#MeToo backlash is hurting women (Bloomberg article)

[k9bfriender]

@Strassia

Franklin was talking about using the power of the state to send people to prison or execute them. This thread is about people being fired or disciplined at work. How do you stand on this statement

Better a 100 innocent people suffer continued harassment and/or assault than one innocent person have to find a new job.

Or the more accurate: Better 1000 innocent people suffer continued harassment and/or assault than one innocent person have to find a new job.

Neither of these takes into account that even with #MeToo, it is still a long a grueling process to attempt to report sexual misconduct.
Despite all the concerns about how unproven accusations destroy the accused, that is not usually what happens. The last high profile accusation, despite credible evidence, which was probably not sufficient for a prosecution but still enough to cast doubt on a job applicant, ended with accused being elevated to one of the most powerful positions in the country, and the accuser having to flee her home for the safety of her family.

I hope you are not thinking that I am defending the use of Franklin’s statement in this thread. My next point, which has now already been made by others in this thread, was that the OP is describing men who are discriminating against women based on the fear that they may cuase “problems”. The way I see it, they are being accused of being potential problems through no fault of their own except for daring to be a woman wishing to enjoy the same work privileges as a man, and to not hire them is to effectively accuse them of being false accusers, with no evidence whatsoever.

This makes the woman in this scenario the innocent who is being made to suffer, multiplied by thousands, so that the single guilty man can go free.

@Whack-a-Mole

The problem, I think, is that #METOO encompasses more than just false accusations.

• A guy can get in trouble for something he did years, even decades ago. There is no time limit.

What do you mean by trouble? Dirty looks and social ostracization?

If it is beyond the statue of limitations,t hen there is no legal trouble to get into. If the complaint is that your peers think poorly of you when they find out what you have done in your past, that’s not really the fault of those who point out what you did in your past, it is your fault for having done that stuff, and assuming that it would never come back to hurt you.

• All bad behavior is treated as equally vile and worthy of the full measure of punishment available. (E.G. There is a big difference between Al Franken and Matt Lauer but they both lost their jobs).

And the follow up is the same too? If Franken seeing the same penalties as Lauer?

It is a problem that if you are in public, then your job depends on you being above reproach, and seeming above reproach. Being a public figure is a privilege, one that can be lost due to poor judgment as much as maliciousness.

• The accusation is all it takes. No prosecution. No finding of facts. This has been of particular issue on college campuses (where often the accused is not even allowed representation and law enforcement is kept out of it).

I disagree. Yeah, an accusation is all it takes to maybe make some people look at you funny, but it does take more than that to get you fired, far more than that to get you into legal jeopardy.

That’s a little scary.

Only if you have something to be scared of.

And can we stop with the “very few people are affected by false accusations” bit? Comparatively speaking very few Catholic children have been raped by priests but no one says to let it be because it is only a small percent of the whole.

And more people have been harassed and have been discriminated against than children molested by Catholic priests, and yet here you are, saying to let it be.

The reason that the catholic church is in trouble is not because people believe that the priests are inherently pedaphiles, or that being catholic somehow makes you complicit in their activities. The reason that people think poorly of the Catholic church is because they didn’t address the abuse, and covered it up instead. Your analogy is poorly chosen, as it only demonstrates exactly why people should think poorly of men, if men plan to cover up accounts of abuse, rather than investigate them.

[Sunny_Daze]

@Whack-a-Mole

And can we stop with the “very few people are affected by false accusations” bit? Comparatively speaking very few Catholic children have been raped by priests but no one says to let it be because it is only a small percent of the whole.

Sure, as soon as “but, false accusations” stops being raised immediately when someone being harassed brings a claim forward. Until then it’s valid to bring up the reality of false accusations whenever the handwaving and dismissal starts following an allegation.

[Kimstu]

@Whack-a-Mole

The problem, I think, is that #METOO encompasses more than just false accusations.

Not seeing why you consider this a “problem”? The thing about #MeToo is that it is overwhelmingly, AFAICT, about true accusations.

@Whack-a-Mole

A guy can get in trouble for something he did years, even decades ago. There is no time limit.

So? Again, we’re not talking about the rules of the criminal justice system here, AFAICT (and if we are, to the best of my knowledge the #MeToo movement is not trying to change criminal law or the legal rights of the defendant).

