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

[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.