Comment by sizzle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sizzle | Hacker News Reader

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"A clear, uniform, globally inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct safely and anonymously"

Can anyone help me understand the rationale behind the anonymous part, with respect to due process and how the framework for anonymous accusations can be abused by bad actors?

Edit- I have a question about the anonymous nature of reporting to HR, with respect to due process for the accuser and accused, maybe some of you can shed light on how you've seen it work in your experiences.

I've heard stories in the past, with details I'm not privy to, where coworkers were let go based on anonymous HR sexual misconduct allegations. I really hope that due process is involved for the accused and not just a "guilty until proven innocent" situation. What I mean is that evidence by the accuser is judged along the lines of probable cause that our police force uses to arrest or judges use to prosecute e.g. inappropriate advances caught on tape, unwanted email/text/chat messages in line with allegations, eye witness statements corroborated by fellow co-worker, etc.

There are a lot of introverted, socially awkward personality types in technical roles (on the spectrum?) with traits that can be perceived incorrectly, even negatively by neurotypical individuals and I fear the power of anonymous, "guilty until proven innocent" allegations standard that HR might start using to police the accused and trample on their right to due process since employment is at-will and you can be terminated for any reason, at any time, but in this situation you are ineligible for unemployment if it's recorded as misconduct.

Maybe they're referencing something like Callisto (YC Nonprofit W18):

"Founders will be able to use Callisto to securely store the identities of perpetrators of sexual coercion and assault. These identities will be encrypted in a way that not even the Callisto team can view. If multiple founders name the same perpetrator, they will be referred to an attorney who can then decrypt the founder’s contact info and reach out to provide them with free advice on their options for coming forward, including the option to share information with other victims of the same perpetrator." Source: https://blog.ycombinator.com/survey-of-yc-female-founders-on...

It's hard to imagine something more illegal than this when it comes to personal data protection.

Thank you for offering this. This is far more helpful than a truly anonymous system.

> Can anyone help me understand the rationale behind the anonymous part…

In general, 21% of workers who report misconduct suffer from retribution (source: National Business Ethics Survey).

An estimated 75% of workplace harassment victims experience retaliation when they speak up (source: US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission government agency).

That 75% number is not from the EEOC study. It is something the EEOC study cited. The original is from:

Lilia M. Cortina & Vicki J. Magley, Raising Voice, Risking Retaliation: Events Following Interpersonal Mistreatment in the Workplace, 8:4 J. OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH PSYCHOL. 247, 255 (2003).

I can't make sense of these numbers. Can you report misconduct without speaking up? Or is there a lot of retaliation that doesn't induce any suffering, or...?

"speaking up" means "not staying silent about harassment."

I have trouble imagining truly complete anonymity being helpful. This is an invitation to abuse the system. Abuse could result from personal conflicts and office politics, or even people who wish to undermine the system itself by entering bad data.

The point of an anonymous system is to encourage people to speak up without a first-mover problem, because in every case of ongoing sexual harassment there is never just 1 victim - it's always a pattern of behavior.

Someone receiving exactly 1 report is probably not a problem. Someone who accumulates reports continuously as team members change probably is.

> Someone who accumulates reports continuously as team members change probably is.

No. If the system is truly anonymous, then people outside the team can submit reports. Continuous accumulation would not indicate there is probably a problem with the accused, given the motive and opportunities for abuse of the reporting system.

Elsewhere in this thread the difference between anonymous and private is discussed, along with semi-anonymizing strategies for achieving privacy protection, which I believe would be helpful for the outcome you describe.

This is a good point. What about a person who has a pattern of accusing multiple people over time? If each of the accused individuals are all not accused by others, would this undermine the accusers credibility?

I wish this was hypothetical, but I once worked with a person that had 3 individuals over 2 years fired for this. Eventually they went too far and HR had to come to grips with an obvious mental illness being the root cause. This person was a great engineer and a good friend, which made it even harder for me and others to admit to ourselves the delusional nature of the claims.

> in every case of ongoing sexual harassment there is never just 1 victim - it's always a pattern of behavior.

citation please

That's straight up hyperbole, and probably is totally false. But it's unprovable anyway.

I'm genuinely confused by the apparently incredulousness at the idea that workplace sexual harassment is generally going to perpetrated (at it's roughly ~30% incidence rate) by "everyone" and not "a small but relatively powerful group of people who are generally not discovered".

This was ultimately the pattern at Uber, it was the pattern at Fox News, it was the pattern in Hollywood.

Total anonymity for accusers is indeed a concerning policy, but partial anonymity (i.e. from one's own team) isn't unreasonable. It ought to be possible to properly investigate misconduct allegations while minimizing the potential for gossip and recriminations.

I think that due process should include the right to face your accuser.

In the USA, that right applies to criminal prosecution but not civil cases.

In the courts, yes, but in an office?

EDIT: I should add that I am 100% for eliminating sexual harassment from the workplace (and in life), but unfortunately there's nothing that forces a company to give employees due process. I would guess that in most cases, even the appearance of inpropriety is enough to warrant termination for at-will employees.

[re: claim that due process includes the right to confront accuser]

> In the courts, yes

In the US, this is only true in criminal courts. Even when it reaches beyond company process to the courts, sexual harassment is a civil matter.

What if the facts can be independently verified ?(existence of material proof or witnesses etc)

I imagine the right process would be to receive a claim and investigate it. The initial report doesn’t need to pinned to a specific employee, and it can even be a bystander that way. If enough evidence rise from the investigation, outing the reporter doesn’t bring much to the table.

You’re right that it’s more tricky when it’s a “he says she says” situation, those would warrant more direct confrontation I guess ?

It’s not a criminal trial.

Meaning that people shouldn’t be treated fairly if prison time is not on the table?

