be a crime because it can't be defined objectively, and someone suggested a definition which included "don't touch anyone without their consent" to which the response was "but what if a child runs out in front of a car, would it be sexual harassment to grab them without asking for consent first?" Which is just making me eyeroll sooooo hard. I agree that some of the internet outrage may lead to con security getting over-zealous for fear of being the next Readercon.

For me the key issue here is, at what level does due process operate? You don't need "due process" to form an opinion that someone is an unpleasant or dangerous fellow. You don't need "due process" to tell your friends of your opinion. Yes, in some circumstances the act of telling people about your opinion may be defamation, but not every negative opinion that falls short of criminal law standards of proof is automatically defamation, and I would regard it as a serious attack on free speech if the law were to shift in that direction. You don't need due process to report someone to the security team for a private event, or to make a complaint to a person's employer. Part of due process is how the security team or the employer or whoever handles that complaint, certainly. But you don't need to put together a case beyond reasonable doubt to even make the report in the first place. And you also don't need a case beyond reasonable doubt to report someone to the police for a crime, and the police don't need a case beyond reasonable doubt to make an arrest or bring charges. Of course, if you are making malicious or frivolous unfounded complaints of criminal behaviour, then you yourself are committing a crime. But if you have a serious reason to believe someone might have done something criminal, reporting that to the police is in fact the first stage of due process.

I absolutely do believe in "innocent until proven guilty". But ultimately that is a standard for the court, to make sure that nobody is punished by the state if there's any reasonable doubt at all they might be innocent. That's not a standard for making accusations, whether informal or formal. Telling people they can't act at all to defend themselves or to inform other people of perceived dangers unless they have already legally proved the accused guilty is again, a corruption of the meaning of due process.

[liv]

Reading through the MeFi thread on this, I found this really enlightening comment. It explains why everybody always says, but what if he's socially clueless? without resorting to "because the internet is full of unreconstructed misogynists" or "because there really is a genuine fear of socially clueless people being accused".

"but if it were me doing Egregious Thing, it would be by accident or because I didn't know any better, therefore this person must be just like me and have done Egregious Thing by accident". So we end up supporting other people in doing actions we would never think were okay for us to do

And crucially:

sexual harassment isn't just sexuality in its unrefined form any more than punching someone is the unrefined form of giving them a lovely back massage

[ironed_orchid]

"but if it were me doing Egregious Thing, it would be by accident or because I didn't know any better, therefore this person must be just like me and have done Egregious Thing by accident"

Yeah, I've seen a number of people make that sort of argument.

These days my response is "if you are not sure if an affectionate gesture is welcome: ask first or don't do it." But I know that when I was younger and less socially ept, I had plenty of encounters which were uncomfortable, and probably caused some discomfort in others.

[liv]

I think having a standard of asking first would help a lot. I mean, irritating rules-lawyery creeps know perfectly well how to make the act of asking into harassment, they go around repeatedly asking their target if they can do [explicitly described sexual act], and on receiving a no, try again with some other, marginally different sexual act described in revolting detail. But for people who are genuinely not sure whether their intentions are wanted, asking seems far the best course.

It seems to me that a similar danger in empathizing with creeps is the concept that everybody sometimes oversteps a line, or sometimes makes people uncomfortable. I mean, that's true, but it's a bit like "everybody's a little bit racist". It's a good idea for people not to other the perpetrators as those awful creeps over there and assume their own behaviour must be impeccable because they wouldn't actually do the most egregious things they've heard of. But it's not a good idea to conflate actual, deliberate harassment with the occasional mistake along the lines of thinking someone's flirting with you when they're just being friendly. That's another direction which leads to, oh, we can't possibly punish anyone for harassment, it's totally out of proportion to their error if they have to face any lasting consequences!

[ironed_orchid]

Exactly!

One of the good things about being in the habit of asking is I can turn it around. When someone I;d known for less than two days tried to hug me as we passed on a staircase, my response was to ask aloud: "Are we hugging friends? I don't think I'm ready to be hugging friends."

[liv]

Returning to old discussion to say: this is brilliant! It's reinforcing consent messages, it's asserting your boundaries without being confrontational. I may well borrow the idea if I'm ever in similar situations.

[siderea]

So the question I have is, how many people reading this personally know someone who has ever been falsely / inappropriately accused of sexual harassment?