Why should somebody who did something wrong automatically be held immune from any kind of “trouble” for it after a certain period of time? If, say, you screwed your wife’s bridesmaid on your wedding day and she didn’t find out about it for twenty years, do you think that would or should keep you from getting in any “trouble” with her when she finally did find out about it? Or if you belonged to the KKK in your youth, do you think everybody else would be obligated to just ignore that if they found out about it decades later?

@Whack-a-Mole

All bad behavior is treated as equally vile and worthy of the full measure of punishment available. (E.G. There is a big difference between Al Franken and Matt Lauer but they both lost their jobs).

More vague fearmongering waffle conflating different types of “punishment”. The Democratic Party felt that association with Al Franken after the negative public reaction to his misconduct was bad PR for them, so Franken resigned. Matt Lauer was fired from NBC on the basis of accusations that he admitted were substantially true.

Which of those, if either, are you trying to claim was an unjust outcome?

@Whack-a-Mole

The accusation is all it takes. No prosecution. No finding of facts. This has been of particular issue on college campuses (where often the accused is not even allowed representation and law enforcement is kept out of it).

“All it takes” to do what, exactly? Did you miss the part where both the men you mentioned confirmed that the allegations against them, at least in large part, were true?

Again, you are going to have to provide some specific examples of something you think was a genuinely unjust outcome of a #MeToo accusation if you want anybody to be alarmed about it.

@Whack-a-Mole

That’s a little scary.

What is it exactly that scares you about the fact that admitted sexual harassers lost jobs and reputations when knowledge of their harassing behavior became public?

@Whack-a-Mole

And can we stop with the “very few people are affected by false accusations” bit? Comparatively speaking very few Catholic children have been raped by priests but no one says to let it be because it is only a small percent of the whole.

As iiandyiiii has repeatedly noted, nobody at all is saying that false accusations are okay or that we should overlook false accusations. And certainly if we found any kind of high-level cover-up of false accusation scandals, as with the Catholic clergy sex-abuse scandals, we should denounce and expose it.

But all the current evidence suggests that there is no such cover-up and that the likelihood of a woman falsely accusing a man is extremely small. It would be horrifically unjust and stupid to decide that women in general are dangerously untrustworthy because of the very small chance that a woman might falsely accuse a man of harassing her. And that’s the kind of unjust stupidity that you seem to be arguing for here.

[JRDelirious]

***If ***there is a backlash, the blame and shame goes to the ones who *are *“backlashing.” Not to the ones who say “hey, stop doing wrong things”.

@Budget_Player_Cadet

Stephen Zweig has got it in one:

“If men avoid working or traveling with women alone, or stop mentoring women for fear of being accused of sexual harassment,” he said, “those men are going to back out of a sexual harassment complaint and right into a sex discrimination complaint.”

@Kimstu

If you have a workplace policy of never being alone with any employee regardless of gender, then I don’t see anything discriminatory about that.

The problem is not men “protecting themselves” by maintaining gender-neutral high standards of dignified professionalism in their workplace behavior: the problem is men “protecting themselves” by discriminating against women.

Right. A uniform policy by which all interactions among members of the work team are carried out on clear sensible professional terms and *nobody *risks a compromising situation or the appearance thereof is advantageous, it is not that absurdly complicated to establish, and FWIW non-fraternization policies between higher and lower echelons have existed for lifetimes even before there were that many women in some workplaces.

What the OP article describes is a reactive(reactionary?) defensive-flailing response, not duly pondered, whereby the workplace leaders, rather than think it through and face the challenge of change, take the path of least resistance in running away from it. They suffer from a Failure of Imagination. Instead of coming up with a new better way to engage with a part of the workforce in everyday personal interaction, in a way that makes that part of the population more confident to contribute to the business, they’d rather not even try. And there you get into what Zweig points out, and as has been mentioned…

@k9bfriender

If you are not keeping proper documentation and records of performance and disciplinary actions, then you may find yourself in a situation where it is believed that you have terminated someone due to their demographics, rather than their performance or discipline, and you may find it difficult to prove that you didn’t. However, if you are not keeping proper documentation and records of performance and disciplinary actions, you may actually be acting on prejudice, and not even realize it.

