Microsoft Intern’s Rape Claim Highlights Struggle to Combat Sex Discrimination
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I just feel like many of these articles stop short of discussing obvious questions, and it leaves me suspicious.
>And despite the allegations against him, Microsoft also hired her accused rapist.
I don't expect any company to act on allegations other than to apply some caution, which is probably already being applied anyhow.
It's clear that our police don't take rape seriously enough, but that doesn't mean that companies should start being judge, jury and executioner instead.
I don't agree with this. Once an accuser has filed a criminal complaint of rape, I think companies should do a lot to protect that person from a co-worker. However, once those charges are dismissed for lack of evidence, which happened for reasons not covered in this article, the situation changes. I would like someone to tell me what Microsoft should do after charges are dropped.
However if I was an employer just from liability sense would just just not hire the guy. I am sure they are plenty of other good applicants. If anything does happen that is an easy multi million dollar lawsuit. In all honesty I wouldn't want to hire her either. Just stay away from any possible issues.
Read further, near the end the article states that after a re-org, they ended up on the same team. As far as I’m concerned, that’s very poor form of Microsoft.
Oh come on. It wasn't even a firing decision, it was a decision on which interns to hire. They can't have been short of applicants. How about not hiring the guy with the rape allegation?
Alternatively, if you believe the woman is entirely lying, why wasn't she barred from hiring? No, they just dropped the question on the floor entirely.
Should you be unemployed for life now?
Due process is important. Raped women should press charges, there should be an investigation, the trial, and prison time.
So relative to the set of all possible destruct rumors, allegations of sexual assault stand as outliers for how uniquely protected the accused actually are.
However, if they want to hire someone who only has accusations against him, I don't see the problem. Businesses can and do hire full-fledged known criminals (typically after they've paid their legal penalty); and this is better for us all then having them uselessly sitting around. Many of them will still be perfectly good workers. Having done something illegal doesn't mean getting ejected from society; being accused certainly doesn't.
http://variety.com/2017/film/news/ashley-judd-mira-sorvino-w...
Edit: In case it’s not clear, the link talks about how Weinstein used his influence to harm the careers of Sorvino and Judd (in 1998) after they rejected him (in 1995 and 1997). The accusations of sexual harassment (not rape) have been made in 2017. How does one conclude that making rape allegations can make you unemployable?
Pressing charges and seeing the process through is often reported as being a significant re-traumatization — sometimes even worse than the assault, itself.
It also ignores the fact that "hiring decisions" aren't subject to due process — and that "unemployed for life" is specious hyperbole.
EDIT: Down-voters, assume an actual rape occurred. Please convince me of how it's incumbent upon the person that was raped to subject herself to all of that, just to be "fair" to the job prospects of her rapist. If the statistics are anything to go by, he's overwhelmingly likely to be acquitted, anyway.
Why should I hire anyone who is accused of rape when I do my background check? Why should anyone else hire such people?
Look: aperrien raped my sister today.
Why should anybody hire you or work for you now?
I propose due process, evidence, trials.
What do you propose?
For starters, a justice system and ideological climate that isn't predisposed to discount women's lived experience of harassment and assault.
I understand it's a traumatic experience, but so is all of violent crimes.
I'm talking about a climate where when a woman claims she's being harassed, the response is to credit the (stated) intent of the person allegedly harassing her ("I was just flirting" or "Can't you take a joke?") over her experience. I don't think it matters what your intent was. If you're making someone — anyone — uncomfortable, that's on you; it's your behavior that caused the discomfort.
Or, when a woman actually does press charges for a rape, the way it generally works out, there's substantial burden-of-proof placed upon her to substantiate her own experience. Yes, even — especially — from the police and prosecution, whose jobs it literally is to do that for her.
> The problem is, many women don't.
Given the above, and the underlying attitudes that give rise to it, can you blame them?
We have a profoundly shitty attitude, as a culture, regarding women and their sexual agency, and the way we treat rape is only a sliver of that.
Just scratching the surface, consider the massive, systemic backlog of untested rape kits in the US.
Women aren't legally prevented from pressing charges by this maddening lack of cooperation, but in practice many rape cases go unprosecuted because of police indifference or hostility.
How come nobody freaks out over THAT? Saying "this person is unpleasant to work with, ND we shouldn't hire them" wouldn't make anyone bat an eye...
Assholes get hired all the time, even when it's known. Ever read Linus's emails? Yet I'd work with him in a heartbeat.
I say "this person is awful to work with. Don't hire them".
And they won't get hired, 99% percent of the time.
And I can do all of this in my word alone, without and judge jury or trial.
Society already says that this is ok in hiring. Nobody is going to go around saying "you can't accuse someone of that and prevent them from being hired! That is he said she said!".
Ugh. This was a nasty flamewar already—the kind of thing this site is not for. Please don't take things even closer to the bottom of the barrel.
From what I can see, in this particular case the girl didn't press charges, even though she had a strong case (his DNA, her being very drunk, done the med evaluation quickly).
What do you propose exactly? Always believe the accuser? No more innocent till proven guilty? Make the accused unemployable? For how long?
Cause it would be trivial to create dozens of FB profiles and accuse you of rape once a week.
And that happens in places where it's prima facie rape to have sex with someone who's too intoxicated to meaningfully consent. How is that not an impossible double standard?
Here the girl reported a crime, there appears to have been compelling evidence that what she says was true, and the state declined to press charges.
That's not her fault, it's a systemic failure.