Several. Just sexual harassment, or all sexual assault? I don't even know where to start.

Some of these stories I am very uncomfortable about telling because they were just shattering for the victim, and I don't want to drag the incidents back into public and cause them more pain, so I'm possibly going to be more vague than usual.

A bunch of times I've had other women attempt to draw me into whisper campaigns about how much of a "creep" a man was for how he was interacting with some other woman who entirely welcomed the attention. Sometimes that other woman was me -- women would start "commiserating" with (at!) me about what a creep some guy was for how he was treating me whom I was flirting with.

Or in one notable case, dated. There is a certain SFF author who apparently was asked out on a date once by a certain man, and never forgave him for it. Seriously, that was it. He didn't put his hands on her. He didn't ask repeatedly, he accepted her declining his offer and moved on. He didn't ask vulgarly or in some weird situation. No, no, she made it very clear to me, his sin was he asked her out at all and who did he think he was? That man sometime subsequently asked me out on a date, and became my first love and lover; when it didn't work out between us and I broke it off with him, she and a few other women swooped in to volunteer their "sympathy" that of course I would break up with a "creep" like that. (I was, frankly, so shocked each time this happened, I was pretty tongue tied.) I was, of course, initially concerned that he had done something radically inappropriate, but as I listened to the "stories" (which in some cases, were more an account of feels), it emerged that basically, his faults were (1) he was short and some women found him ugly, and he should know better than to attempt to date above his class, and (2) he was flirtatious with particular female friends who enjoyed flirting with him, in an on-going game. Explicitly. When we started dating, he actually disclosed this to me and asked if it was okay with me if he continued with that. This apparently freaked out other women who observed these (welcome, consensual, reciprocal) sexualized interactions.

I know of another case, somewhat complicated, in which the background noise was that some women in an IT organization considered a certain man a creep because of how he was interacting with a close female friend of his. He was clearly smitten with her, she was engaged to someone else, he accepted this and that he would only ever be friends with her. She was manifestly okay with this -- I'm guessing they discussed it out like grownups in private, but it's none of my business -- and they are still good friends (and he became very good friends with her husband) to this day, 20 yrs later. Against that situation, another woman entirely made vague allegations against him after he gave her a ride home from a meeting; she made them officially to an organization they were both in. He was not told what they were, he insisted, shocked, he had no idea what he might have done, and he was effectively thrown out of the organization without his side being heard or being told why. His response, btw, to this was not to rail against his accuser, but to assume he must have done something unwittingly wrong, be terribly chagrined, and offer to make whatever apology was necessary, and never do that thing again, if somebody would just tell him what he did.

He came and talked to me about it several years after it happened, still absolutely shattered by the whole thing. He had no confidence whatsoever that at any moment he wasn't doing something terrible and just didn't know it. He was talking to me because he wanted to know if he had ever said or done anything to me that had been inappropriate or made me uncomfortable. Which: no. In fact, it seems so surpassingly unlikely that this mild-mannered, easy-going guy whom I knew quite well had said something "clueless" or inappropriate, much less aggressively sexually forward, I had to wonder if the woman had laid completely specious charges out of personal animus.

Because in both these cases? Contemporaneously, other organizations -- one at Wellesley College for crying out loud -- identified these men as
particularly safe and trustworthy around female college students. I know decades of these guys' volunteer history working with young adults, not only without rumors of problems, but with reputations of being righteous dudes.

Creep shaming? Is a real thing. Honest.

Then there's the case of the woman who attempted to redress some sort of conflict with her fiancé by making insinuations (not even accusations) that she had been raped by a friend of his. Unfortunately for her, she was not very good at this nonsense, and I was one of the people she attempted to manipulate.

I have had at least one female patient confess to me that she had made false allegations of sexual impropriety against men. I have had colleagues tell me they, too, have had female patients confess to them that they made false allegations of sexual assault.

I had a female colleague in college, who was falsely accused by a female patient of sexually assaulting her (no malice here: patient made the accusations while floridly psychotic and believing many terrible things, and we all figure that the patient absolutely believed in that moment what they were saying.)

I had a male patient who was accused by his then-wife of domestic violence and evicted from the home with a restraining order, who then, post-divorce, his wife confessed to him that she knew she was lying when she got the restraining order.

