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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Personal opinion - the lack of a "innocent until proven guilty" judicial system when it comes to sexual harassment claims is what has caused much of the fear of women. Colleges, businesses, and online communities almost always simply believe the victim, and even if a trial should occur and the accused is vindicated, the accused has already been fired, expelled, or crucified by public opinion. The records of the accusations remain online forever, with little or no followup.

Innocent until proven guilty with a trial by peers. We enshrine these in our public justice system; it needs to be spread to private companies as well.

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Really, employers, universities, etc. should not even be involved in these kinds of claims. They are not competent to investigate them.

If a crime has been committed, there is a judicial system that can and will deal with that, with established standards regarding presumption of innocence and burden of proof.

To be fair, there are a number of behaviors which create negative environments for men/women/minorities/majorities which are not against the law. I personally have no problems with a company/college having higher standards than "it's against the law" - they simply need to ensure that investigations into those broken standards don't turn into witch hunts.

> I personally have no problems with a company/college having higher standards than "it's against the law" - they simply need to ensure that investigations into those broken standards don't turn into witch hunts.

What is missing is a suggestion for how you could avoid that. If business and institution are free to handle these things as they please, which they generally would be granted under labor law and free speech, there are those that are going to disagree with you and there are those that are going to be outright bad at it. Just like they are at handling a lot of other things.

If sexual harassment is as important as not being deemed "a team player" at a company or the right of colleges to design their own admissions process (sometimes to the detriment of Asian students) we can expect people to be mistreated, at the least subjectively so, for this as well.

You can certainly can judge those involved, but I think it is hard to make a case against the problem as such. Because if you have e.g. extensive rights for companies and extensive free speech, there will be downsides as society changes. But that is an expected part of the process, unless you want to change the process and thereby labor law and the rights of colleges or introduce something like the right to be forgotten.

Also, sexual harassment laws differ from state to state. It would make sense for an organization operating in multiple states to adopt a universal policy for the entire organization.

Isn't the topic at hand how businesses should handle the balance between keeping harassment out of the workplace, but not, in the name of that cause, overzealously punishing people who are implicated as having harassed somebody? Surely you're not suggesting that 100% of such cases fall into either: A. Crimes the victims of which should go to the police with. or B. So harmless that no business should ever take any action on it.

I would probably agree with an argument, if you were to make it, that the punishments in some of these cases that are driven by the reaction of larger social groups are too quick and too harsh. However, it sounds to me like you're making a much more extreme case that I have to disagree with.

With such disproportionately high rates of domestic abuse in law enforcement professions, you really can't say they are competent to investigate them either. So whose responsibility is it?

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Police-domestic-viole...

> Colleges, businesses, and online communities almost always simply believe the victim, and even if a trial should occur and the accused is vindicated, the accused has already been fired, expelled, or crucified by public opinion.

Colleges don't almost always simply believe the victim. It's quite the opposite: “Alarmingly, many universities are compounding this trauma by failing to support survivors and, in some cases, actively seeking to silence them.” [1]

Businesses don't almost always simply believe the victim. In fact, "often employees fear that human resources will help the company lash out at the accuser rather than punish the accused." [2]

Online communities don't almost always simply believe the victim. Take Twitter for example and how a chunk of that online community turned against Christine Blasey Ford. [3]

In the last case involving the accuser and the accused, the accuser had to move several times, hired her own private security detail, and continued to receive death threats [4], all the while the accused got the promotion of a lifetime. Hardly the case of — as you put it — "the accused is vindicated, the accused has already been fired, expelled, or crucified by public opinion."

I know that what you said is personal opinion, but as far as the data supporting that opinion, I just didn't find it.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/feb/27/unive... 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/business/sexual-harassmen... 3: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/conservative-rea... 4: https://www.npr.org/2018/11/08/665407589/kavanaugh-accuser-c...

Human Resources does not exist to protect the employees. They exist to protect the company from employees. So victims are right to fear HR.

In a way it is like Game of Thrones. If you take something to HR, you better win. And sometimes both of you lose.

We never really had "innocent until proven guilty" in these circumstances. Legally sure, but courts have little involvement even now.

Until recently, the women/victim side was assumed guilty... still are in many places/circumstances.

We're leaving judge and jury duty to the public, social media, old media, individuals and (above all) corporate policy. None of these operate on a presumption of innocence.