Anyone else doesn't have to use that. If someone who's called a rapist sues for defamation the courts will use "balance of probability".
People get confused by the apparent contradiction between "innocent until proved guilty" and the fact that someone not prosecuted (or even prosecuted and found not guilty) may have done the crime.
For an example see the comments about football player Ched Evans being found "innocent" - he wasn't, at all. He was found "not guilty" which spans the range from "he definitely didn't do it" right up to "he almost certainly did it, but the prosecution didn't persuade me beyond all reasonable doubt".
So if you're Microsoft you can do what you like. If it ends up in court it's probably going to be "balance of probabilities".
The choice about which crimes to prosecute with what vigor is very much a political question, and I agree with you strongly, we need more discussion about it.
This is also a priority as the police are generally bad at this apart from a few places which have made it a priority. There is a national backlog in the US of unprocessed rape evidence kits: http://beta.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-rape-kits-legisl...
> What should the standard of evidence be for Microsoft?
See other comment, but civil standards rather than criminal standards sound like a good place to start. But really consider the normal standards of "evidence" at work; people are fired for all sorts of reasons on the flimsiest of evidence all the time. Remember that Microsoft was a pioneer of "stack ranking" which would sack 10% of employees annually simply for relative performance on the judgement of their manager.
> I just feel like many of these articles stop short of discussing obvious questions
A separation is usually maintained between "news" and "opinion", but I agree that journalism is often very bad at giving context.
I think you might want to research this a bit more; it's often a matter of prejudice.
Reputation systems are important to fill these gaps. And in a reputation system, where peoples’ freedom isn’t on the line, a different standard of review is appropriate. If someone says “we shouldn’t hire this guy, I know he cheated in his classes.” Nobody says “well can you prove that beyond a reasonable doubt?” That’s not how things work.
However, I don't know what's going to work to take people with vast amounts of power out of power for wrongdoing, either. What we've done in the past doesn't appear to have consistently worked. So here we are, unfortunately.
Trivial but serious answer: You might not know. Harvey Weinstein got Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino blacklisted, and neither of them knew why they suddenly weren't getting roles.
It would be nice if we could build a gossip network which was immune to malicious gossip, but I don't know how one would go about doing that.
I don't have an answer. Clearly, it is problematic that you can have your career derailed by a bogus accusation. The real world is complicated and judging the feed of incoming information we get is a hard problem.
But two things I'm pretty sure of:
* The fundamental concern the "due process" people are articulating isn't unique to gender relations, but has its most powerful emotional impact for dudes in those kinds of controversies. Something is broken about that.
* "The police should resolve it" is clearly not the answer; in fact, that's a conclusion foreclosed by logic, since the standard of proof the police and prosecutors work on is so much higher than any standard used by people in their ordinary lives.
In particular, I would be interested to see examples where peoples’ careers have been ruined by sexual harassment, rape or gender discrimintion accusations that were legitimately baseless. I think that “the court of public opinion” is a red herring, because from what I can tell news outlets that people take seriously put serious due diligence into finding evidence against the accused. And as you said, they do not need to abide by the standard of reasonable doubt that the court system requires.
I also think that this discussion is mind of muddied by peoples’ perception of how likely accusations are to be believed. If someone starts a rumor about your job performance, that might be equally believable to a rape accusation, but it’s frankly not serious or “juicy” enough to really spread around. That won’t be reported in a major newspaper or make the rounds on Twitter. It’s just not going to attract eyeballs. But your example of child pornography is a good one, and probably comparable in my opinion. If someone is actually concerned about rumors against, I think it’s fair to give them that rape accusations are more worth worrying about in terms of damage than a rumor that people are going to sort of shrug off and not leave any one team or company.
One thing that I like to think about with respect to accusation validity - is there a heuristic we can use to informally determine the likelihood of an accusation before we find the conclusion? For example, if we are self-aware in acknowledging that our bar for truth is lower than a court, can we find commonalities in reaction or public response that are generally unique to people who actually did do the things they’re accused of? It’s not rigorous, but then again it doesn’t really have to be - most examples of careers being ruined by these accusations feature at least three different women. I think that if you can find three unrelated accusations, that’s a reasonable degree of certainty for the public, especially when you consider that these accusers do not typically have an incentive to collude (they don’t get anything material from publicized accusations).
The underlying problem is how to calibrate your heuristic. To know if the heuristic is any good you would need to know which accusations are true to begin with, which is the original problem.
> I think that if you can find three unrelated accusations, that’s a reasonable degree of certainty for the public, especially when you consider that these accusers do not typically have an incentive to collude (they don’t get anything material from publicized accusations).
They get whatever motivates anyone to make a false accusation (revenge, blackmail, jealousy, attention), with the added incentive of knowing that a previous accusation provides false credibility.
Relying on due process and the court system is one way to prevent people like Harvey Weinstein from carrying through on a threat of "I'll make sure you never work in this industry again", but it's not the only one. Taking rumours and innuendo at face value, on the other hand, is guaranteed to hand more power to abusive people.
There are people who are very good at detecting these kind of weaknesses and exploiting them. Whenever a system of power or control is overreacting or is irrational about something, let's say terrorism, there will be people who will report their neighbors for "bomb making" or anti-government propaganda knowing the government will overreact and ruin that person's life. Instead of terrorism and government it could be a company's HR and this sexual harassment rumor network, or reporting someone for neglecting their children (playing on the "think of the children" irrationality) to the police if they cut the lawn too close to the your fence and so on.
