What if somebody, somewhere turned the tables on this imbalance of power? And made a googleable database where the name of the guy could be followed by anonymous stories of his conduct? This is what police records should provide, but obviously don’t; less then 4 % of rapes are reported to the police.
What would be the potential for use? And for abuse? How could abuse problems be adressed?
What would be the legal repercussions? Is it against the law to write somewhere on the internet that X did Y to you? Or is that only illegal if X sues you?
Has this been tried somewhere? Maybe just to stir up discussion?
Yes. Here’s one example, although everyday citizens can’t contribute yet.
I can’t imagine what could go wrong with a completely anonymous, publicly searchable database for people to accuse any person they dislike of sex crimes.
How could abuse of such a system be prevented ?
I can think of a few safeguards. The accusers name needs to be know to the perators of the database; she needs to have gone to the police ( but if the police decides there’s not enough evidence, that might still be enough evidence for this website. So the threshold would be higher then just anonymously putting as mark behind someon’s name, but not as high as the bar for a criminal charge.
With such safeguards in place… wouldn’t the danger of abuse be… worth it? If the system had a few safeguards, would the danger of misuse not be kind of worth it?
You could argue that the sex offender registry is far too punitive, and that, on the other hand, rapists identity before they are found guilty is not nearly punitive enough.
Many such people have a “reputation”. The problem is, most people won’t know of such a reputation untill it is too late.
I’m on a dating site. That particular site offers women the opportunity to hand out digital “roses” to a guy if the chat with them has been pleasant and polite. I was more likely to chat with a guy with roses in his profile, and I was also quick to give out roses if an chat had been pleasant. Men didn’t know if they had been given roses. So that was sort of the same system, but then on the positive side.
This is a great idea. But at the moment I have no idea how best to execute it. If the barrier to report is too great, such as having gone to the police, well you’ve missed the point because as OP notes, only 4% of incidents are reported to police. But if the barrier to report is too low, you will be stuck with unreliable data.
Maybe the reporting person has to verify their identity to the database proprietor, but can remain anonymous.
It’s just a technified version of the rumor mill. On one hand it has the same problem as the mill, that if you haven’t had time to check or don’t have a way to check it does you no good, and on the other hand it’s even less trustworthy than the rumor mill, due to the anonymity. When I ask someone for their opinion on somebody else, or when someone provides it of their own volition, I filter that through my own opinion of the person providing the info; I’ve got as much reason to trust an anonymous rumor mill as to believe that someone having a ton of contacts in LinkedIn means they’re good at their job.
You think coeds are going to look up guys they meet while drinking at frat parties? That’s not how these things work. Drill-Mecum was able to rape a bunch of women with impunity because college students tend to find themselves in dangerous situations (which is not in any way to suggest that his victims were at fault).
As others have said, this sounds like a recipe for wild abuse of power. You could have people cyber-bullying someone and smearing him with all kinds of false accusations. You could have people making false accusations against someone just because they don’t like his politics (i.e., a Trump supporter at Oberlin or a Bernie supporter at Liberty University.) Anonymity permits people to do terrible things.
And if the falsely smeared person can’t identify his accusers to sue for defamation, I think he would have legit legal grounds to sue whatever entity is hosting or running the website database.
Wasn’t there a site similar to this a while back that was shut down because of abuse? It was called girldontdatehim.com or something along those lines.
You had things like women posting their ex-husbands’ names on them, which got some of them in trouble regarding custody of their children.
It’s one of those things that sounds like a good idea, but isn’t IMHO.
I don’t think this could ever work. What do you think would happen if there was a website where anyone you’ve met could leave an anonymous review about you? Chances are that anyone who doesn’t like you would write something negative about you regardless of whether it was true or not. The ratings would quickly become meaningless.