> We never really had "innocent until proven guilty" in these circumstances. Legally sure, but courts have little involvement even now.

> Until recently, the women/victim side was assumed guilty... still are in many places/circumstances.

The victim being "assumed guilty" is just an awkward phrasing of "innocent until proven guilty" for the perpetrator. What do you see as the difference?

I see the difference in the way the victim and perpetrator are treated.

If someone robs your house and you see them running away, television strapped to your back, you call the police and give testemony. You say what you saw and the jury judges on the merits of the case.

What doesn't happen, in a robbery, is the defense team lining up a slew of witnesses talking about all the times you left your house unlocked, all the times you invited other suspicious people over, all the times you sold something on Craigslist and all the times you Googled the price of the TV that got stolen. The defence doesn't use this testemony to show that you really wanted to give your TV away, and it wasn't actually stolen, and even if it was, weren't you sorta asking for it anyway?

I meant that when word gets out, someone is assumed guilty and socially sanctioned in some way.. at least. Previously it was generally the "young lady in question," as a matter of cultural prudence.

I'm not saying that prejudice is right, it's just.. evidently hard to shake.

In every case where it was the victim's word against the accused the court almost always used to side with whoever has more power in society.

White woman accuses black man -> accused is guilty.

rich woman accuses poor man -> accused is guilty

black woman accuses white man ->accused is not guilty

poor woman accuses rich man -> accused is not guilty

It's still that way, sometimes. The difference is now is that "who has more power" suddenly varies a ton based on who's making the decision and the political optics of the situation. So some people on wall street (statistically richer and whiter than average) are scared (rationally or not, you decide) that they're now potentially vulnerable to false accusation when they were previously insulated to some degree by being (mostly) rich and white.

I'm not a lawyer and not playing one here.

In any case, it is my understanding that 'innocent until proven guilty' is part of criminal law. In other kinds of law the burden of proof is lower.

Of course these claims have to be investigated carefully. But I think it is wrong to try to copy elements of criminal procedures to civil matters.

It is important to strike a sensible balance. We cannot have a situation where women would always lose because of lack of hard evidence.

"...would always lose"

Really? I think the reasons for the requirements of evidence are justified in civil matters just as they are in criminal.

We cannot have a situation where men always have no defence because of a lack of requirement of evidence.

At least where I live (The Netherlands) for civil matters it is, as far as I know, about which story the judge finds most plausible.

In a criminal case, if the defendant remains silent then it is up to the prosecution to present enough evidence.

In a civil case, any argument made by the plaintiff that is not rejected or corrected can be accepted as true.

Of course, legal systems vary, but in general there is no right to remain silent during a civil case.

Testimony of lived experiences is evidence. It's enough to convict.

When you serve jury duty and the case involves domestic violence, you are explicitly reminded of this because most people will assume it is not.

Still, we end up with cases like Brock Turner where he does get convicted not with the victim's testimony but a mountain of corroborating evidence and national media scrutiny. And then receives what is essentially a non-punishment.

> Still, we end up with cases like Brock Turner where he does get convicted not with the victim's testimony but a mountain of corroborating evidence and national media scrutiny.

How can we know what specific pieces of evidence led to his conviction? I would assume the jury took into account the victim's testimony and the testimony of the onlookers who stopped him. What makes you say he was "convicted not with the victim's testimony but a mountain of corroborating evidence and national media scrutiny"?

Of course judicial systems vary with countries, but I'm not aware of a jurisdiction where only the word of the victim is enough to convict somebody (who denies the act).

But maybe there are such places.

This is possible in the US. Imagine someone rapes a nun, and she testifies to it. She identifies the defendant, and in his testimony he denies it. If the jury finds her testimony more credible — to the extent that there is not a reasonable doubt as to his guilt — they can convict him.

Of course, it helps if there is corroborating evidence, but there is no rule that says one cannot be convicted (in the US) based on a victim's testimony alone. It just doesn't happen often because usually there is some sort of corroborating evidence of a crime, and because it's hard to eliminate all reasonable doubt without any.

Maybe you can point to a case where literally the only evidence was the story of the victim?

(I would be really scared to live in such a country, that strikes me a a recipe for disaster)

Sorry, it's been a long time since I was a lawyer, and I didn't do criminal cases!

So, it is no different than for any other sort of accusation lacking corroborating evidence?