Come now Colin, the answer is clear. We merely use a blockchain featuring anonymous signatures and transactions - parties have to stake N of their own GossipCoin to accuse others of some wrongdoing, and they lose their stake if greater than p other validators disagree. If at least q validators agree, the accused forfeits N GossipCoin :)
TBH (acquired by FB in Oct.) tackled this challenge [0].
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/10/17...
also, i think that in the US a defamation suit requires some sort of assessment the claim being actually true or false (as you can't defame with demonstrable truth), or at least some strong sense of merit, as well as some assessment of malice or bad-faith actions on the accuser/defamer end.
not to mention that there appears to be little enthusiasm for helping falsely accused, or those claiming to be such. there are fears that aggressively pursuing false accusers risks dissuading actual victims. bad situation all around.
When someone makes a false claim without providing any of the specifics like when or where it supposedly happened, how are you supposed to prove it didn't happen under any standard of evidence? Show your whereabouts for every hour of your entire life?
These cases usually have precious little in the way of evidence one way or the other. If it was so easy for an innocent accused to prove they didn't do something then we wouldn't need the high standard of evidence in criminal cases either.
That statement needs to be backed up by hard evidence. It's a very terrible thing to accuse someone of such a serious crime.
And if the statement is true, I somehow don't feel comfortable accepting that the solution is just to warn people not to work for them.
Note : I am NOT saying that it is also the case for Dylan Farrow. Just that sadly the world is not all black and white and for this kind of crime it is very hard to find the truth.
Dealing with a work place complaint is very different than dealing with a criminal case. With crimes, we can say “it’s better to let one thousand guilty people go free than to convict once innocent person.” We can do that because a false negative has relatively little cost. As we are learning with the Harvey Weinstein allegations, that’s not true in a work place setting. A false negative means that some woman has to either exit the job and give up career opportunities, or live with ongoing harassment and abuse at the hands of a coworker. And if you set the standard for believing accusers so high that you let one thousand victimized women continue to be harassed to save one innocent man from a false accusation, you get what we have now: a bunch of really angry women.
After the fact it's clear that Alice and Bob working together isn't good for either of them. And to the best of your knowledge Bob isn't guilty of anything -- unless you claim to know better than the police and the courts.
If you were the manager of Alice and Bob what action would you take that you belive is fair?
Having a different burden of proof for firing someone and sending them to prison is completely reasonable.
Also, if you aren't going to follow the justice system's outcome then what system are you going to use to evaluate the evidence under the new burden? The court of office opinion sounds terrifying.
Now, let’s look at the statistics. Rape is much more common than false accusations of rape. Now, you run a simulation using these statistics. What happens? The rule of believing Alice results in vastly more cases where you make the right decision than the rule where you believe Bob. And it results in vastly less social harm overall.
So what’s fair? I’d assume that you’d say it’s to believe Bob, since you have no “hard evidence” to the contrary. (To nitpick: a sworn statement by a witness, Alice, is evidence admissible in court.) But that means that 10-20 women are forced to leave their jobs or work with their rapists for every one man who is spared from wrongly being fired due to a false accusation. From the point of view of minimizing social harm, you’ve failed.
Of course, in reality, you’re usually going to have some other evidence to go on. Bob might say, “Alice is lying I was at the bar with my friends when the alleged rape happened.” If so then you should believe Bob, of course. The idea of shifting the burden of proof might not work in a criminal case, but for the reasons explained above, the considerations in a work place scenario are very different: false negatives are just as bad as false positives.
i'd wager that's true of every crime, from thievery to murder.
what you're suggesting is to treat every accusation as true.
And even when rape accusations are false, they're primarily not what the fertile imaginations of HN imagine, which seems to be women who've taken a dislike to some nerdy colleague for no reason, or the willing partner who decides later that it was actually rape.
In reality, the majority of them are very young girls, or cheating wives, who need to come up with some alibi for their parents or husband and so invent a classic stranger with a knife rape scenario rather than point the finger at some innocent person. Often they don't even intend to go to the police but the parent who they lied to files on their behalf.
https://qz.com/980766/the-truth-about-false-rape-accusations...
10% of false rape reports may be made by people in the hope of recieving medical care they need for other reasons, which is a tragic statistic in itself.
"To classify a case as a false allegation, a thorough investigation must yield evidence that a crime did not occur."
2-10% provably false allegations does not mean 90-98% are true.
i have little doubt that most allegations speak to truth, but it also seems to me that trying to manipulate numbers in this way isn't beneficial.
But you're missing my main point, if, as one study found, 78% of false rape claims involve claims of weapons, gang rape or physical injury then it's not going to happen during a Silicon Valley office Christmas party.
The raw numbers are paired with a narrative, when really the real data blows the narrative apart.
sorry, i was unclear. it's found in the link under "only between 2% and 10% of all reports are estimated to be false".
The stats argument is clever but I don't think I could support it. I don't think a person should be punished because of the actions of people he doesn't know completely outside of his control. In another universe where false accusations are more common it would mean you make a different decision despite all the facts of the case remaining constant.
Why don't you think reasonable doubt a good standard in this case? I recognize that I try to err on the side of not punishing people but if I can seriously say that Bob really might not have done it then I don't think I could hand down judgement.
Additionally if we followed your recommendation (which is essentially to lower the evidentiary standard for rape), it would probably result in more false accusations, which would multiply the number of wrongful convictions.
What you're arguidng for is exactly why we have the Weinstein's of the world, and why they feel empowered to abuse.