So. Yes, it happens, and I think it's a lot more common than people are aware or admitting. And none of this it seems to me is grounds to dismiss or disbelieve women's claims of sexual harassment or assault on their face. Because the number of true cases of sexual harassment, assault and frank rape do greatly exceed the quantity false allegations.

But the false allegations exist. They really do. And creep shaming is a real thing.

[liv]

Thank you very much for these stories, for telling them in a way that's both informative and discreet. I was really starting to wonder whether treating "what if he's socially awkward?" as purely a derail was the only model that fits the facts, which is why I made the post. I wanted to do something to alter whatever it is that leads to me not habitually hearing these sorts of stories.

I'm not entirely sure I understand what creep shaming is. Is a fair summary, calling someone creepy purely because they're attracted to women with higher status than them?

[nameandnature]

Have you read The Fourth Meditation On Creepiness and the followup? (I think you might because Jack has commented on them. I commented on one and told him to pay less attention to Internet feminists, more or less: comfort the disturbed, and all that).

One of the problems with the "creepy/creeper" thing is that it's much more ambiguous than a con harassment policy (so perhaps it's a more genuine concern for a guy to worry about being called a creeper than it is to worry about the con security people clamping down on people walking down the hallway). There are people who get very angry if you suggest it's ever just about social status but there are also people who appear to use it that way. Frex, some of the so-called "creepy" guys at dancing are merely very bad at it or a bit awkward without the suggestion that they're lechers, as far as I can tell, but there's a lot of debate on the subject ("creepy leads" here = "creepy guys", usually, although there's a lot of debate on that subject, too).

[siderea]

Maybe it is; my own definition may ultimately boil down to that, I'm not sure yet. I've been trying to formally, er, formulate a definition of "creep shaming" -- at least what I mean by it when I use it -- and I'm not sure it's ready for prime time. Here's my alpha-version crack at it:

Creep shaming exists in parallel to slut shaming. Like slut shaming, it's a form of policing social behavior on sexual grounds by holding people under constant threat of being assigned a stigmatized identity. These stigmatized identities, where they stick, mark a person as unacceptable company, unworthy of inclusion in "polite society"; once so labeled, all that person's behavior is interpreted in light of the stigmatized identity such that they can do no right, and all behaviors are understood to be, circularly, evidence of both the crime and the sentence. Men to whom the label "creep" has gotten stuck are considered to be acting "creepy" when they engage in courtship behaviors identical to ones that are acceptable from men not so labeled, simply because they "are" "creeps" and all their courtship behaviors are interpreted as "creepy", axiomatically; further the fact they they behave "creepily" (engaging in otherwise normative sexual behavior, but while being a "creep") then is construed as further evidence that they are a "creep".

Which yes, may boil down to status. Though the issue isn't attraction, it's behavior: men of low status are supposed to be terribly, terribly attracted to high status women. (Status wouldn't be any fun if you didn't have anybody to lord it over, would it? :/) But they're supposed to know their place and never have the impertinence of pursuing superior women. The pangs of unrequited desire are their punishment for not conforming adequately to hegemonic masculinity to earn higher status; serves their lazy asses right for not growing up tall or not being born first or screwing around with poetry or cooking or telescopes.

Which is why I, personally, really, really, really wish we would stop using the term "creep" to describe sexual harassment and a wide range of other sexual (and non-sexual!) misconduct. It's like trying to discuss irresponsible female behavior around STDs while using the word "slut". Okay, one reason. There are others.

There are multiple category of problem here, and they're getting thrown in the same bucket labeled "creep", and that is producing more smoke than light:

1) There really are "socially awkward" people -- more accurately, individuals with social behavioral deficits or social behavioral flaws -- who make mistakes. I think these people are more prone to get creep shamed when they transgress, ironically and unfortunately: the real predators manage to evade the label more successfully, precisely because of their social adroitness.

3) There really are predators -- people who are looking for victims, who enjoy victimizing others in a range of severities from ruining someone's day to killing people. These people have excellent social skills, if you're meeting them at any event in a hotel. That's how they get away with it. They know what they're doing, they know it's wrong, they know why it's wrong, and they like doing it because it's wrong.