Is there evidence that this is more likely in sexual assault cases than others? Your post here [1] (and the post you are replying to) seem to suggest that it is actually less likely in these cases.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18590977

I think all cases that are based only/mostly on a victim's statement are very difficult to prove. In my other comment, I was pointing out that sex-based cases are more likely to be based mostly on a victim's statement than other cases.

Indeed - there seems to be an absence of empirical evidence for any more specific claim than that such claims are difficult to prove.

Evidence is evidence. Witness testimony is evidence, photographs are evidence, video is evidence, dna is evidence. All evidence has credibility, which can be challenged.

Every case is different: witness testimony can be far more credible than photo evidence, dna evidence can be less credible than video evidence.

There is — as far as I know — no legal system in the world that measures the validity of a case based on the amount or type of evidence. You can absolutely be convicted on witness testimony alone in the US. That’s very unlikely but entirely possible under the law.

There's a weird double standard in crime in the USA (probably elsewhere), the conviction rate is greater than 85-90 percent for most crimes except sexual assault/rape, where it's closer to 50%, and the lack of whatever you want to call it leads to less people reporting rape/sexual assault, less investigation, all the way to incarceration, so people might feel that there is an inherent bias in results of the criminal system already, part of it is the victim is put on trial in court and public in a way that discourages participation in the system.

This is probably because for most crimes, it suffices to establish that (1) the act of the crime occurred and (2) the defendant is the one who carried out this act.

In many types of sex crime cases, the prosecution must also prove that (3) the behavior engaged in by the parties was not consensual.

People do not generally consensually enagege in battery, theft, or murder. People consensually engage in sexual activities all the time. Also, sexual activities often have no third-party witnesses, which makes proof more difficult.

The judicial “beyond reasonable doubt” process is far from perfect, it has many shortcomings and is only suitable for the justice system because we’ve decided that it’s much better for someone guilty to walk free than for someone innocent to be incorrectly punished. This doesn’t work in smaller environments, like an office, because if the guilty walks free then the innocent person — the victim — suffers directly by their continued and unavoidable presence in their life.

I have served on a jury in a sexual assault trial and after what I’ve seen of the process first hand I would rather work for a company that doesn’t roleplay as the judicial system and instead believes the victim and uses the preponderance of evidence approach for determining guilt.

Most people guilty of sexual assault (in the literal sense not the legal sense) will never face any legal consequences because of how the judicial system works: I would never want to work in an office where the same was true.

If you flip this statement, you find yourself in a similarly bad situation: if you always assume the perpetrator is innocent, the victim is now in a world of hurt until / if they can get a conviction. Unfortunately a lot of times for various reasons (many to do with the psychology of being a _person_, e.g. shame / no report, shock / slow to report) it devolves into "he said she said" because there's no physical evidence anymore << even if multiple people have stories about the same offender.

The result is that women live in a state of _perpetual fear of men_. And that's current state.

^ That's not even to mention that women are disproportionately likely to be assaulted / hurt by men than the other way around.

I'm not saying _presuming guilt_ is good. But that's not what happens, and your statement is a bit misleading. When you mention "firing/expelling/crucifying" you must remember these are usually done with pretty thorough investigation / good reason to believe the victim; there are far and away more cases of offenders getting away with their misdeeds.

> The result is that women live in a state of _perpetual fear of men_. And that's current state.

Hyperbole does not help at all, and this statement is several levels beyond hyperbole. A bit of nuance, please.

It's not hyperbole. Some easy ways to check IRL: Do the women in your life not check their routes when walking when it's dark out? Do the men?

Do women try to bow out gracefully from relationships even if the onus shouldn't be on them, sometimes from fear of men potentially harming them? Do men do this at all?

Do you tell your daughter to watch out for predators before college? Do you tell your son the same thing, or different? Which one are you more worried for? Do you tell your daughter to stop being vigilant in <any scenario> because creeps aren't a threat?

Men do fear dark alleys yes, where did you get the idea that they don't? Stranger rape is exceptionally rare. Rapes are usually by people who the victim already knows. Being mugged by some drug abuser on the other hand is a genderless crime and a fair bit more common.

Do women try to bow out gracefully from relationships even if the onus shouldn't be on them, sometimes from fear of men potentially harming them? Do men do this at all?

That's what the entire Bloomberg article is about! Yes, men apparently now routinely bow out gracefully from relationships with women, because they fear the woman will harm them.

"That's what the entire Bloomberg article is about! Yes, men apparently now routinely bow out gracefully from relationships with women, because they fear the woman will harm them."