The comment still doesn't make a lot of sense to me in the context of workplace standards. Frequently claims of sexual harassment DO result in the alleged harasser being dismissed, regardless of whether they're true. So isn't this just an argument for the status quo? And if the evidentiary standard is lowered further, won't it still translate into a larger percentage of rape/harassment claims being fraudulent? Is this really the best way to address the problem of unprosecuted rapes?
You're throwing away a datapoint - "the police decided not to press charges or Bob was found not-guilty in court".
There's not much more you can do. You address the tension, you don't assign blame, and you make sure both people have enough room to live healthy lives.
Now, if this is the second or third time Bob has been put in this situation, he's gone. And if this is the second or third time that Alice has been put in this position, she's gone.
When Cheryl Yeoh posted her story, I wrote a few blog posts positing that we ought to focus on prevention. You and most people here are kind of assuming that the only point at which Microsoft had power to intercede was after the woman was sexually assaulted and now has this horrible dilemma of whether or not to work with her rapist.
But the incident occurred because she went out for drinks with colleagues, got too drunk to drive home and crashed at the home of a colleague. Microsoft could have had policies about how to handle work related functions that discouraged drunkenness, discouraged a woman crashing at a male colleague's house instead of being put up in a hotel if she couldn't make it home, etc.
No one ever brings up that angle but me and when I do, I get accused of blaming the victim.
Doesn't it seem ridiculous that companies need to have these kind policies or risk lawsuits and being smeared as cultivating a culture of rape? It seems to me that employers shouldn't have to babysit their adult employees or be their parents. Maybe instead of having employers be parents, society could reinforce the idea that parents/family/individuals be responsible. For example, not getting hammered, calling a cab if one can't drive, not going out alone (or as the only female in a group), not staying the night at the home of someone of the opposite sex, not having sex before marriage, courtship is chaperoned, etc. Oh no, how patriarchal! Instead, it's seen as reasonable for one's employer/university/etc to decide if one's sex life is consensual and make sure one has a safe bed to sleep in when one goes out partying!
> discouraged drunkenness
I'm sure this isn't what you meant, but imagine if Microsoft had a policy that punished an employee if they were found to have gotten exceptionally drunk outside work like in this scenario. First, it could only be applied to the accused, never the accuser. Imagine if this purported rape victim were punished because she admits she got very drunk before the rape happened. People would go crazy at that. They'd blame Microsoft for punishing the victim. They'd demand all rape accusers be given immunity from any punishment for misdeeds they did before the purported rape took place, lest the punishment for what they did discourage them from reporting the rape.
Btw, very much enjoyed your thoughtful well-reasoned comments in this thread!
Thank you for proving my point that even trying to broach the topic of prevention is rife with difficulty and gets insane pushback. I can't really fathom why. Simply not having the rape happen to begin with seems like the optimal solution, but it can't be discussed in good faith at all. It essentially gets nothing but over the top inflammatory remarks.
Edit: Though TBF I will add that it would probably be more accurate to say policies designed to discourage such things. Elegantly promoting safe social practices is a hard subject to write about.
Why are rape cases like this hard to prove? She was pass-out drunk, and the accused had sex with her. That's all the prosecutor should have to prove, there should be no she-said, he-said over consent.
Courts regularly rule that people don't have the capacity to sign a contract while drunk, yet somehow they do have the capacity to consent to sex? Come on.
Even if she did say yes, it's still rape in my opinion.
I know that drunken sex is the traditional way to consummate a relationship in modern Western culture, so this would be quite a difficult cultural change.
But IMO such a change would do more to strengthen the drunk college party tradition than it would to weaken it. Girls would be even more likely to party wildly if they weren't scared of being assaulted while doing so...
Most cases of rape absolutely are a case of he said, she said because in most cases they are the only two people present when the encounter occurred.
You can come up with physical evidence showing that intercourse happened and that she had high levels of alcohol in her system. You can come up with witnesses that the man and woman in question attended an event together and she went and crashed at his place. All of that is called circumstantial evidence. So unless you have something like videotape of the assault, it very often comes down to the testimony of two people -- him and her -- and which one you believe the most. Because the definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent.
That is almost always the case. Sex typically occurs privately. There are usually no other witnesses to sexual intercourse aside from the two people who had intercourse. This is generally true whether the incident was consenting or not.
And I'm saying that's all that necessary. With high levels of alcohol I claim that she could say "Yes, please" and it would still be rape: she didn't have the capacity for consent.
Most incidents of first time sex -- ie the first sexual encounter for this specific couple -- involve alcohol.* Are we going to start willy nilly charging both parties with rape for all such incidents?
* at least in the US they seem to.
I asked it to rebut their unstated but obvious (and erroneous) assumption that only men are rapists and only women are victims of sexual assault.
That standard may vary from state to state (but shouldn't.)
http://www.fremstadlaw.com/drunken-sex-rape/
I don't know what the relevant law is in WA.
Even in those places, her drunkenness is used as a mitigating factor by the defense — and often also the police and prosecutors.
And, anyway, in the jurisdictions I'm talking about, it doesn't matter if you knew or not; if she was that drunk, it's rape. That's what "statutorily" means.
People close to me have been victims of acquaintance rape in their homes. It’s a horrific crime that shakes the victim to her core and leaves her violated in many ways. The process of getting justice is like getting victimized again.
That is probably at least in part because men and women both routinely drink in order to get past personal sexual hang-ups in a quick and dirty fashion so they can get laid at all, hang-ups that would take years of therapy to really fix. So voluntarily choosing to drink with or in the company of a member of the opposite sex can be reasonably interpreted as intent to try to get yourself laid.
