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

[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.