2) In between those two is the really problematic case: people who enjoy dismaying others, who really don't see what's so wrong with it -- especially or exclusively if the other is a woman, and thus (they don't realize of themselves) not as much a person. They see groping a woman's breast or bodily picking her up and carrying her against her will as on a par with tying a string around a cat's tail or pretending to throw a ball to a dog. They think it's adorable to confuse, frustrate, frighten, or thwart a smaller creature than themselves toward which they feel fondly and which they think is cute.

[liv]

Just wanted to say, I have read this and I've been pondering it quite a bit over the week. I don't want to go around picking holes in an alpha version; it seems like it could be a really useful framing. Threat of getting stuck with a stigmatized identity, I can definitely see how that's a problem.

I can very much see the point of not using the word "creep" to describe predators. Partly because of the shaming issue you mention, and also partly because of conflating people who make people uncomfortable because they don't behave in the expected ways, with charming suave deliberate predators. I feel like part of why people are saying "creep" or "creepy" is because sexual harassment and sexual assault are actual legally defined crimes, and I can exactly see why someone might be reluctant to state outright, this person committed a crime against me, especially if they've been manipulated into the kind of, did that really just happen? did I invite it? was it a misunderstanding? kind of doubt. But your argument against that euphemism is a strong one.

[azurelunatic]

I have knowledge of a group that was being targeted by some pretty egregious internet trolls. One form of the various harassment was that one of the group who was married with children was reported to CPS, who investigated and of course found nothing wrong.

[liv]

Ugh, that's really appalling for lots of reasons, using CPS reports as a way to attack people! It doesn't quite fall into the same category as people's innocently intended advances being perceived as harassment because the initiator is too socially awkward to realize that the attention is unwanted, but none the less horrifying.

[jenett]

I hadn't been thinking about that one in this context, but yes: I do also know people who've been in that situation, too. (Not the CPS thing, but calls to their boss/etc.)

(However, it didn't slot into my brain as sexual harassment, per se, for some reason, because it was clearly coming from other kinds of harassment, and they were using sexually based stuff as the convenient handle, if that makes sense?)

[siderea]

I didn't mention false CPS reports because it's not generally a matter of sexual harassment in any of the cases I know about, but, hooboy! I know about more false CPS reports than I can keep track of. As part of my job, when CPS (here DCF, was DSS) gets called on one of my patients, shortly thereafter they call me. So. But! The very first case I ever knew of I learned back when I worked as a temp secretary for the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities Consumer Division. Some family got in a conflict with a utility company meter reader -- you know, the guy who comes out to read the meter so your gas or electric company knows how much to bill you that month, or did before the wifi digital kind of meter -- I don't even know over what, and he retaliated by calling then-DSS on them. Supposedly anonymously, but MA DSS is terrible about keeping a secret and it was discovered.

[(Anonymous)]

Why do people on the internet set themselves up as 'amateur, unbriefed defence lawyers'?

Is this not a lot to do simply with the self-selecting nature of internet comments?

Specifically, people comment if they have something to say. 'Something to say' falls into three basic categories: 'I agree', 'I disagree and here's where you're wrong', and 'Here's something else I thought of that's relevant'.

The first category will be under-represented on the internet as compared to real life for several reasons, including the general looking-down on 'me too's and the effort it takes to reply when you have nothing real to add beyond general support. In real life you'll get a lot of people nodding, or muttering, 'that's awful' or suchlike; such responses will simply not exist online. The vast majority of readers may be in this supportive-but-nothing-to-add group; but they will be, in internet terms, invisible (and when they are visible, a 'me too' or (in the annoying modern parlance 'yes this' makes much less impression than a longer reply, so they will be less memorable.

The third category will tend to be dismissed as irrelevant, because it usually is: in real life discussion such interjections are the lifeblood of conversation, sending discussions down new tracks, and generally keeping the social wheels turning. On the internet, they just hang about there.

The second category, on the other hand, is going to be massively over-represented on the internet simply because it is disagreement -- where disagreement may not be 'disagreeing with the point' but simply 'nit-picking', which is the category 'but what if I did X for these reasons would I be wrong' falls under -- that is most likely to make someone bother to reply. I mean, it's what's making me bother to type this: the thought that there is a nit I could pick, that even though I don't disagree with your general point this time, there is an explanation you hadn't considered.

And people on the internet, by and large, are geeks with few social skills. And what do geeks with few social skills do? They pick nits. They hear somebody say something and they go, 'But hang on, there's this edge case you haven't considered...'

