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Comment by bufferoverflow | Hacker News Reader

What if I allege you raped me?

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.

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Due process is what’s required to take away someone’s liberty, not to deny a job. When my boss asks me “hey, what do you think of Jim?” I can say “we can’t hire him, he was a huge asshole to everyone in school and I think he’s untrustworthy.” I can do that, and we’ll not hire Jim, and I won’t even have to submit a notarized official statement.

You can say that, but if he finds out, you can get sued for defamation. That's why most companies, when you ask for a reference, will not say anything beyond your dates of employment and maybe the names of the projects you were working on.

In reality, the majority of destructive rumors take the form of "Bob was impossible to work with", not "Bob sexually assaulted Avery". Meanwhile: a bogus accusation of rape is far more actionable than a bogus accusation of being an asshole; if you actually worked with Bob at all, you probably can't be sued for that at all, since things that can be construed as opinions cannot be the basis of a valid defamation claim. Unlike sexual assault, which, as a crime, is probably defamatory per se.

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.

The companies can hire whoever they want however they want within the law. They certainly could not hire this bloke.

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.

Slander - "Some statements such as an untrue accusation of having committed a crime, having a loathsome disease, or being unable to perform one's occupation are treated as slander per se since the harm and malice are obvious,"

https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/slander

To be slander it would have to be provably false, not to simply be something that they can't prove to be true.

When a suspect is arrested for murder, the newspaper uses the words "suspect" and "alleged" in order to avoid slander lawsuits.

Be careful: at the moment, making a rape allegation can make you unemployable.

http://variety.com/2017/film/news/ashley-judd-mira-sorvino-w...

And that's wrong.

Making a rape allegation can make you unemployable 20 years in the past? I don’t think causality works this way.

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?

Apparently not in tech though. All the recent sexual harassment accusers are employed

This ignores the myriad ways that rape victims are further traumatized by the very due process you're demanding they subject themselves to (note: "subject themselves to", not "avail themselves of"): police, prosecutors, and defense counsel all casting various kinds of doubt on her version of events; having to bare a profoundly vulnerable experience to the world; being accused by looky-lous, her own acquaintances, "friends", and family, and people with all kinds of agendas of having made it up in the first place.

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.

Playing devils advocate:

Why should I hire anyone who is accused of rape when I do my background check? Why should anyone else hire such people?

Because anybody can accuse anyone of anything.

Look: aperrien raped my sister today.

Why should anybody hire you or work for you now?

False rape accusations are a crime. Specious examples of false accusations are a cheap debating tactic. Literally, that is a textbook straw-man.

Yeah, but that's what we're discussing. How do you tell if the allegation is true?

I propose due process, evidence, trials.

What do you propose?

> 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.

What does that mean specifically? Women can already press charges when they accuse someone. The problem is, many women don't. I see no evidence of women not being allowed to press charges on a mass scale.

I understand it's a traumatic experience, but so is all of violent crimes.

> What does that mean specifically?

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.

> I see no evidence of women not being allowed to press charges on a mass scale.

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.

I can accuse someone of being an asshole, and that we shouldn't hire him because of that.

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...

Nobody is freaking out about anything. We're talking about due process. Being an asshole isn't a crime, rape is a pretty bad one.

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.

But my point is that I can already take away someone's due process.

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!".

> Look: aperrien raped my sister today.

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.

Ok, the system isn't perfect, for sure, but who cares about someone's doubt, when you have the evidence?

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.

As often as not — more often than not — her state of intoxication is somehow construed as a mitigating factor. "How do we know she didn't consent, but couldn't remember, because she was so drunk?"

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?

This shows a misunderstanding of the us legal system. You or I don't press criminal charges, a DA does. We can report a crimes, this girl did, the rest is up to the state.

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.

Would you really do that? Are you that evil of a person?

And if the proper process for effectively addressing rape on a legal level is not in place yet, you suggest just to do nothing about it on any other level, great.

What specific legal improvements are you proposing?

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