Besides, there may not be a criminal case / the police may do nothing. One of the accusers only came forward three years after the end of the two-year relationship; it's not unheard of for someone to realise that what happened was wrong years much later, at which point the police is less likely to do anything because any physical evidence will be gone by then, and it's one person's words against another's.
The #metoo movement gave victims the push, visibility and protections they needed to stop hiding their abuse / protecting their abusers, sometimes decades after it happens.
Most victims of CSA are minors. No wait: all of them. CSA is a crime precisely because the victims are not able to understand what happens to them and not able to react appropriately. That's the distinction between minors and adults.
Adults are considered able to navigate sex & relationships and should take responsibility for what they do and what they don't do. There might be exceptional cases (e.g. cults) but I still think that public accusations of abusive behaviour in adult relationships, when they come with such delay, should be put under the utmost scrutiny.
2) A lot of sexual misconduct happens behind closed doors and is (I would imagine. IANAL) difficult to prosecute. I’m not saying that one should believe everything at face value but if multiple people make such allegations it’s more likely than not that such allegations have weight.
3) Not all sexual misconduct is “illegal”. But it doesn’t mean that communities should not attempt to censor people who engage in problematic behavior.
With all respect, that's nonsense. Where do you draw the line? Your morals? My morals? The victim's morals?
This is why we have a justice system, so that there is one place where you can say "that is wrong" and "that is right".
Forming a mob because "well, that person didn't akshually commit a crime, but we don't like the way they think about sex" is a primitive and regressive viewpoint.
The correct way would be to petition to make a law against whatever act you don't like. Not to say "let's leave it legal and instead simply punish the person".
No one should be facing a societal punishment without due process.
It's not at all. The law doesn't cover all forms of community or personal misconduct, sexual or otherwise.
And everyone -- especially businesses in Silicon Valley -- understands this.
Same with various forms of cheating - adultery is illegal in some states; but not all. And even then rarely prosecuted.
Yes, and those rules are enforceable contracts with penalties for breaking clauses in those contracts.
I want to know why, if those penalties are insufficient, is it better to join a mob than to petition the parties drawing up those contracts for stiffer penalties.
Further, legality does not imply correctness.
For example, it’s probably legal to call somebody a transphobic slur in many parts of the world but to suggest that trans people shouldn’t attempt to avoid or “cancel” such people is ridiculous.
And if you sincerely think that the only acceptable action to take is make a petition to change the law, I would suggest you go out and touch some grass. The law doesn’t work that way.
This sounds great in theory - where "community" means the small town that you live in. In practice, "community" often means "terminally online social media users", and many of the members of this "community" have little interest in looking for context, facts, or the truth and are instead invested in pushing their worldview or just getting a rage boner.
Edit: A great example of this in action was the "bike Karen" incident: https://archive.is/j0Yr8
How much of the online "community" was all-in on the narrative that she was trying to take the teens' bike until more information came to light?
That's not what we're talking about here, are we? We're talking about a public dogpiling.
And, TBH, your example is a poor one; while it's not illegal to slur/slander someone, there are legal remedies that dont' involve a global request to followers of a specific ideology to pile on.
Avoid people you don't like? Certainly. Join a campaign to ostracise someone you never met and never knew existed until your ideologues extended an invitation to mob them does not leave you on the right side of history.
Especially in countries where "free speech" means I can basically say anything I want short of defamation, no matter how hateful, profane, sexually inappropriate, or otherwise offensive, it only makes sense that a community should go beyond the limits of the law to maintain a non-toxic environment.
You need to explain what you mean by "that way", because I did not express any opinion on speech, free or otherwise.
Your comment sounds like a pre-prepared one, for any occasion that someone is performing wrongthink.
“Communities censuring people for problematic behavior” has been an important human behavior since way before we had states and laws.
> “Communities censuring people for problematic behavior” has been an important human behavior since way before we had states and laws.