And the article is showing this because it is a massive, unheard of change.

> Do the women in your life not check their routes when walking when it's dark out? Do the men?

Of course we do. Btw statistically men are assaulted more often than women.

Well, the hyperbole helps in the sense that it's an opinion shared by much more people, including some pundits, academics, and commentators with an audience, than ten or twenty years ago. This alone ought to explain, if not necessarily justify, why some men are starting to practice extreme avoidance of women.

>if you always assume the perpetrator is innocent,

Yes, "innocent until proven guilty" is a terrible and fearful situation.

My little sister was raped by her boss last year when she was an apprentice[0]. Since she was devastated (and her ex-boyfriend a cunt, pardon my french), she waited 3 day before telling my father, who then took her to the hospital, but it was to late: no evidence we could give the police.

Result, the only thing she could do was filing a report at the police station, and now she have to wait for another girl to get raped and go to the police. I still scream "rapist!" when i pass by his restaurant though, twice this year and will do that too at Christmas, and will continue until i get arrested or until i pardon him. I also gave his picture and contact information to all my highschool friends so they can avoid him, as it's a small city and we are around the same age (luckily i'm no living there anymore). My sister's former cooking school now forbid female student to take apprenticeship there (a bit cynical, but well, better than nothing).

I was all for "innocent until proven guilty", and still am, but maybe because it's still fresh, i really can't condamn public shaming anymore.

[0]I might have the wrong word: she was working on her cooking diploma while working in a restaurant

We enshrine these in our public justice system; it needs to be spread to private companies as well.

If I've come to appreciate anything-among many things-in the last few years of this cultural evolution full of "social justice" debate, discussion and forums-it's that there are pockets of the social fabric who seem very eager to suspend elements of the public justice system or eagerness to put a moratorium on certain 'memes' inherent to our system of adjudicating wrong deemed absolutely necessary or otherwise considered baked in, incontrovertible features of Western "justice" (because fairness, equanimity, better 100 guilty go free than 1 innocent go to jail etc) in just about every realm that isn't a court room where they would beholden to certain burdens and requirements to satisfy other 'memes' inherent to our system of adjudicating wrong.

Edit: I really wish the people who have such an issue trying to explore and openly discuss these ideas (even if you personally disagree with them) would step forward and actually offer a counter response versus driveby downvotes of myself and wutbrodo who replied here-and other comments here in the thread trying to actually explore the issue on a level that isn't surface level, shooting from the hip reactions. Barely fresh for 20 minutes and we're both nearly greyed out.

This is just called rejecting liberalism, which is happening across the left-right political spectrum. It's exhausting to see how common medieval arguments about the way society should be run have become.

That isn't to say that Enlightenment liberalism is unquestionably correct, but the conversation has shifted such that the hoi polloi have started to reject liberalism without having even done the basic work to consider the pitfalls and the counter-arguments to those pitfalls (you will, of course, find more radical strains of thought that reject liberalism, and while I disagree with them, I don't have the same problem, in that they tend to be sincerely held and supported).

To be clear, I don't mean "hoi polloi" to refer to some caricature of an uneducated lower class. It was probably five years ago that I had an argument with someone on an internal board at Google, wherein he claimed the presumption of innocence was irrelevant, since it was a legal constraint by which we weren't bound. Again, not saying that its incontrovertibly correct, but the guy had no concept of why it existed in the justice system and whether those principles were generalizable.

I saw someone speaking in this way once; they were immediately accused of maintaining and cultivating the "rape culture" and seemed to get more heat than the supposed offender.

An employer does not need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you missed your target, mouthed off to your boss, or any number of firing offenses. Association is voluntary, on both sides. Unions sometimes win a quasi-judicial system for firing, which this forum usually bemoans as making it too hard to eliminate low performers. With a judicial procedure only for sexual harassment, companies could always fire you “for” something else.

If male/female relationships in companies devolve to the same level of gaming, backstabbing, and insanity that happens around KPIs, then we might end up with a literal gender war. I think the point of the article is that regular relationships between people turning into this sort of Machiavellian game is a bad thing

Men are currently taken seriously when they complain about sexual assault and as a man there's no way I would voluntarily give this up. Why would I? What could possibly be in it for me?

edit: what the child comment said

It sorta is (libel/slander laws), but is hugely difficult to get any meaningful result out of.

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