I think by now, with the threads we have participated in together, you know exactly how I feel about mob justice. I find it equal parts terrifying and horrifying. Deciding not to vote for someone because the allegations against them seem plausible is not mob justice.
Due process is well and fine for deciding whether someone should be convicted of a crime and punished. An individual making up his or her mind about the known facts and how to proceed is a separate one.
You have to understand where I’m coming from. The first man who molested me confessed to it (I was far too young to even comprehend), pled guilty, was convicted, and 27 years later I find out one of my Aunts is dating his nephew and my molester is just around her kids all the time. I had a childhood friend who was raped at knifepoint repeatedly by her teenaged brother. He also went to prison, but being of a religious family, she was pressured immediately to forgive and reconcile with him. I have a relative through marriage who participated in a gang rape, he was also convicted, but due to the wealth and influence of his family, he did not serve prison time. He isn’t allowed to be near a school but he is welcomed with open arms at family events, I see him on a regular basis, he has his own business and a daughter and for all intents and purposes, a normal life. I am expected to kiss him on the cheek whenever we see each other (I don’t.)
I don’t suggest that people’s crimes must always haunt them forever, but that fact that in my direct experience you can be legally convicted of rape or pedophilia and people will pretty much forget about it really dampens the impact of claims that mere accusations will forever ruin a person’s life. ‘‘Forget’’ isn’t exactly the right word, because it always comes with a host of disgusting justifications that attempt to blame the victim. Now, I’ve heard accounts of falsely accused people experiencing significant hardship so I’m sure it happens occasionally. That whole business 30 years ago about the Satanic Ritual Abuse witchhunt comes to mind. But I really doubt it’s anywhere near as systemic an issue as sexual assault.
Now, those are just the actually convicted offenders. There is my adopted father who abused me for six years, and the accusation, if you can even call it that (it’s a long story, but I was under the impression my session with the counselor was confidential, I had no intention at that point of telling anyone in my family anything) impacted his life in approximately zero ways. I was harassed, shamed, interrogated and blamed for everything that happened, he remained married to my mother for another six years, he ended up with another woman who had a daughter the same age as I was when I was abused, she started acting out, and nobody. gave. a damn.
Not a lot I can do, I had and continue to have no evidence of my abuse, because you don’t often have physical evidence for that sort of crime. While I was being abused I wasn’t calculating how this would run in a court of law. I barely comprehended the reality of what was happening and spent most of my childhood ignoring it to the extent that I could. I understand how victims often act on a visceral level because I lived it. I never said a word - not a word - in protest and I didn’t move. I couldn’t wrap my head around it and I still can’t. When I think about it I’m not angry, I’m just confused. All these years later my brain is still struggling to process it. Why don’t we speak up sooner? Why don’t we fight back? Why don’t we tell someone right away? Because most of us don’t. There’s no reason in it. It’s more like a physiological process you can’t control.
Anyhoo, I was skipping school my senior year (I had become a legally emancipated minor), sitting around in my pajamas contemplating hanging myself from the rafters when a young police officer maybe five years older than me knocked on my door, came inside, clearly uncomfortable, and began asking me all these personal questions he was clearly embarrassed to ask me. It was just the two of us. (I’d rank that up there as one of my more humiliating experiences, second only to having to recount all of this to my mother over the telephone because she refused to meet me in person.) I finally just said to the officer, ''Do I have to talk about this?" He said, ‘‘Oh, no, you don’t have to file a police report.’’ I thanked him and sent him away.
Now it may be obvious to you but in my fugue state of depression, disbelief and trauma, I had no idea I was even filing a police report. The thought of dragging that stuff into court was the very last thing on my mind. I just wanted to die. The idea that if I had filed a police report and then later redacted it, I would be called, in the court of public opinion, a liar, someone who obviously made it up, is not something that is ever far from my mind when we talk about false accusations.
17 years later, where are we? Well, I don’t know what the hell he’s been up to, since we no longer have a relationship, but he did attend my grandfather’s funeral and I did not so that I wouldn’t have to see him. (Until my grandfather died, he was actually still a part of my family after the divorce.) As far as I can tell, he hasn’t suffered the slightest for his actions. It’s not him, it’s me, with the therapy bills, and the sexual hangups, and I even had to deal with that shit when I tried to adopt a child, for fuck’s sake, because my name was in the CPS system as a result of having been abused. It was eventually cleared but at a certain point you’re like, ''Fucking really? This shit isn’t over yet?"
At some point I moved from my personal experience to a broader advocacy platform, I studied things like public policy and social welfare at the graduate school level, and I learned about gender dynamics and began to understand that this stuff doesn’t happen in a vacuum. My job with a domestic violence and sexual assault organization is really more coincidence than anything else (I was looking for any grant writing job I could get), but it’s become a vital part of my identity because I’m finally in a position where I can do something about it. I know it makes some people uncomfortable that I talk about it so openly, and that’s good, stay with that discomfort, and then realize that there are thousands of women out there with nearly identical experiences and far worse, and many of us are done watching people look the other way, and equivocate, and propogate myths about us, without pushing back.
octopus, you do not strike me as a person that is particularly naive about the realities of such things, and I am speaking just as much to the hardcore apologists on this board to you as I am in this particular instance. If you want to know what a typical response is from a victim of sexual abuse, you don’t have to guess, there are plenty of women you can ask.
