I think it's very interesting how, despite knowing nearly nothing about the situation, everyone here is quick to doubt the victim, and make up scenarios (for which there is zero evidence) where the harasser is the victim.
Because we use this standard, it is natural for people to look for reasonable doubts when talking about accusations.
That is how western society works. And for very good reasons.
Justice system administered by a state where the repercussions include imprisonment and death - absolutely. But HR is not a judicial system and should not be viewed as one. I think I take your point to be just a descriptive observation of "our social discussion reflects a habit based on our exposure to judicial systems" and not a normative statement. Even if it's the former, I think it's naive and ignores a very real culture of doubt and victim-blaming exclusive to sexual violence.
The fair way is to withhold judgment (while presuming innocence) when there's a charge against someone but it hasn't been investigated. That's fair whether we're talking about courts or society. Society pronounced its judgment on O.J. after evidence was presented and witnesses testified.
The problem comes when people presume guilt based on a charge alone. Unfortunately, that's often what happens when high-emotion charges are leveled against someone.
So, in the eyes of the criminal courts, yes, OJ is still innocent. But would you have him babysit your kids based only on a reasonable doubt he's a multiple murderer?
That's true, but it doesn't make my opinions morally justified.
But my point wasn’t about the verdict--the court’s, mine, or the public’s. It was that it is wrong to presume guilt anywhere—in court or in personal opinion—on the basis of a charge alone. (In OJ's case, we're all far past that, so I think bringing it up is a bit moot.)
I'd try to do neither. The reality is, no one is equally qualified because no one is identical to anyone else. There are always tradeoffs.
But I'd try to weigh those tradeoffs without being swayed either way by the fact that someone was once accused and later acquitted. Personally, I'm not even sure whether I'd be more or less likely to want to hire a person on the basis of that detail; I really think it's not evidence of anything.
It's like the influence of an independent variable Y in the logical formula "X implies Z", or like a "don't care" cell in a Karnaugh map -- it signifies nothing.
I suppose we can all agree that any individual should at least first know the facts before forming their opinion.
Something obviously bad happens, and everyone falls over themselves to correct and defend not the bad thing that just happened, but a thing they just imagined might happen.
It's a very peculiar (and fairly revealing) thought pattern.
No, that's how justice systems in western society (and many others) work. Because guilty/not-guilty is a binary choice, there's no in-between option.
I don't have the same binary restrictions when I form an opinion based on the information available to me. As we all do.
Call it a bad cultural fit if you prefer. Someone who cannot navigate the social work environment, and makes others feel uneasy and lowers their moral is not as good an employee as someone who'd have no issue doing so, and makes everyone else motivated and confident.
As an employer, I'd probably quickly try and replace such an employee, with someone who's just as good technically, but also has better social work ethics and collaboration skills.
This is totally fair to me. Being good at your job also involves being good with coworkers and promoting a healthy work environment which boosts everyone's productivity. If you have deficiencies there, try working on it. It'll be good for your career.
Now I know what's going to happen... But what if someone totally fabricated a case against you and brought it up to your employer and now your employer falsely believes that you're a big bully and harasser and that you hurt the work environment and they fire you over that?
And I think that's a bit of a fallacy counter-argument honestly. Some kind of reification fallacy. Yes in the abstract hypothetical, this would be unjust, and you can deduce that it was in fact the accuser who was being unprofessional and fabricating an environment of blackmail. But give us any concrete case, and we can now observe the facts of that case and see if employers did an unreasonable assesement or not. For example, we might see in real cases, there is always more than one complaint made, or there are recorded behaviors like emails, chat logs, naughty passwords, etc. Or there's repeated offense, or there was prior knowledge, etc.
And again, no crime here. An employer for their business sake, might prefer to lean on better be careful rather than sorry. That makes total business sense to me.
Is the implication that non-Western societies don't work that way? Or that somehow it's only Western societies that came up and all of them practice this behavior?
