> Even then, it may be far from clear-cut. We don't know what those problems are. Have there been reports of harassment regarding this guy? If so, that's fairly clear-cut. But maybe this is just kind of a jerk, but hasn't done anything over the line before.
All of this is idle speculation that is really besides the point. The point is that conferences should have a policy for how to deal with these kinds of situations. Those policies are probably going to depend on a certain amount of judgement from the conference organizer. They make all kinds of other judgements, about who to include as keynote speakers or accept for talks. One of their criteria should, perhaps, be whether the person in question has stepped seriously out of bounds at previous events.
> I'm wondering where the rest of the community was when this harassment was going on at the bar. The victim says they were there in a group. So a whole group of conference attendees was just standing around, letting this victim be harassed?
You have been to a bar before, right? Many of them are dark, and loud. There can be many conversations going on at once. It's pretty easy, even with a large groups present, for people to have a conversation that no one else can hear, because there's music playing, and they are involved in their own conversation.
If people did overhear, there's always the bystander effect. In groups, people are sometimes less likely to intervene in a situation, because they expect someone else to intervene, or because they see no one else intervening and feel some social pressure not to break the ice.
And we've seen several other incidents like this. Sometimes, it happens off in a corner where no one else is around; or in a hallway in the conference hotel. Those are situations we need to deal with just as much, and we can't depend on there being a helpful bystander.
The only point is that we need a policy. The policy does not need to be bulletproof. These are human situations. There will always be cases that slip through the cracks. Some of them might just turn into a he-said, she-said that can't be resolved. Some people might never come forward to the conference organizers. Some people might abuse a policy to just get someone kicked out that they don't like. But you do your best to try and provide the best, most accepting environment that you can.
And right now, we have a real problem. We have people abusing the lack of any policies, the lack of will of organizers to do anything, to continue coming to events without repercussion for repeated behavior that is clearly unacceptable. We can do better.
You know, the policy might be a warning at first. It might include some form of adjudication if the events are in dispute. It might give someone a cooling off period, and allow them back after a certain amount of time. There are lots of options, and a large space to explore. But it is fundamentally unacceptable that we just say "well, we can't tell what really happened with a legal level of proof, so we're going to keep inviting creeps to our conferences and let anyone who feels uncomfortable with that stay away."