The accusations were lies, but could we prove it?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There's a really good reason we have an innocent-until-proven-guilty system. False accusations can be just as harmful as actual crimes.
There has to be a minimum standard of evidence before we can assume someone is guilty of something; even if bad apples are getting away with crimes. Otherwise the system can only fail.
You seem to live in a parallel reality. Susan Fowler's career was destroyed twice when she came out with accusations.
For the victim, it's not even an uphill battle, in most of the cases it's a guaranteed losing battle.
> Fowler's role in changing Uber made her into a business world celebrity. She has received book and Hollywood film deals and continues to work towards legislation and workplace protections for women.
How is that "getting her career destroyed"?
In response, processes were created to instead suppress & destroy the accused regardless of fault.
Now cases take the shape of one or the other, depending on the context under which they are processed.
What do you mean by this? She was working at another company when she published her story, and as far as I know was not fired or otherwise had action taken.
It's entirely possible that our society makes it very hard to touch high status people and easy to destroy low status people. We can easily have the worst of both worlds.
[1] https://reason.com/2020/03/18/title-ix-arizona-state-univers...
No, really, I am asking. Why is the New York Times writing about it now? Why for these people?
This gets reads, this gets people's attention, and its less common then the typical case of abuse, making it interesting. It helps that they have more concrete proof the accusations were a lie, so the news paper doesn't have to worry about being on the wrong side of a sensitive topic.
but don't forget about the empathy gap. Not in the news paper, but in society at large. The idea of an innocent man getting caught up in the system is uncomfortable, but people push that thought to the back of their mind and subconsciously rationalise it away as a necessary evil to protect women (and some men) because they can't think of a way to protect the falsely accused that doesn't make it easier to get away with abusing women. In this view the potentially abused women gets more empathy over the potentially innocent man.
I think in this kind of story, where the accused are women, they're pretty much always going to be gay women.
Not for reasons of any particular animus, but because that means the putative victims are female, which people will take a lot more seriously.
For "political/cultural" topics, I generally ask does the article align with the company's/editorial staff's biases.
For important geopolitical topics, I generally ask does the article align with the company's masters' biases.
What a company chooses to cover or not cover and how a company chooses to cover a story becomes rather obvious. After a while, you can pretty much tell whether a story will be cover by a company and how they are going to spin it.
> Numerous lawsuits have been brought about this kind of thing and even won. Why is this case different?
It's hard to say. If the situation isn't special since we had numerous lawsuits like this before, then I guess we can ask what else is special? Maybe we can run down the "who,what,when,where,why". Lets start with who. Is there anything special there?
Edit: I wonder if Ms. Viren planned for the discovery by Twitterers. I'm sure (and hope) she cleared the article with their lawyer. If that is the case (that she knew there's a way for the public to get person's name through hints in the article), that is an amazing way to get back at the accuser.
http://www.superiorcourt.maricopa.gov/docket/CivilCourtCases...
Second I submitted a complaint to university where the perp teaches. No response so far.
Without a way to credibly proceed such investigations should be expeditiously closed and sealed. With an avenue to proceed they should be investigated with intelligence and diligence.
With that said although author isn't allowed to name J I suggest that the populace is under no such constraint. I will not herein speculate nor suggest such but I have to hope that the interests of justice will be better served in the future than they are presently.
*(1:frenemy finds out you are a candidate for a job; 2: frenemy anonymously send unsubstantiated rumors to decisionmakers; 3: decisionmakers take the rumors seriously)
On the other hand, from 2011-2017, most schools reading the federal Title IX guidance were not only discouraged from listening to the defendant, they found themselves discouraged from listening to the victim. Thus you see a black athlete Grant Neal who was expelled from Colorado State University-Pueblo for raping a trainer, despite the trainer saying that she was fine and not at all raped. (You can't believe her! She's a battered woman.)
Of course, when Betsy DeVos announced changes in 2014, all the commentary you could find was "this is rape culture at work!" but if you're willing to actually look at the cases she cited, I can point you at https://reason.com/2017/09/07/devos-title-ix-example-cases-r...
Probably not in U.S. academia. When a U.S. department is thinking of hiring you as a professor, you give a public talk in front of that department's faculty. At that point, it becomes more or less public knowledge that you are in the running for a job.
Instead, universities made what happens off-campus into their business. I’m sure there’s a conspiracy theory to be found here.
It seems outright byzantine to me. There appears to be a parallel justice system at work where complaints about serious crimes are brought to faculty or peers or title IX compliance officers rather than state authority directly. There are countless of informal relationships between students and teachers and people who are economically dependent in ways that are ripe for abuse. There appears to be a culture of brushing serious crimes under the carpet on one hand and a reaction of vigilante justice as a response.
That would be a non-starter for me. I think I would burn about half my net worth to let the world know about a scumbag on the level of "J".
Have you tried blocking JavaScript? It works fine here in Firefox with NoScript and in Dillo (which has no JS support).
This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Thanks to everyone who summarized or referred me elsewhere.
(Title of the reason.com post linked above)
Without any evidence that this is a systemic problem, I wonder why it would justify my attention.
It doesn't matter that only one (publicly known) case has happened, if there's the potential of others latching on.
>Melanie also hadn’t been able to locate a current student named Rebecca James in Marta’s department, but she said that the name could always be an alias, and she was still obligated to investigate Marta now that a “credible” accusation had been made.
>“Good question,” Melanie responded, her voice bright again. “Because of the funding that we receive through Title IX, we’re required to investigate everything. And with that we want to really run everything to the ground.”
> in the future, anonymous accusations would be fact-checked before new investigations were opened
policy allowed for this..
By the second go round, when the "y'all" message arrived, the credibility problem was obvious but the investigation didn't address it.
This sounds to me like a very limp bureaucratic response by someone just going through the motions, with no real effort to resolve matters.
Why should the university start paying detectives to investigate crimes that it can’t prosecute?
Instead, shouldn’t the police have subpoenaed the documents and pressed criminal charges?
The article shows a very troubling abuse of the system, but it should be a prompt to fix it rather than destroy it.
AAUP: https://www.aaup.org/article/trouble-title-ix
Harvard Law: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/9/1/law-faculty-titl...
More law professors: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/05/17/professors-ur...
This current administration engenders no trust in me, but I'm open to rare possibilities of them doing something right on rare occasion.
We have real laws and courts. Let them work.
Personally I have made three such reports, including two home invasions, and it is not hard to guess how many have ended up in court.
In order to fix this we could change the law and the legal system to push the resolve rate up, but there is many good reasons why society have chosen not to do that. Parallel system is much easier as long the right persons get targeted.
If we knew how to do that reliably, we could just hang people from trees.
Unfortunately, we don't.
For what it's worth, I don't think that perpetrators of violent crimes, including rape, should ever be allowed out in public. Their incarceration should be humane, but it should not be temporary. And this judgement should be made by the courts.
This isn't the best of all possible worlds obviously.
(You see my point.)
Dismantlement seems pretty unnecessary.
1) Ubiquitous government funding
2) Student-teacher power asymmetry
3) Strength of tenure
Furthermore, the last two points would make sense if Title IX only applied to teachers. But that's not the case. Even between students Title IX still applies.