Presumption of innocence traces back to roman law (hence "occidental" from the latin, meaning the going down/setting of the sun, or "western", referring to European countries) . It has propagated at various rates through various cultures. Other cultures (including germanic, which could also be classified as "western") did not have the presumption of innocence centuries ago. China (latin "oriental", rising sun, or eastern) has been moving toward it in the last 50 years.
This doesn't say that no other culture has independently developed the presumption of innocence principle, but that the idea of it in modern judicial systems around the world traces back to the roman culture, and is generally associated with a body of ideas collectively called "western culture".
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326070104_Understan...
A bit more clarification from the researchgate link above, talking about the movement toward presumption of innocence (POI) in China (emphasis added to the statements that Western societies came up with this behavior and that at least one non-Western society doesn't work that way):
"As POI is a legal principle originating in the West, its acceptance in the criminal justice context of China is a gradual and longstanding process. The CPL’s first revision, in 1996, adopts the clause ‘no person shall be found guilty without being judged as such by a People’s Court according to law’, but the protection guaranteed to criminal defendants under Article 12 of the CPL (2012) is different from the classic concept, which, according to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), requires POI. Article 12 focuses on who has the power to issue a guilty verdict rather than on the presumption of the accused’s guilt or innocence during the investigation and trial."
HR doesn't fire on a whim. I'd default to saying this guy got due process.
Since it's quite long, I'll summarize. An 18-year-old woman, "Marie", whose had been in foster homes since the age of 6 or 7, reported having been raped. Her two previous foster mothers, both of whom she was still friends with and whom she told about the rape, suspected she was fabricating the report and, after discussing the matter with each other, said so to the police. Despite the significant forensic evidence, the police persuaded her to recant and ultimately charged her with filing a false report. A couple of years later, a serial rapist with a penchant for photographing his victims was caught. Among his effects was a photograph of Marie.
What does this story tell us? First, that even someone who has just been raped may have difficulty relating the event in a coherent and consistent way, and may not seem to be feeling the emotions one would expect of someone to whom that had happened. (The implications for the Brett Kavanaugh affair are obvious.) Second, that even female friends of the victim might be led by such inconsistencies to doubt the veracity of the report — a sobering observation. And third, that the slogan "Believe Women", though it cannot be taken as an absolute, is still important to repeat, because it's still far more likely that a true report will be doubted than that a false one will be believed.
"Innocent until proven guilty" and "beyond a reasonable doubt" are critically important for a government-run judicial system, because they ultimately have control over your freedom, life, and death. While a job is certainly important, the loss of one job will not ruin your life unless you are particularly unlucky. So the burden of proof is much less.
Regardless of all that, it's just really saddening to me that the default seems to be that people assume that the victim is lying or overstating the harm done to them. This seems to be something very specific to sexual harassment cases that doesn't crop up as much or as universally with other accusations of wrongdoing. We clearly have a long way to go before we get rid of our knee-jerk biases about this sort of thing (and I'm no exception; I have them too).
Some people evidently want that, because they're "not a witch" themselves.
It's really awful that in some/many cases, accusations of rape or sexual assault or sexual harassment or creepiness end up reducing to one person's word against another, when there's no good objective evidence either way.
You should doubt everyone. You should doubt the accuser. You should doubt the alleged harasser's claim of innocence. Without evidence, you can't adjudicate it, and unless it's a matter of rape or sexual assault, the compulsion to adjudicate it in the absence of evidence is unhealthy[1]. What you can do is try to engineer the environment or counsel the people so the alleged behavior by the accused or negative perception by the accuser is less likely to occur; most obviously, by separating them and ensuring they rarely/never have to interact.
If you can't keep the two people from communicating or interacting, and you have to fire one, and that one should be the accused, that is precisely a witch trial, but without a declaration of being a witch. The accused might not be a witch, but we're going to burn them anyway, because the social fabric depends on it!
And of course, criticizing witch trials can make you a witch, because there's evil in the world and therefore the witch trials must go forward! To do nothing is to enable witches, and who would want to do that except a witch? "Cui bono?"