There are principles that are only binding to the government, but worth following outside of the courtroom in a civilized society. Innocent until proven guilty is one of them.

> I really hope that due process is involved

Outside of civil service jobs, in the US there are no “due process” rights in employment decisions; what process is due is a matter of employment contract (which for non-unionized rank-and-file, and even non-executive management, employees usually means no process is due, because of “at-will” employment.)

Given that, and given that employers are legally bound to prevent retribution against reporters, anonymity for reporters is strongly incentivized.

Due process would certainly be nice when it comes to letting people go, but introducing it makes it much more difficult for a company to move quickly and adjust to market conditions. If a company faces lawsuits every time it makes any decison, it’ll be far more difficult to make any decison and will make that company far less dynamic. Sometimes that’s worth it, but there are cons to introducing due process too.

It's probably meant to alleviate fear of retribution.

I guess you missed the part of the question referring to due process

Maybe they mean privately, not anonymously?

This worry is unfounded.

Harassment is rarely the case of a single incident. Instead, people who harass other usually have a long history of harassing lots of people.

An anonymous complaint could be used not to determine guilt, but instead to trigger an investigation.

And if the person is guilty, then the investigation will almost certainly have a very easy time finding somebody, likely many, who will go on record with their incident of harassment.

And if they are innocent? That investigation will come with an impact to the accused. A serious one.

If they are innocent then nothing will happen to them as the investigation won't find anything.

That's how it should work. If someone gets accused of something, there should be an investigation. And if they did something wrong it will be outstanding obvious. If they didn't, then they won't find anything.

It is ridiculous to complain about an investigation, which should be the entire goal. To investigate and figure out what happened.

> If someone gets accused of something, there should be an investigation. And if they did something wrong it will be outstanding obvious. If they didn't, then they won't find anything.

Reading this genuinely frightens me.

Our legal system, with due process and "beyond reasonable doubt" and all the rest, regularly convicts people who are later found to be innocent. And, of course, regularly acquits people who are later found to have been clearly guilty. Even in countries with fewer complaints of bias and bad faith than the US, miscarriages of justice are not exceptional.

And here's this reply, suggesting that HR departments will simply get it right all the time. We're talking about people not trained in investigating anything, operating with minimal oversight under rules that have probably never been scrutinized, who in almost every case will face biases and incentives that would recuse any judge and strike any juror.

Discovering the truth is genuinely hard. If someone did something wrong, it will be "outstanding obvious"? What guarantees us a world so convenient and just that no one ever harasses in private and leaves only "he said, she said"? If someone did nothing wrong, investigations will find nothing? How have we gotten free from DARVO and coordinated dishonesty and all the other things that produce wrongful convictions (quite often of victims, on their attacker's word) in actual courts?

The certainty that every investigation will react a decisive conclusion, that official decisions are automatically trustworthy, that people who are found innocent are never harmed by public knowledge that they've been investigated. It's a display of faith in authority (any authority) that I truly don't understand - are people extending this same sort of blind confidence when police forces, churches, and politicians investigate themselves?

> HR departments will simply get it right all the time.

They weren't getting it right when they were letting harrassers off the hook.

It's not about truth or justice. It's about corporation trying to get rid of pesky humans doing human things. Harrassing, accusing. Until recently sweeping things under the rug was the best way to deal with it. Winds changed. Now it's cheaper to kick out men even if they possibly did nothing.

Woman reporting harrasment was a problem and was silenced or fired. Now man getting accused is the problem, gets aame treatment as women got earlier because now it's more efficient to get rid of him.

Perfect justice is never efficient.

Part of this is due to incentives. Police and elected officials have an incentive to appear tough on crime.

Theres no particular reason a priori, to assume that HR has the same incentives. In fact if anything, the current state of affairs may imply the opposite.

They do: risk of lawsuit. Risk of the PR hit of a Twitter mob descending on the company.

There's a risk of lawsuit from either side though (sexual harrassment/workplace safety vs wrongful termination).

This seems to be an argument against investigating anything ever.

What I am saying is that if someone is genuinely harassing other people, then there will be lots of complaints.

If there is one complaint, then it will be easy to find a dozen of them.

And what I am saying is, a company should only punish someone if they find a dozen of them.

It is not he said she said. It is instead he said and a dozen people said otherwise.

This is what the investigation is for. I am saying that there is nothing wrong with a company punishing the outstandingly obvious cases, which is almost all cases, and then giving the benefit of the doubt to the rest of them.

IE, nobody should ever be punished for a single anonymous complaint. Instead that single anonymous complaint should be used to talk with other people, and to determine if there are instead a dozen of them.

Let the edge cases go unpunished, and target the obvious harrassers, which is almost all of them.

Let's give a similar example. Imagine someone was going into meetings and just yelling slurs at other employees. And they did this mutiple times. Do we need to police to be called to fire this guy? No. We don't.

Do we have to worry about false accusations of this guy yelling slurs at meetings? No. We don't. There will be a dozen people who will easily be able to verify that yes this guy did this thing, mutiple times, and there is no danger in firing him.

And you should also notice that this isn't necessarily even illegal, therefore it makes no sense to call the police.

The problem here, in this naive view, is how you define an "investigation." The moment that "investigation" goes public around the topic of sexual harassment (or worse), the accused is done. That's the real world. I've seen it, several times over. That's important. You shouldn't have the power to significantly wreck someone's life by just making an accusation. There needs to be as much protection for the accused as there is for the accuser.

> If they are innocent then nothing will happen to them as the investigation won't find anything

This is just willfully ignorant. Look at Steven Galloway, or Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim at McGill. Investigation revealed that neither had credible claims of harassment against them. Both of them had irreparable damage done to their careers - the former pushed to the brink of suicide.

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