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Comment by smokey_the_bear | Hacker News Reader

The article seems to be down, so I can't read it right now. But I went to DefCon when I was 17, and it was the most sexually threatened I've ever felt. Some things were benign, a lot of strange looks and stupid things like guys dropping stuff and asking me to pick it up. Someone followed me in a parking lot and then ducked out of sight twice. Someone grabbed my ass on the way out of a talk.

I otherwise had a great time there, but I didn't go back for 10 years. I had none of the same issues later, but I'm not sure if the crowd has changed or if they're just less interested in 27 year olds.

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Okay... I am a pretty experienced party animal, and this stuff (sexual assault, that is...not random hookups) is NOT normal. I've heard the occasional story, but both you and the author of this post seems to imply that this is a pretty regular occurrence. Hell, if "it was everyone else's job to prevent being sexually assaulted" and her friends "managed to do this job on several occasions" (parapharasing here), this sounds like one of the seediest parties I have ever heard of. Stuff like this does NOT fly in any normal social setting - the guys usually have the decency to back off before things get too awkward, and if they don't, someone will usually break in and stop it.

I've never been to one of these conferences, but what's the deal here? Being a bit of a cynic in regards to the social skills of a lot of techies, I'm thinking that this is could be the result of alcohol + desperate and socially inept guys + a few women that don't have the critical mass to put up a proper pick-up shield. If this is really a normal phenomenon at tech conferences, I'm a bit shocked that no one have mentioned it before.

The incidents that have been mentioned sound more to me like completely clueless pick-up attempts than any genuine attempt at assault or rape, but the end result is pretty much the same.

The issue of this kind of thing simply not being talked about is a large part of the problem. Your friends may simply (understandably!) not want to talk about it.

It's uncomfortable to suggest but picking 10 of your close female friends and asking directly if they've been sexually assaulted at a party might be informative. I'll say that from my personal experience if you get fewer than 10 affirmatives I'll be fairly surprised.

It's definitely something women don't always want to talk about. It would suck to tell men you didn't want to go to a conference because you were vulnerable. I went to DefCon that year with my older brother, and he didn't want me to go the next year because he felt he had to spend too much time worrying about me.

That said, I've been to lots of other technical conferences without any issues. I'm not much of a party animal, but anything else I've encountered at bars or parties has been milder and less frequent than at DefCon, and has generally seemed more awkward and less predatory.

Is it possible that this happens more than you've observed or heard about at the parties you attend? One of the disadvantages of being male (which I'm assuming you are from your username, forgive me if you're not) is that we're often much less aware of this sort of thing going on than we should be.

Also keep in mind, there's a big difference between this happening (no matter the frequency) and it being accepted. It sounded like she was able to enlist the help of several other people to break in and stop it. The fact that this shit didn't fly with what was likely a vast majority of the people there didn't prevent the assault from happening.

Seriously, what percentage of the people who attended do you think were actually aware of this happening at the time?

> Hell, if "it was everyone else's job to prevent being sexually assaulted" and her friends "managed to do this job on several occasions" (parapharasing here)

You misunderstood.

Her point was it wasn't her job to avoid being assaulted, it was the job of the males present not to be assaulting her.

> If this is really a normal phenomenon at tech conferences, I'm a bit shocked that no one have mentioned it before.

As an example of this type of incident being mentioned before, while this list is not limited to incidents of physical sexual harassment it includes some:

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents

sadly, sexual harassment has been a common enough occurrence in the open source community that countering it has been a major topic over the past 2 years. Open source communities as a whole have only 1% women, much lower than IT in general. This is because you must choose to join one of these communities, and women are choosing to do something where they wont be harassed.

DefCon is an outlier even by tech conference standards. Especially for DC2-DC11 or so, it was basically a party which had a bunch of computer hackers, and while there are lots of parties at other conferences, at early DC the party was basically all day (although I didn't go to DC2-DC5 myself). DefCon was basically Burning Man or a comic/fan conference, although it did become a bit more "industry" around 2000.

BlackHat (which runs contiguously to DefCon) is much more of a "professional" conference, while still being more "fun" than something like RSA, or the academic conferences from IACR.

(I really enjoyed DefCon, and have spoken a few times, but going without knowing what you're getting into would be a mistake)

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