That's not what we're talking about here, though. We aren't talking about voluntarily ending out association with someone, the specific context is about forming a group and going after someone.
Presumption of innocence is a cornerstone of society since at least Roman times and is recognized as a fundamental right by the UN.
If you cost me my ability to make a living, I should be able to take you to court for damages.
In most (all?) Western countries, cheating on your spouse is not illegal. But 99% of the people would say that "it is wrong".
Well that’s why so many cases are civil and not criminal. The bar is much lower (“preponderance of evidence” versus “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt”). A man can be accused of some sexual act that occurred decades ago without any substantive information like what day it happened on, and if a jury says “well I believe her”, it’s a wrap.
There was one high-profile trial, of a man who was definitely guilty. A bunch of other accused people faced zero consequences. In total, the #metoo movement raised awareness and was dwarfed by its own backlash.
An overcorrection would be what people fear-monger about: men arrested for innocently holding doors open, etc. None of that happened.
What does is that reform should apparently be a much more urgent issue than it seems to be.
The problem is with people not being willing to decide for themselves whether someone's behavior meets this threshold, and letting the mob substitute their own judgement.
Yes -- additionally there's also the situation where they try repeatedly to act collectively on this for themselves but the individual in question (or a compromised individual) has power over the resulting action, right?
I think it worth considering that many, if not most, of these "cancellations" occur long after serious attempts have been made to privately act that have been thwarted, often by commercial interests.
What I object to is the social dynamics of cancellation, where people feel compelled to e.g. sign an open letter, lest they themselves be viewed as siding with the accused, without fully considering the claims and counter-claims for themselves. I also object to creating a false sense of urgency, in order to to encourage this behavior.
A few years back I criticised someone (without naming them) online (since the egregious, thoughtless conduct itself was online) and triggered something of a pile-on that I thought was a bit too much.
Subsequently I realised that I had under-read the situation myself, and the conduct wasn't simply thoughtless at all, it was repeated, self-interested and very calculated; people finding that out was actually the accelerant of the pile-on.
So I wasn't really so guilty of it after all. But I definitely witnessed what you talk about -- the "you're with us or with them" of it all, the social compulsion to join the pile-on.
I will probably still openly criticise people if I think it is very merited, but any criticism needs to be tempered with as much of an antidote for a simple pile-on as it can.
Maybe there should be a public list of slanderers, defamers, mob justice participants and cancellers in general so we can all avoid them like the massive liabilities they are.
Do you have stats on this?
Every law, no matter how well meaning, can and will be abused. Women are not saints. Be especially wary when lies could provide secondary victories such as favorable child custody outcomes.
Feminist discourse is overwhelmingly in favor of disregarding false positives: they would rather see thousands of innocent men suffer than watch a single guilty man go free. They cast a wide net and hope to catch the guilty men within it. They care not for the suffering they cause to the innocent. Quite the contrary, in fact: I've seen them try to justify it as historical reparation.
I don't think we can say that this is what happened here. The allegations were public; some signatories may not have read them and just gone along with the "mob", but many would have read them and made their judgements based on that. This isn't "letting the mob substitute [for] their own judgement."
It takes work to protect the integrity of our justice system. This applies to the members within it and for those outside of it--neither should sacrifice or attack its credibility for short term political or personal gain. It also requires proper education that focuses on the good, not just the failings.
You might say "this will have a chilling effect on legitimate accusations" and you might be right, but the situation is bad enough now that it's created a pretty extreme chilling effect on socialization in general.
EDIT: I don't normally do this but argue your point. If you continue playing games like down voting very reasonable ideas that you disagree with eventually all of us are going to come together and leave you out of the discussion entirely.
Are you aware that here you are arguing for criminal sanctions on the order of 10 years in prison, for writing a letter?
You probably should expand on that.
Edit: some people seem to be okay with this notion! Would love to hear thoughts on how stiff criminal penalties for what is in the end expressing are at all compatible with societies that claim to value free speech.