This is part of why people vehemently object when I (a woman myself) suggest things like "In order to protect themselves, women should not drink under x, y and z circumstances."
That said, I also think there's a bright-line distinction between using intoxication to explain an assault, versus using it to excuse one. People tend not to see that line, either, though.
People who grow up with Catholic guilt or who were sexually abused as a child (etc ad nauseum) may, themselves, feel conflicted about having sex at all, even with their spouse. (I speak from firsthand experience as someone who was sexually abused as a child.)
Sexual consent is just not the nice, simple thing that some people want it to be. There are people who can't get laid without getting liquored up. There are people who have rape fantasies because they want sex, but don't want to be "at fault" for doing something that they have internalized is inherently bad and verboten.
This element is mostly not discussed. The subject of rape comes up, and people don't want to talk about how personal baggage intersects with sexual morality and seriously muddies the waters on exactly what constitutes a consenting moral sexual encounter. If you need to have a drink to get laid at all, telling people you need to be sober amounts to telling them you can't get laid until you work out your personal demons. (Which is not what I am saying, but it may be what people "hear" when I say certain things.) This is incredibly problematic.
I'm also not talking about "bright line consent". I'm talking about drawing a flashing-neon line on the near side of using intoxication to excuse shitty behavior. It never excuses anything. E.g., you get behind the wheel, over the limit, that is 100% on you, no matter what.
I advocate that women should not put themselves in certain situations and I get accused of victim blaming for trying to empower women to live safely.
But I did years of therapy. I generally don't drink. Women who do drink and/or have not sorted their childhood baggage get pretty enraged when I suggest not putting themselves in certain situations.
Can you point to a jurisdiction where this rule doesn't require direct evidence? Re-quoting parent's ask here:
>Do we have video of the event? Do we have eye witnesses who saw the sexual encounter? Do we know for sure what happened between two people when most likely no one else was around?
I don't think you thought that one all the way through. They also wouldn't be allowed to have sex afterwards under any circumstances, which for a lot of women I know would be a problem. As far as I know this is already the law essentially, but not in practice.
Criminal accusations are much worse and deserve a much higher standard of evidence. Also, I think you're wrong. People ask that question all the time in the civil case.
Also, here's a couple of year old article that takes head on the question of how police deal with rape accusations. I can't recommend it enough, it won a Pulizter:
https://www.propublica.org/article/false-rape-accusations-an...
I'm a woman. I have been raped. I also have two adult sons. So, here are some issues as I see it:
First, if you lower the burden of proof for rape because it is rape, then you open the door to men having their lives ruined because some woman wants their job, is mad he won't leave his wife for her, or whatever. Women are human too. We aren't all paragons of virtue simply for having been born with different bits between our legs. So if you set a low standard for convicting a man of rape, you open up a different huge can of worms.
Second, human sexual morality is all kinds of messy and complicated. Date rape routinely involves alcohol, yet if you tell women "Play defensively and don't drink and don't get so drunk that you can't drive home and need to crash at some guy's place where he can rape your inebriated, unconscious body," now you are blaming the victim. If we told someone "It's a rough neighborhood, so lock your doors." that would be good advice, not victim blaming. But make it about sex and try to give women practical advice, and suddenly you are impinging on their right to do any damn thing they so please.
I mean, I have seen an article where someone was literally quoted as saying "A woman should be able to walk naked down the street and be safe from rape." Is it okay for men to wander the streets naked? Last I checked, the answer was no. Why are we making up this ridiculous scenario?
Additionally, because in a court case you can't realistically lower the legal evidentiary bar, going through a court trial after a sexual assault is quite the ordeal. It isn't a sympathetic, hand-holding oh, honey, you poor thing experience. You will essentially be treated like you are lying, because the reality is that you could be.
Another thing that is incredibly hard to talk about at all is that we have things like BDSM and cultural standards that men are supposed to initiate, etc. So there is no bright line between a man pursuing a woman and a man harassing a woman or pressuring her into sex, which could then come back to bite him when she decides it constituted rape. I strongly suspect some men genuinely are surprised at being called a rapist after the fact. To their mind, it was consensual.
There are no simple, easy, straight forward cures for that last issue. I don't know how we are going to fix it. Perhaps the outpouring of #MeToos and multiple cases currently ongoing against powerful men will change the standard, but not without a lot of blood in the water.
I read some of the articles where multiple women have accused a rich, powerful of man of sexual assault and the man often denies it and swears it was consensual. Given my experience of human sexuality, I suspect a lot of these men firmly believe that -- because men are supposed to be the aggressors and rich, powerful men can be oblivious to just how much pressure their wealth and power can represent for a woman they are pursuing.
It's complicated and a desire for a nice simple solution in the name of justice tends to just lead to other injustices, not actual solutions.
If you didn't realize that you didn't have consent, sucks to be you, but you should still suffer the consequences.
But I am not really speaking to "What do we do after the fact?" I am speaking more to "How does culture change so you see fewer rapes to begin with? How does culture change so fewer rich, powerful men are oblivious to the fact that their wealth and power can be a form of pressure for a woman they are pursuing?"
I was raped at the age of 12. I have not been raped as an adult. I don't want to be raped ever again. I am not interested in fostering a culture that does a better job of throwing all the rapists in jail. I am interested in fostering a culture where people do a better job of negotiating consent so we don't have women feeling violated while the man who had sex with them is completely convinced she wanted it and she consented by failing to say no strongly enough.