Essentially, your complaint is only something that would be feared by poorly run or ignorant management or owners. Unfortunately, such people are not all that rare. Even your cavalier admission that you expect that people are terminated based on ease of termination due to their demographic status, rather than based on their performance and disciplinary history, shows that that attitude is very dangerously rampant.

…the attempt at not risking an accusation of discrimination on the job, will result in you being nailed for discriminating *before *the job.

[octopus]

Sounds like conditions are perfect for a corporation to hire these women who are already working at a ~27% discount and with the savings in labor crush their competitors.

I’m not surprised by any of this. People have to take every cost into account when hiring and working with people. What is there to be gained and what is there to be lost? These are questions that must be answered in business even if it leads to outcomes that are unpredicted by zealots. Now, I’m not saying wanting equality and respect is problematic. What is problematic is when due process is tossed out the window and decisions are made to appease the loudest mob. France is about to learn how counterproductive that is.

[Kimstu]

@octopus

Now, I’m not saying wanting equality and respect is problematic. What is problematic is when due process is tossed out the window and decisions are made to appease the loudest mob.

I repeat to you the question I asked Whack-A-Mole: Exactly what outcome(s) of the #MeToo campaign for increased equality and respect are you claiming have been unjust? In what specific case(s) are you claiming that “due process” has been “tossed out the window”?

A lot of the #MeToo-deploring head-shakers here are heavy on the vague foreboding pontifications but awfully light on any specific details of alleged injustices towards the accused, or alleged popular sympathy for false accusations.

[clairobscur]

@Sage_Rat

We should probably start to teach dating in schools, with a specific set of steps outlined, that allows for proper consent, no mixed signals, and starts from the position of shared world outlook and interests rather than physical appearance and “chemistry” (aka, the mutual desire to start boning). Once that standard is set, I would expect it to migrate up into the adult world.

I see no point in reducing the importance of physical attraction and desire in dating. I think it can’t be done, and that even if it could it would be a net negative. The reason why we’re dating is that we’re seeking sexual partners. If it weren’t about sex, we would just seek friends. Attraction and chemistry are fundamental. If you were actually raising people to date on the basis of mutual interests rather than chemistry, the result would be a massive level of hypocrisy from people who wouldn’t conform to the model, and a lot of misery and insatisfaction from people who would.

Desire isn’t a bad thing. It’s a good thing, a great thing. I worries me a lot how it currently tends to be demonized. Being attracted by someone’s, say, IQ or social status isn’t in any way nobler than being attracted by his body or face. And “chemistry”, which isn’t only (or even mainly) about physical appearance, is fundamental if you want to have a remote chance of being happy in your couple. Having “common interests” isn’t in any way a guarantee that your couple will successful and long lasting. I would even say that it’s barely relevant. Not having “chemistry”, on the other hand, is a recipe for disaster.

And finally, not everybody is in for a long relationship based on shared interests/world outlook or whatever else. Plenty of people just want to fuck, and for this pretty much the only thing that matter is chemistry.

[TimeWinder]

@iiandyiiii

Men who believe this are delusional and so indoctrinated by the patriarchal bent of society at large (and especially the most powerful and wealthy institutions and organizations) that they are incapable of seeing such things accurately.

Or they’re Republican, where the idea that most–probably all–of these accusations are false is basically canon.

[Whack-a-Mole]

@k9bfriender

Only if you have something to be scared of.

Everyone should be scared of your and others here contempt and dismissal of due process in favor of the court of public opinion (because when has that ever gone wrong?).

[clairobscur]

@HurricaneDitka

So we can put you down as preferring that 100 guilty sexual harassers go free rather than one innocent one be wrongly punished?

Wasn’t that (better to have 100 guilty men free than one innocent man unjustly punished) a common adage until very recently?

[Kimstu]

@Whack-a-Mole

Everyone should be scared of your and others here contempt and dismissal of due process in favor of the court of public opinion

Once again:

In exactly what case(s) of #MeToo accusations are you claiming that due process has been violated in any way? And exactly where are posters here expressing “contempt and dismissal” of due process?

I’m starting to wonder if you’re one of the many people who erroneously conflate “contempt of due process” with “other people expressing an opinion that I’m not sure I agree with”.