Note that the author of the post does not present any proof that the allegations are false. Similarly, the other side likely cannot prove its allegations are true. So we are here discussing long prison sentences for unprovable opinions. I would love to hear how people justify that.
You can downplay any action by breaking it down to its foundations and stating it that way.
None of this is obviously accurate. More to the point, no court can adjudicate the "predictable outcome" of a letter or whether the reasons were malicious.
In fact, that’s a fundamental facet of a libel claim.
It's about writing a letter that can result in someone else receiving criminal sanctions on the order of 10 years in prison, when that someone might not have even written a letter.
Provably false is essential here.
As far as I can tell, nobody has offered (or likely can offer) proof of anything on either side and yet people are talking about long prison sentences for speech.
Free speech is not the same as freedom to falsely accuse. Libel is absolutely illegal and has been since before the US was a country. Allowing things like this to happen means men and women formally socializing with eachother except in really limited or alternatively psychopathic ways isn't practical. It needs to stop and the only possibilities are
a) Just exclude women entirely like we used to.
b) Punish them very harshly for lying.
I think most people would be more upset by a than b. I hope the feminists and egalitarians realize that this is the pro feminism argument as the only practical alternative is to return to a formally patriarchal society. If people can't appreciate the point I'm making then I suppose we'll end going with a which is unfortunate. Everyone who doesn't will eventually be cancelled by the same group of people they're aiming to support.
What is being discussed here is adding harsh criminal liability ultimately for expressing opinions, since we know that two people can experience the same event in very different ways.
A lot of people are understandably low on trust for a legal system that doesn't do anything about multiple highly-public sexual offenders.
Well, then you'd presumably fall back onto the old witch hunt; plenty of puritanical mobs are still around to say something like "What about when the courts don't do the job".
Good thing we don't live in those unenlightened days, eh?
A functioning justice system for sex crime accusations would be amazing; for valid reasons, a lot of people do not trust that this exists.
They are not some core, universal rights that every individual must respect when interacting with other individual.
The accused in this case absolutely still has the citizen rights of association and speech. He can gather with people and he can publish his thoughts. The fact that a bunch of individuals have decided they don't want to gather with him is in no way a reduction of his rights.
There's no right to being accepted, and no right to make people approve of your actions.
It's not actually a problem in society that needs fixing if people decide not to associate with someone on the basis of their behaviour.
It's not a problem you can, or should, solve legally.
> A functioning justice system for sex crime accusations would be amazing; for valid reasons, a lot of people do not trust that this exists.
They have no valid reasons. No system is perfect. Claiming that the system getting it wrong 1 out of every 1000 times is a valid reason is just stupid; no system is perfect.
Our justice system doesn't fail 1 in a 1000 times, particularly when talking about sex crimes. It fails far more frequently than that, given the prevalence of sexual assault and the rarity of convictions [1]. Additionally, there's an aspect that justice must be seen to be done: high profile repeat offenders walking free damages confidence in the system out of proportion to their frequency.
As above, if you want people to use a system, the system has to work.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/01/07/the-s...
What makes you think I'm okay with the current system? Upthread I even said "if you are unhappy with the way things are, petition to change them instead of mobbing".
Just because I hold the opinion that evidence matters does not mean that I am a bad person.
People aren't required to only critique a system using the tools that system provides; progress is often made when people step outside of the system (e.g. Rosa Parks) rather than quietly accepting it. There's evidence for that in countless civil rights campaigns.
Not saying people should leap to letter signing, but it also misses the mark to suggest that the US legal system will resolve the issues these kinds of actions cause.
it seems that the author lives in Germany and that he went to court in Britain: https://pretty.direct/consentorder.pdf
- "the BBC let this person get away with this for years" and also "cancel culture has to stop",
- "there's too much filth on the internet" and "don't you dare demand I tell you my age",
- or the most complex and culturally nuanced one: "children are being groomed" but "she's 18 now, she's an adult and she can make up her own mind about posing nude in a tabloid".