Can you elaborate on that dynamic? Is it as simple as "women are drawn to men with money and power" which is what men think, or is there something more to it? How is it pressure?
And BTW you are unusually honest about sexual dynamics in a way that most women are not IMHO. Thanks for that. Nobody is going to stop in the moment and sign written consent forms, and a woman who happened to have a drink or two will dump a guy who says "oh, I can't because you had a drink and people say that make you unable to consent." It's just not that clear cut in practice.
Not the other poster, I assume they are taking about inherent power dynamics in the workplace. So not two random people at a bar, but let's say an employee and a boss, or a boss's friend. In hopes of maintaining the status quo with their boss, the employee might comply.
(I know HN is full of rebellious individuals who'd never acquiesce, but for a more commonplace example, think of happy hour functions where the boss buys everyone another round and there's the pressure to finish that shot.)
I don't know how to elaborate. I have been trying to come up with a clear explanation.
The best thing I can come up with is that somewhere I saw some video that said that white males are the only people in the US who seem to not know that when a cop stops you, you roll down your window and place your hands on the steering wheel at the 10 and 2 positions. Some white males will act like the cop is their friend and cops never see that from women and people of color.
If you have so much power that no one wants to offend you, you may not realize you are surrounded by yes men. You may have gotten to where you are in your career by being very aggressive and not readily accepting no for an answer. You may not recognize that doing the same thing in romance is actually harassment. To you, it may be a normal form of negotiating.
Pissing off a powerful man in your social circle can be very problematic. Most people don't want to do so, regardless of gender.
And I think that's a poor explanation, but it is the best I can come up with right this minute.
So, does it solve the problem if it became a rule that men in more powerful positions (but with no direct business relationship) should wait for a woman to pursue them? Or should people only ever date at the same power level? If the answer to the first is yes, wouldn't it help quite a bit if it became the norm for women to do the first move, or at least to so around half the times? There are cultures where this it the norm, but I can't comment on whether their dating life is 'healthier' or whether there is less sexual assault there. I reckon it would be an interesting, albeit very difficult to control for, social study.
How we get there, I don't know. But I doubt there is some easy answer here. If powerful men cannot ask, how do they weed out women who are pursuing them solely for their money?
Being rich and powerful does not make them invulnerable. It does not mean they have no Achilles heel.
I'm a fairly traditionally feminine woman who does not like initiating. I have figured out how to navigate traditional gender dynamics comfortably. If you are asking, then I have the power here. You have to meet my expectations to get a yes.
My perspective is very underrepresented and hard to talk about. It is fairly socially unacceptable for me to try to talk about certain things. This has left me with few opportunities to practice communicating effectively on those topics, which just about guarantees that I won't say it very well. Given that it isn't acceptable to say to begin with, saying it poorly tends to lead to drama.
I am not an expert in US law, but doesn't intent to commit a crime matters ?
Which is why there is a difference between murdering someone and taking actions that ultimately lead to someone death ?
In France (civil system, I know), we for example have "murder" and "violence that lead to death without intent to cause it" (and "involuntary homicide", etc)
Law is complicated stuff.
My understanding is the standard is in place to avoid giving all first time offenders a free pass and to also actively encourage people to look up laws pertinent to their lives. If it weren't in place, then willful ignorance would be in your best interest. Since it is in place, it is in your best interest to go find out what is and is not legal when, for example, starting a business.
We have a legal system in place for a reason. And if she claims rape and files a police report then it's not up to HR or you and me to go play detective
This theory falls apart with us being a society, however. We need to evaluate, think and talk about it because that's how we can grow as a society.
It's neither easy nor quick though, I expect this discussion to continue for the foreseeable future.
Firstly, I want to thank you for publicly sharing your opinion and bringing nuance to a complicated and difficult topic.
But secondly, how did we get to the point where we must first give out group identity credentials in order to be taken seriously in a discussion? Shouldn't the actual meat of what a person says hold greater weight than the group(s) that a person identifies with?
I've been noticing this trend a lot lately -- articles in, say, The Atlantic of the type of 'hold on, is this what feminism should be?' -- but always prefaced by the author first identifying as a woman, perhaps to insulate from criticism.
Please note that this is no way intended as a criticism of you. I find myself doing the exact same thing (prefacing comments with snippets of my bio) -- it just feels weird that 'progressivism' seems to have led to this, which doesn't feel much like 'progress' at all.
I am not really aware of what you are describing.
HN is less "social" than most forums. There are no avatars and the profile is completely free form and can be left completely blank. It is a very large forum, so I cannot assume that everyone recognizes me. It also is overwhelmingly male, so it is common for people to assume that anyone speaking here is male.
I often qualify my remarks here on certain subjects for those reasons. Long experience as a participant tells me that if I don't, someone will make a fool of themselves by accusing me of being a rapey bastard, as obviously only a rapist man would ever say X (or something along those lines). And that is a huge, pointless derail that I hate seeing.
As far as I can tell you're both on the same side that you share the experience that if one isn't (perceived) a member of the protected group they are at risk for being subject of virtue-shaming or ad-hominem attack for debating progressive ideals.
I would like to think that years of study and introspective contemplation have helped me craft an evenhanded and well thought out position on certain subjects.
My observation is that most people, regardless of which "side" they are on, somewhat ham-handedly speak to only the concerns of their side. This very often comes across as dismissive of the concerns of the other side, even when that isn't intended.