They might agree with you. They might not even care about the edge case. They might be stating it purely out of Devil's advocacy. They might in fact be appalled to think they are actually defending the person: in their minds, they are simply pointing out a logical flaw, a possible innocent explanation that would make your argument fall. But they have spotted a nit and damn they are going to pick it.

And of course once it becomes an argument they have to defend their nit because that's what being on the internet is about.

So. Anyway. A possible explanation for the observation: a disproportionate number of those who bother to reply to anything on the internet will be those who are trying to pick logical nits with the arguments (case in point: this very reply), and in cases where there is a description of misconduct, this naturally manifests itself as 'amateur, unbriefed defence lawyers'.

But it would be wrong to conclude from the disproportionate prevalence of this in replies that the majority of readers are of that opinion, let alone the majority of people, most of whom don't even read the internet that much.

[siderea]

+1

Well, mostly. I could pick some nits.

[liv]

That does in fact sound plausible, maybe it's the case that most of the depressing patterns that keep coming up are just examples of internet nitpickery. I suppose in this situation it feels like lots of the contrived what-if edge cases are particularly offensive in their assumptions, but yeah, I see where you're coming from.

[shreena]

I did a self-defence course ages ago (recommended by the lovely khalinche) and one of the interesting exercises that they did was that they got us to role play in pairs one of us being creepy to the other so that the other could practice verbally saying **** off (or whatever your choice of words).

One of the most interesting things about it that they highlighted was that it is blindingly obvious when someone is uncomfortable. It was really not hard to pick up that you were making your partner in this exercise uncomfortable. The lesson that they were trying to draw out was that, really, you don't have to worry that the person harrassing you doesn't know that you're uncomfortable. Obviously, not that over the millions of instances of harrassment, that has never once happened but that, really, the percentage play is that the harrasser is fully aware of their impact on you

[liv]

Good example. I'm also reminded of the studies showing that people are really perfectly capable of understanding polite brush-offs as "no" when the context is anything other than asking for sex. I did a similar exercise (on assertiveness, not self-defence precisely) where partners simply had to walk towards eachother slowly, and yeah, you could tell when you were too close. I hesitate a little, because I'm bad at reading non-verbal cues, but I realize that some people are actually disablingly bad and worse off than me (whether or not they have an official diagnosis). But yeah, it's a good lesson, at some point you have to stop giving people the benefit of the doubt, because it's exactly that benefit of the doubt that allows ill-intentioned folk to push even harder against boundaries.

[aphenine]

Because I'm transsexual, I've seen a bit of this issue from both sides and I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about it all, because the issue is really complicated and it's not as simple as I thought it would be now that I've been transitioning for a while. I kinda expected for things to be simpler now, and they aren't.

I guess the main things that I've noticed is that one of the effects of changing hormones as I've done is that I got increased emotional capacity and I'm much better at communicating, versus becoming physically weaker.

I'd heard that women tended to be weaker than men, which is what makes women more prone to sexual harassment and violence, and that's definite and can be measured (and I had to admit I was surprised at how much weaker I've gotten). But I'd kinda dismissed the whole communication/emotional thing as a stereotype and it surprised me a lot that there was some truth behind it.

It also made some sense of things that I was picking up, because I can remember talking to men in dating contexts and having really positive reactions where I behaved emotionally supportively and just helped them out with expressing themselves, as if this was some big thing and I was being particularly nice to them as opposed to just a decent human being.

Inversely, I'd pick up lots of antagonism if I behaved manipulatively and men would more often respond with being physically threatening. Indeed, once I got over the initial painful and awkward phase of transitioning, I made it a rule not to manipulate men and, on the whole, I haven't had much trouble since then.

It also reminds me of a transguy I was talking to who said how he'd instantly gone from not being noticed to suddenly being stopped by police when hanging around after dark. Because he was male, he was instantly suspicious to everybody. That's something I found in reverse going the other way. Suddenly I was less suspicious and I could walk around supermarkets without security eyeing me up.

Putting it all together, it makes me think that, if men have the advantage in physical situations, but women in social situations, then accusations of harassment, both sexual and non, are exactly the kinds of places where men are most scared of women, because they're most out of their depth and least able to defend themselves and where the consequences are most likely to be serious.