As difficult as it is, any invitation to treat a subject with less nuance is better considered misbegotten until scrutinised much, much further.
If I've missed an implication that limited their suggestion to specific regions, them I'm happy to retract. But what I'm seeing is a general suggestion, so I've extrapolated that out and tried to apply it to a hypothetical where the advice might be appropriate.
Feels like maybe you've assumed that the thread starter was scoping the suggestion to the regions where this offense occurred. Again, I don't see that implication in the text, but I feel like it's an entirely reasonable assumption. That being the case, I don't fault anyone for thinking only in those terms. But I also don't think I was out of line to engage with the thread starters points in the way that I did.
It's a matrix: a perfect system would always punish the guilty and refuse to punish the innocent.
Without perfect information, you have to choose: will you bias the outcome punish the innocent, or to not punish the guilty?
… and it usually ends badly when this happens. One kind of injustice is replaced by another. But this is what people will do.
Epstein? Jimmy Savile? The massive and still ongoing sex abuse scandals in not just the Catholic Church but many faiths? Those are high profile ones but there are so many examples of people getting away with sex abuse for years and years with dozens or even hundreds of victims. The wealthier, more powerful, or more famous and “loved” the abuser, the longer they can get away with it.
I remember back in college being personally shocked at how many women I dated who had been raped or at least harassed in disgusting ways, as children or adults. It was like half. They told me the details and I had no reason to disbelieve them. I’ve since heard many similar and worse things from people I know.
Part of why lynch mobs are so easy to form around allegations of sexual harassment and abuse is that it's so incredibly common. The allegations are easily believed.
In this situation you have an accusation of misconduct made by 1) young 2) women 3) new to a community 4) who don't speak English well. These are all big red vulnerability flags.
I would ensure that every accusation of this nature is treated with respect and investigated by a trusted authority figure in a given community.
EDIT: Though I'm not suggesting people should sign letters about people they don't know based on allegations by other people they don't know.
And you know full well that the whole range of sexual harassments is entirely legal.
- If it's not something you can at least sue over or is not illegal, it's not misconduct we should care about.
- If no one was at least prepared to sue, we should all just let it be.
I think perhaps you don't understand that quite a lot of persistent unwanted behaviour never rises to that standard (or perhaps no individual victim was willing to put their head above the parapet).
Anyone who has worked in education can tell you about someone whose unwanted behaviour escaped scrutiny for decades because each individual incident had enough deniability. I have never worked in education and I can identify at least two such cases from my own experiences. (Very likely a third, and there is no way that third person would ever have seen any kind of censure for what they were doing, because it was so deniable and because their victims would not even have classified themselves as victims)
There are plenty of occasions where a community quietly agreeing that someone's behaviour is unacceptable has kept them from a situation where the harms they cause can escalate.
If someone was accused of murder, or theft, in most cases, social stigma would be part of that. An admittedly sometimes unfair, but baseline thing we're gonna do as humans to protect ourselves.
If your child was at a preschool, and a teacher was accused (but not convicted) of molestation, you wouldn't "be a good person and wait for the justice system to sort it out". You'd either demand the teacher be fired, or you'd take your kid out of the school.
Main issue with investigating child abuse is that the victim's account is unreliable as they might not yet even have the language to describe some things, so we err on the side of caution.
In an environment where all participants are adults it makes sense to at least ask the alleged perpetrator if they're guilty and analyse their reaction.
There was a notorious case in my corner of the world where a locally famous YouTuber was accused by his ex of sexual abuse. He lost a significant number of followers and of course revenue so he took her to court and won, as her story didn't add up.
Undeterred, she continued, but with increasingly wild accusations and even attempting to rope in other people.
I occasionally see a new post about this drama and it serves as a remainder that some people are just out to destroy others.