So, if someone wants to speak to difficult subjects, I think good advice is to consider how things impact all parties, not just their own side, and work at considering details like context and how that makes your message look. If you barge into a discussion of rape and all you say is (or sounds like) "what about da menz!", well, yeah, that will go badly.
Like take the charge of victim blaming -- on the one hand, we can all probably agree that victims deserve sympathy and a platform to air their grievances as well as our thoughtful consideration.
Yet it seems that of we as a society offer unconditional trust to anyone who claims to have been a victim, this will eventually encourage all sorts of mischief. Not every person who 'seems' like a victim is in fact one, and not everyone who has been victimized can or will lay public claim to that status.
In the limit, this confusion about who is allowed to say what about whom can actually lead to the behavior you referenced above -- if men have internalized the idea that men are only allowed to comment or judge men, but not other groups, then the only possible response is for men to speak about their own group interests.
Sigh. This is perhaps a can of worms I shouldn't open. But here goes:
I was sexually abused as a child. So, in my youth, I very much had the mental model that men are predators and women are prey. It took me a long, long time to sort that out. I think that mental model is shared by quite a lot of people, often without realizing it.
So, if you have internalized this idea that all sex involves a victim and that the woman is probably the victim, well, that explains a lot of the dynamics of discussion that we see, where people implicitly assume that if anything goes wrong in a heterosexual encounter, clearly the man is the perp and the woman is the victim.
I think a lot of people cannot imagine women as having any kind of real power. And therein lies a real huge problem in these discussions, because if you suggest anything women can do differently, you are bad, evil and wrong. Or if you suggest women aren't all paragons of virtue and many would equally take advantage if given the opportunity, this just doesn't sit well with a lot of people.
Someone here mentioned intersectionality, a term I only know from an incredibly toxic environment full of SJWs who claim to want a better world, but mostly crapped all over me rather than being helpful with my problems and also very much are fine with the Lord of the Flies pecking order that is at the root of a lot of social problems. They don't really want to be rid of it. They just want to be at the top doing the shitting, rather than at the bottom getting shat upon.
So if that is your approach, well, duh, the well off white males currently in power aren't going to go along with your plans to make them the acceptable social toilet that everyone gets to crap all over. And when they resist becoming the new victim of our crappy social order, they get accused of all kinds of evil for clinging to the privilege they currently have.
The problems we currently have cannot be resolved by seeking revenge at the societal level. This is an incredibly hard thing to discuss, for a long list of reasons. But the angry, vengeful approach that so many women take helps entrench the problem. It doesn't resolve it.
I don't want revenge. I want constructive change that overall reduces how much people get victimized.
I have been speaking about subjects like rape and women's issues and female empowerment for a long time. It's just a hard, hard subject to have a good discussion on.
I think this one is going incredibly well -- or was. Perhaps this comment will be a thing I very much regret. But it is a thing we eventually need to discuss in the world, and Hacker News has turned out to be the least worst place for me to try to make constructive points on such subjects.
(crosses fingers, hits reply)
Unless you are talking about homosexuality. Then you will see a lot of women trying to lecture you. Damn bastard you.
What I'm worried about though is the risk of going past 'we should listen to person from group X when they talk about group X's experience', to the the much stronger claim that 'for all persons P outside of group X, P have nothing valid to say about group X'.
That would be to confuse ends for means, and to discard the attempt to find universal truths and merely settle for truths that are relative to a person's group identities.
In other words, this is thought of as a feature, not a bug.
We can still argue based on merit but I find it interesting to hear the perspective specifically from a woman.
I am a man fyi
I'm glad she said she's a woman first up, it made me much more interested in what she had to say in response.
I would take what males said seriously. But a group of males discussing rape etc isn't quite... Anyway - is this hard to understand? Women have a 'different' point of view on the subject, and on a mostly-male site like this, it's useful to know. I'm puzzled by your confusion. Maybe you are female; then it would be easier to understand what you say. I wish you had said up front :-) It just helps understand where people are coming from, their perspective. A man writing about what feminism should be has a different effect to a woman doing it, and naturally/rightly so.
Thank you for stating this idea so perfectly.
It (was) fairly okay in San Francisco. There was even a hubbub about how nudist men were taking over a shiny new parklet a few years back. The city passed an ordinance, but I don't think any of them were too worried about getting raped.
(Note: You moved the goalpost from "safe from rape" to "is it okay".)
I noticed that too. Maybe the correct point to make is this: how is wandering the streets (almost) naked, or with the most provocative choice of clothing one could make, not considered in itself sexual harassment?
> Mariah asked him to come to her room to move some luggage; when he got there, she was allegedly wearing a see-through negligee that was open
So, you might not find it in the same article, but if you want to do the research you can find out the answer to this question.
And there are a lot of answers. Here's on aspect: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/07/16/untested-rape...
For the victim it’s particularly difficult as she will generally get branded a slut by the defense. On cross examination, the defense attorney can pretty easily rip the victim up.
Microsoft’s position is unconscionable in my opinion. This wasn’t a frivolous accusation — the victim made a police report and got a rape kit done. The intern is an at-will hire... he could be fired for any reason or no reason. Microsoft HR would probably had fired him if he stole her purse, but instead forced this woman to work in proximity to her rapist and hires the guy. Give me a break.
Microsoft HR would certainly NOT have done anything if she ACCUSED him of stealing her purse with no other evidence.
And, your way of thinking is not good for the victim, either. If I'm Microsoft HR following your advice, I will simply fire BOTH and now I can wash my hands of the problem.