[Whack-a-Mole]

@Kimstu

Once again:

In exactly what case(s) of #MeToo accusations are you claiming that due process has been violated in any way? And exactly where are posters here expressing “contempt and dismissal” of due process?

I’m starting to wonder if you’re one of the many people who erroneously conflate “contempt of due process” with “other people expressing an opinion that I’m not sure I agree with”.

Here’s a start:

Due process is the constitutional guarantee of equal treatment under the law and fundamental fairness in legal proceedings. The late Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas wrote in 1967 that it is “the primary and indispensable foundation of individual freedom,” and the high court has ruled that due process requires that laws not be “unreasonable, arbitrary, or capricious.” But many campus proceedings seem to fit that description. For example, it is not unusual for a male student to be investigated and adjudicated for sexual assault, yet to never receive specific, written notice of the allegations against him. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a civil-liberties group, found in a report released on September 5 analyzing due-process procedures at the country’s top-ranked colleges and universities that about half fail to offer this minimal protection.

<snip>

In a 2014 Yale Law & Policy Review article, Janet Napolitano asked, “Should there be any recognition of an accused student’s rights against self-incrimination in the administrative investigation?” The answer has been no in recent years. If the accused declines to answer questions, he can be expelled. But whatever he says in an administrative hearing can be turned over to law-enforcement authorities and used against him in a criminal proceeding.

SOURCE: The Uncomfortable Truth About Campus Rape Policy - The Atlantic

[Whack-a-Mole]

@iiandyiiii

False accusers are universally condemned and excoriated. We can long move past the worries about false accusations – they’re very rare…

How do you know?

A central tenet of advocates seeking greater accountability for sexual assault is that the complainant is virtually always the one telling the truth. As a 2014 White House report, “Rape and Sexual Assault: A Renewed Call to Action,” stated, “Only 2–10 percent of reported rapes are false.” Campus materials aimed at students make similar assertions.

But as Michelle J. Anderson, the president of Brooklyn College and a scholar of rape law, acknowledged in a 2004 paper in the Boston University Law Review, “There is no good empirical data on false rape complaints either historically or currently.” The data have not improved since that time. In a 2015 working paper, Lieutenant Colonel Reggie Yager, a U.S. Air Force judge advocate who has defended men accused of sexual assault, took a comprehensive look at the research on the incidence of false rape reports, and concluded that the studies confirming the overwhelming veracity of accusers are methodologically unsound.

For instance, consider Yager’s analysis of a 2010 study titled “False Allegations of Sexual Assault: An Analysis of Ten Years of Reported Cases.” The study is one of the few to examine false reports with specific reference to campus allegations, and is frequently cited by government officials and activists. David Lisak, a former associate professor of psychology at UMass Boston and a prominent consultant on campus sexual assault, is the lead author; when he and his co-authors reviewed the reports of sexual assault at one northeastern university to determine what percentage were false, they concluded that the figure was not quite 6 percent. “Over 90 percent of reports of rape are not fabrications. They’re not false allegations,” he said in a videotaped interview describing the research.

Yager writes, however, that about 45 percent of the cases Lisak reviewed did not proceed, because there was insufficient evidence, or the complainant withdrew from the process or couldn’t identify the perpetrator, or the allegation did not rise to the level of a sexual assault. In other words, no one could possibly determine whether these claims were true or false.

SOURCE: The Uncomfortable Truth About Campus Rape Policy - The Atlantic

[Kimstu]

@Whack-a-Mole

Here’s a start:

In your attempt to find something to blame on the #MeToo movement (which went viral in 2017), you don’t seem to have read the part of your own cite that clearly attributes these problematic campus sexual-assault rules to federal regulations promulgated well before #MeToo:

[…] many of the university’s actions—the interim restrictions, the full-bore investigation and adjudication even though R.M.’s own statement does not describe a sexual assault—were mandated or strongly encouraged by federal rules that govern the handling of sexual-assault allegations on campus today. These rules proliferated during Barack Obama’s administration, as did threats of sanctions if schools didn’t follow them precisely. The impulse behind them was noble and necessary—sexual assault is a scourge that should not be tolerated in any society, much less by institutions of higher learning. But taken in sum, these directives have left a mess of a system, and many unintended consequences. […]

On April 4, 2011, the country’s more than 4,600 institutions of higher education received an unexpected letter from the Obama administration’s Department of Education […] The letter, and other guidance that followed, laid out a series of steps that all schools would be required to take to correct what the administration described as a collective failure to address sexual assault.

