Comment by oconnore | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oconnore | Hacker News Reader

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I think the discrepancy comes from advocacy thought vs. legal thought [1]. When advocating for rape victims, who are severely disadvantaged in these situations, you might make a statement like "we need to listen to the woman's perspective". As has been pointed out, that statement is a heuristic on several levels: the woman is often, but not always, the victim; and from a legal standpoint, there are of course other things to consider. It's still a useful and generally true statement.

When you're listening to "megaphone speech", you have to understand the context to understand the message. That can be difficult, because in most cases if you already understood the context, you wouldn't need to listen to the message. Try.

The flip side is also true, when activists win, and are given real institutional power, they must stop relying on context and start being precise ("gavel speech") with their intentions.

1: http://harvardlawreview.org/2015/02/trading-the-megaphone-fo...

> "When advocating for rape victims, who are severely disadvantaged in these situations"

Curious if you have a way to back up the claim the accusers are severely disadvantaged? Based on how it is at Stanford and many universities in the US, the system is certainly stacked in the accuser's favor. See, for example: https://www.thefire.org/stanford-trains-student-jurors-that-.... This leads to terrible mistakes, Joe Lonsdale comes to mind (it was since reversed, but the damage is likely done by then).

Edit: to downvoters, care to explain why..?

The accusers (victims) are disadvantaged in court (i.e. where facts matter and where there is a very high standard of proof), whereas the accused are disadvantaged outside of courts (and in college "kangaroo" courts), where the standards of proof are much lower and and perceptions matter more than facts.

"Rape culture" advocates claim that courts should become more like kangaroo courts.

There are several well regarded sources that show that the crime -> conviction rate for rape is shockingly low, the main bottlenecks being: reporting (because the victims are heavily disincentivized from reporting for a variety of reasons), decision to bring charges or not by prosecutors, and conviction rates once in trial. I don't have them handy but I'll try to come back to this tomorrow.

Because no one should have to explain to you that universities and incredibly famous cases like this are the exception. I shouldn't have to back up climate change every time I down vote someone "just asking" about clean coal or some shit every time that conversation happens either.

These are horror stories - they hit home IMO because so many men would never dream of assaulting anyone so it's scary to feel lumped into that group, because of the shame that comes with the crime and because the idea of being stuck in a criminal system you don't belong in is infuriating. But much like terrorism, home invasion murders, car jackings and shark attacks the likelihood of being accused of a sexual crime you didn't commit is basically zero.

It's okay guys, we can admit there is a problem without having to get grouped in as a rapist. It's not like any of this changes the fact that 90.5% of the murders in the US are apparently committed by men[0] (which also does not make us all murderers)

[0] Google it yourself.

We are talking about universities here, presumably, since the title is "college sex-assault trials belong in court". So, dismissing them as an "exception" is neither helpful nor relevant.

I have no idea about how fair the system is out of college. My point was about how unfair it is _in_ college.

Could you elaborate how 'we need to understand context' means reducing issues to 'you need to listen to one side' is acceptable? Saying we need to 'try and understand' seems like you're saying that unless we consider things from one side we don't have any empathy at all.

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