[liv]

Thank you, this is interesting. I don't think anyone, of any gender, appreciates being manipulated, and most people like being emotionally supported. So I guess if women are on average better at both sorts of emotional competence, they should pick supporting rather than manipulating if they want to be liked!

Definitely good points that men are more likely to be automatically perceived as being suspicious in some situations, hanging around after dark, behaving a bit strangely in shops etc. And also that I think men may not always realize the implications of many women being physically weaker than them. I would guess means that a relatively innocent, well-intentioned approach may come across as threatening, because a woman may be calculating whether she can physically escape and concluding she probably can't.

I am not sure that women really have the "advantage" when it comes to reporting harassment, though. I suppose that someone who has high social skills is likely to do better at reporting harassment than someone who has weaker social skills. But surely everybody would greatly prefer not to be harassed in the first place, than to be able to report any incidents successfully?

[lovingboth]

When I read the initial post, I did wonder what behaviour she was talking about, but I also went 'I don't need to know, and the people who do need to know do'.

There's one time I think I was falsely accused - someone posted a 'I don't have a partner to do Stuff with', so I emailed them to say I would. They replied with something like 'I'll think about it'. Some months later, hearing nothing since, I asked if they'd thought about it, and then they posted an 'OMG I'm being harassed by...'

If they had said 'Not interested', I'd have had no problem with that. But if someone says they will think about it, I think they actually mean that.

[liv]

That does sound pretty unpleasant, yeah. Thanks for telling the story.

I suppose I really want to live in a consent-culture type of world where people ask explicitly about potential sexual connections and take no for an answer. But that doesn't square very well with the existence of people who may feel really uncomfortable with even being asked about some things. Some possibly because they've had bad experiences in the past with people using pestering with unwarrantedly explicit questions as a form of harassment itself, some possibly because they're just really really sensitive about the issue.

[hatam_soferet]

I know a rabbi who was against a certain policy issue, and some students said, if you don't change and support the policy, we'll report you for inappropriate behaviours. They made a false accusation to damage him politically, to cause his position to become discredited. He was eventually cleared, but it was a messy situation.

Then there was the new bride whose enthusiastic first-time sex with her groom was later described by him as rape, when the couple was in therapy because the marriage was going down the toilet.

Recently I took a friend to the police station, as support because my friend was reporting harrassment. Not exactly of a sexual nature, but definitely creepy. The police aren't really interested if there isn't actual sex or violence going on, but we wanted to create a paper trail.

Then, as happens, the harrasser started saying things like "$Friend doesn't want to talk to me! I'm being ostracised! Abused! $Friend is an abuser!!!" which is rather unpleasant.

[liv]

Those are all really depressing stories, but thank you for adding them to the post.

I'm seeing a lot more examples than I expected of overtly, deliberately malicious accusations, rather than ones that arise from misunderstandings and people reading interpersonal cues wrongly, which seemed to be much more what people worry about in "how do we prevent harassment" conversations.

I'm somewhat inclined towards the opinion that we have to have robust processes for dealing with reports of harassment, even if some people are going to use those processes to harm people. Like jenett's example above, where someone was falsely (or mistakenly?) accused and because it became a formal thing, he was able to be fully exonerated. But the accusation, the investigation processes are apt to be horrible for the accused.

I should say, you did a good thing by helping someone go to the police to get a paper trail. I suppose it's a fairly common abuser trick to claim that the victim pushing back or resisting is itself a form of abuse. Again, don't think the answer to that is to make it harder to report, but it's never simple, for sure.

The situation where one person thinks they're having happy enthusiastic sex and the other thinks that they don't have a choice (and maybe even need to fake enthusiasm to protect themselves), that is just miserable all round. I have been reading a lot around this and I haven't really come up with any good approaches for the rest of society to handle that situation. For me personally, I'm most drawn to the "consent culture" stuff that mostly comes out of the kink and sex-positive communities, but I worry that it relies too heavily on people being verbally articulate and self-aware. And those things, too, can be used as weapons when there's a power imbalance. The most plausible model I've seen is probably Pervocracy's rescripting sex thing. But that has no suggestions for how the rest of the world ought to react where that sort of discussion doesn't happen and people are trying to guess.

I suppose it's somewhat progress that society has mostly come to grips with the fact that even married people might or might want to have sex at any given moment, but that's not really very encouraging progress :-(