[1] And in serious cases, you can try to take it to court, but it'll fairly likely end up unsatisfactorily for the accuser unless they're particularly persuasive or the defendant is obviously creepy or there's some other evidence. Even a string of accusers, although it means something, is not necessarily good evidence. Again, see the witch trials.
Studies bear out that false accusations of sexual misconduct are exceedingly rare. If you go just by the odds, the likelihood is that when someone accuses someone of misconduct, it probably happened.
That doesn't mean you just accept an accusation at face value, but it does hopefully set the stage for you to be sympathetic, and committed to be thorough and to actually listen to what the accuser is saying. You of course do an investigation. You talk to the involved parties. You talk to witnesses, if there are any. Some of these witnesses may not have been present for any of the alleged offenses, but might speak to the involved parties' character. Does the accused act creepy around other people? Is the accuser constantly making up false stories about people?
If it does boil down to taking one person's word against the other, then I don't think the default should be to just separate the people and hope nothing happens again. Just as in a civil law case, part of the determination (both the direction of the judgment itself, as well as the magnitude of any penalties) is based on who is more persuasive about any available evidence, not strictly about whether the evidence alone is more or less damning.
It's not cut and dried. It's not clear. It's fuzzy and muddy. That's unfortunate, but happens to be the reality of dealing with humans.
See how this works? "Believe the victim" is circular reasoning, all it does is calcify your priors. Truth-seeking demands that one must keep an open mind and consider competing interpretations of an event.
1: "One guy actually got fired for his password." This is a statement of fact, which we can initially accept as true.
2. He was already being super creepy and making the girl who sat across from him uncomfortable This is a statement of opinion with the appearance of a fact. The phrase "super creepy" is quite vague, to the point of being meaningless without further specification. Also, how jedberg can know that she was feeling uncomfortable should be in question.
3. "but she never told anyone." This unsubstantiates claim #2. If she never told anyone, then there was no way to determine the truth of the claim that he was "making the girl across from him uncomfortable." Note that even this statement may be false, as she could have told many people already without informing jedberg, and if so, would help to substantiate the previous claim.
4. Then we cracked his password, which was a very naughty phrase about the girl who sat across from him. Note that "we cracked his password" is a statement of fact, mixed with opinion that the phrase was "very naughty". Whether the password was "naughty" or not, I don't think anyone is disputing that the password was cracked.
5. I reported it to HR This is a factual claim.
6. who asked the girl This is a factual claim, and most probably true, with the exception that it could be hearsay if jedberg wasn't in the room at the time when it happened, which has not been specified.
7. who then said he was creepy This is a statement of fact. Assuming that jedberg heard this directly from her, we can call this statement true. The important bit, however, is the word "then". She only said that he was creepy _after_ approached by HR. If HR's question was "Don't you think that guy across from you is creepy?", then that would be considered leading and deceptive. If HR's question was "what do you think about the guy across from you", then that question would be leading. If HR's question was "what do you think about your fellow employees", then that question would be neutral and acceptable. Since the manner in which the question was asked was not specified, there is no way to know how this question affected her response. It is not reasonable to assume the question was leading or not leading without further confirmations, and this unfortunately makes the claim moot.
8. so they acted swiftly on the reports and got him out of there. This statement appears to be a reiteration of claim #1, I don't see anything additional here that affects the previous claim.
Later, jedberg said this:
9. he got fired for sexual harassment. This is a statement of fact; however, this appear to directly contradict the first statement that jedberg made, which was that he "got fired for his password." So, if we can accept that he got fired for sexual harassment, then he didn't get fired for his password, and the original claim is untrue.
In summary, 1) a guy got fired for sexual harassment. 2) The accused also had a password that may have mentioned something "naughty". 3) That password was noticed by an IT group and may or may not have had some impact on the termination. 4) The interviewing of the alleged victim may or may not have influenced her testimony.
Those are the specific facts that we're dealing with in this case. Dismissing this with the idea that "there are no facts in this case" is incorrect. The fairness or unfairness of the case is framed around these facts, with opinions given on both sides throughout this thread.
There's a mile wide difference between being a weirdo mouth-breathing creep, and actually sexually harassing someone.