The stereotypical case of rape would involve two people who know each other, may have had a prior intimate relationship, and then did something behind closed doors with no witnesses. One person will claim it was consensual sex or, failing that, that they had a reasonable yet mistaken belief that it was consensual sex. The other person will claim it was non-consensual sex, and that the first person did not have a reasonable believe that consent was present.
What are the police meant to do with that? Both parties agree that they were together, in the room, behind closed doors, and had sex; the disagreement hinges over extremely specific details about what was said and how it was interpreted. Classic police tools (checking alibis, interviewing witnesses, pulling security camera footage to track someone's movements, speculating about motives, following money, running DNA tests, checking forensics) are all totally useless here.
It's possible the justice system is failing to bring charges in cases where there is a strong chance of proving a crime occurred beyond reasonable doubt, but the nature of rape makes most cases extremely hard to prove, as the linked example makes clear. Here:
"The [woman's] colleagues took her out for drinks [...] after a night of drinking, she crashed with a male intern and his friend who lived in a group house nearby. She fell asleep in the basement [...] but during the night [...] the male intern [...] “forcibly penetrated her while she was sleeping”."
That's her story and I have no reason to think it's false. But here's the thing: All the guy has to do is say is something like "oh, I went down to check on her, she was awake, we chatted a bit, she seemed sober, we flirted, I propositioned her, she said sure, we had sex, I gave her a kiss, and left her to sleep" (or some variation of that; basically anything that expresses a reason why a reasonable person in his shoes would have believed she was consenting). And here's the thing: His story doesn't need to be true; it just need to be possibly true, because a conviction would require proving it was untrue beyond reasonable doubt. As long as the male intern says something that implies he had a reasonable belief in consent, and there's no third party witnesses willing to testify to undermine his claims, the justice system is powerless. And rightly so. (If he was dumb enough to claim they hadn't had sex at all, and the rape kit proved otherwise, then he'd be in trouble, of course. The rape cases that the justice system can deal with are the ones that hinge on whether or not someone was in the room, or whether or not intercourse took place. Ie, the rare easy ones.)
> Do people believe that the standard of evidence for Police is too high but isn't politically possible to change?
Not at all. It's good that the justice system works by requiring crimes to be proven to a jury of one's peers beyond reasonable doubt, and that shouldn't change.
> If someone files a police complain but that complaint is dismissed for lack of evidence, how exactly should Microsoft evaluate that claim?
Microsoft should evaluate the claim at face value. What the police do is entirely separate. If one intern is convicted (and only then) Microsoft can decide if they want to hire a rapist. Until then, they can look at the fact that two of their interns have had an extremely unpleasant encounter. Deciding to hire both, and then assigning them to the same team is clearly the wrong solution, whatever did (or didn't) happen that night.
Couldn't Microsoft also get into trouble by hiring just one of them (the other one could have a good case for being treated unfairly)? And what if they don't have 2 separate teams which need new members? Should they create a new team just to make sure they don't heart anybody's feelings?
> Couldn't Microsoft also get into trouble by hiring just one of them (the other one could have a good case for being treated unfairly)?
MS has no obligation to hire any interns, and ultimately they have to make a judgement call about the interns honesty, integrity, and suitability. If you think one of your interns is a liar or a rapist (or even just lazy or incompetent!), then you have an obligation not to hire them (and no, that doesn't open you up to legal risk). If you have two interns, and you can't figure out which one is the liar (or rapist), the obvious choice would be to hire neither.
The situation is unfair to MS, and to at least one (and maybe both) of the interns, but even so, hiring them both and then putting them on the same team seems like the worst possible way to handle it. How could the team possibly function given that history, regardless of who's telling the truth?
The other thing about tech companies is that it would be interesting to compare their statistics of sexual harassment to other industries. Putting at the front page some stories about sexual harassment don't mean anything. Microsoft has 125,000 employees, google 75,000, apple 125,000, etc. At this scale, and unless they have a special hiring technique that enables to spot criminal behavior that I am not aware of, they are bound to hire some future criminals: rapists, thieves, stalkers, etc. It's just statistically impossible for it not to happen. Is there any evidence that there is more sexual harassment in the tech industry than other industries?
It really sounds crazy, but I can understand it. I was sexually assaulted by my boss (and I am a male and so was my boss) and couldn't understand my wife's anger when I said I'd still be working for him. Luckily I came to understand how poor a decision that would have been and I quit.
I understand not shifting employee job functions based on an unproven accusation. If there's a restraining order in place, it's not her problem. It's his. He's restrained. He has to go to his HR rep and say "I can't legally work next to this person, what happens?"
That's only one side of the story, though.
It doesn't say if the victim here was drunk, but some level of intoxication seems likely given the nature of the crime. This doesn't excuse anything.
I wonder how many of these crimes would be prevented if steps were taken to limit excessive drinking. I don't know how this would actually be implemented, or if companies or universities already do have a policy about alcohol and social events.
She should have called the nearest city's police. If there was proof of a rape from her hospital visit they probably would have charged the guy.
On a side note it absolutely flabbergasts me that Microsoft offered a job to the alleged rapist! Surely it can't be that hard for them to find good employees.
Microsoft lost a case a few years ago when a female manager made up allegation to get a male employee fired. One of the employees she tried to convince to lie testified. That case may have influenced their decision to extend an offer.
On second thought, more likely that companies just don't care about a single allegation.
>, the male intern sexually assaulted her
When you finish the thought from the author, it's less clunky. Its saying "her lawyer wrote that during the night the male intern sexually assaulted her".