Nor have you provided cites of any posters here expressing “contempt and dismissal of due process”.

[Whack-a-Mole]

@Kimstu

In your attempt to find something to blame on the #MeToo movement (which went viral in 2017), you don’t seem to have read the part of your own cite that clearly attributes these problematic campus sexual-assault rules to federal regulations promulgated well before #MeToo:
Nor have you provided cites of any posters here expressing “contempt and dismissal of due process”.

Where do you think #METOO arose from? You think it just sprang out of nowhere with everyone behind it in 2017? Such things just don’t spring whole cloth out of nothing and besides…it is over 11 years old.

A black woman named Tarana Burke is the original creator of the #MeToo campaign that has recently taken over social media.

Burke, founder of youth organization Just Be Inc., created the “Me Too” campaign in 2007 long before hashtags even existed. The 44-year-old told Ebony Magazine that she created the campaign as a grass-roots movement to reach sexual assault survivors in underprivileged communities.

SOURCE: The 'Me Too' Campaign Was Created By A Black Woman 10 Years Ago | HuffPost Women

And as for the contempt for due process here it is exhibited that few are arguing for its necessity and are content to let the accusation be sufficient (is it not a central tenet of #METOO that the woman is always to be believed?). I just cited a long article for you (which is one of a three part series I think) showing that this is not a tiny issue. It is something that affects many thousands on campuses across the US and can affect many more in their jobs.

[Kimstu]

@Whack-a-Mole

Where do you think #METOO arose from? You think it just sprang out of nowhere with everyone behind it in 2017?

Yes, that recent development, beginning with a viral tweet in October 2017, is what is generally known as #MeToo, and that’s how the OP of this thread refers to it. If you mean some related phenomenon such as the Obama-era campus sexual-assault crackdown or just the current zeitgeist in general, you should say so.

@Whack-a-Mole

And as for the contempt for due process here it is exhibited that few are arguing for its necessity and are content to let the accusation be sufficient

As I’ve asked you before: sufficient for what? It is not an infringement of due process, or any kind of “dismissal and contempt for due process”, for people to form a personal opinion about an accusation.

Nobody here is arguing that any accused person should be denied any of their rights, so your claim that they are expressing “dismissal and contempt for due process” is nonsense.

[Lemur866]

@HurricaneDitka

Benjamin Franklin is said to have written "That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer". I wonder if many (or any) posters in this thread would agree with this.

So better that 100 false accusers should escape than one innocent accuser should suffer?

[Voyager]

@HurricaneDitka

So we can put you down as preferring that 100 guilty sexual harassers go free rather than one innocent one be wrongly punished?

I’m not sure about today, but in the past this was probably pretty close to what happened. Is this good in your book?

[Kimstu]

Exactly. What the #MeToo movement is about, AFAICT and insofar as such a diffuse popular movement can be “about” any one thing, is simply rejecting and condemning the normalization of sexual assault and harassment.

I’m not seeing anybody saying that legal rights or due process don’t matter. I’m not seeing anybody arguing that false accusations are okay or shouldn’t be punished. What I’m seeing instead is millions of women insisting that sexual harassment and assault are not acceptable, not normal, not “just the way men are”, not something that women should have to put up with. Fundamentally, it’s sexist attitudes that #MeToo is attempting to change, not the legal system.

And the reason a lot of people are howling so hard in response is because they’re used to not having to take sexual assault and harassment seriously as a form of intolerable misconduct. They are so desperately worried about the possibility of the one innocent man suffering partly because they don’t really think what the hundred guilty men did, or whether they get away with it, is such a big deal.

[HurricaneDitka]

@iiandyiiii

No idea what the fuck you’re trying to say (Crystal Mangum? Who’s in jail right now, and was excoriated by pretty much everyone?). …

She’s in jail for murdering someone. AFAICT, she received no criminal punishment for her false accusation. Perhaps if she had, her murder victim would still be alive.