I have no experience with corporate culture in Canada. My understanding is that Canada doesn’t allow “at will employment” which is the norm in the US.
In the US you would rarely hear about such things except anecdotally unless you were in upper management or human resources and in those cases it would be under strict confidentiality. At will employement means an employer can fire an employee for any reason or no reason at all. In the termination paperwork they probably wouldn’t write: “accused of sexual harassment, and honestly we need to downsize anyway and this employee isn’t stellar so we’re just going to fire him and save the time and expense of an investigation and possible litigation”. All you’re really going to find is anecdotal evidence if you don’t have direct first hand experience in such a situation, and a basic web search will yield you no shortage of anecdotes about this.
Of course. You do you. Not sure how you even leave your house if you’re erring on the side of caution of everything that has the same chance of happening as you being falsely accused of harassing a woman or child.
I would consider it to be small talk. How about those Cubs? Who do you like in the Super Bowl? Did you get your tax bill, yet? Mine’s Outrageous! Did I see you getting out of a red Maserati? Didn’t you go to Barrington High School? If you were a tree, what kind of a tree would you be. But, I’m not constantly looking to be offended.
There’s a non-zero chance of being harassed for being a guy minding your own business in a park, and this is one area where I do think society can improve while not opening themselves up to danger: after all how many abductions occur in broad daylight in a busy park from a person who had been previously lingering on a bench and not interacting with anyone? And we’re not talking just getting the stink-eye but cops coming and everything. All else being equal, trying to avoid even passively being around children is warranted: after all, the risk is low but not nonexistent and by definition you are not making a lifestyle modification to exercise this caution.
Well, since you haven’t been taken away in handcuffs, everything must be just peachy right? It’s not just about being accused. People gossip, and sometimes that gossip can be dangerous because these days, some people tend to gravitate towards, “He’s a creeper!”.
Heck, I can remember when my son busted his head on the coffee table and I had to take him to the emergency room. The nurse started asking him questions like “Did your daddy do this to you?”. My son, being autistic and not very articulate just answered in the affirmative, not really understanding what he was saying yes to (We were horse playing, he slipped out of my grasp and did a face plant into the coffee table. So to his mind, daddy did this to him)
Nurse notified the authorities, and after a brief talk with them, they decided all was good.
Now this is with my own frick’n son. I wonder if things would have went so smoothly if this were someone else’s kid. And I wonder if any of this would have risen to the level it did if I were a woman.
Non-zero? Sure. There is a non-zero chance that I will be hit by lightening too. How much above zero do you think? On what basis do you think that? And is the chance of the harassment being anything worse than just that some mothers as irrationally fearful of strange men possibly being predators as some men are of being “in trouble” for being a man near a park, even a non-zero number? Maybe but if so barely.
Of course you are free to have irrational fears and to act on them. Just don’t blame others for your having them or use your having them as prove of their rationality. Grrr! you might or might not be interested in knowing that autistic kids are abused more commonly than are neurotypical children. Significantly more than just “nonzero.” I doubt it would surprise you as you know how difficult meltdowns and rigid behaviors can be to deal with, how stressful the situation can sometimes be - a parent who is prone to lose it is more likely to have triggers with those challenges than with other children. The harm caused by asking and by you having to have a brief talk with the authorities because of a confused affirmative answer? Pretty dang small. Your having a conversation. The harm caused by nurses not asking about what seemed to them to be a suspicious injury and not getting an affirmative response investigated when abuse was actually involved? Substantial.
Choosing one choice over the other when one is more dangerous than the other, all else being equal, is the very definition of rational.* It would be irrational for me to take hours to research how much this happens to win points on the Internet when I only rarely encounter the situation myself. It is a rational use of my time to not prove to myself that the anecdotes are false because that takes less time than simply modifying my behavior.
Unless you have cites yourself that this never happens.
*On the other hand, I don’t go around proclaiming that “all mothers are potential false accusers!” Some are, some aren’t.
I don’t know what you are trying to tell me. Are you saying that, as a man, I SHOULD constantly be afraid of false accusations? Because I am saying I am not.
Once when I was in a fight with my wife, she got a bit crazy. I ran into our bedroom to get away from her and locked the door. She repeated kicked the door to try to get in until she jammed her knee and fell down crying.
I then had to take her to the emergency room and sat with her while the doctor examined her and asked her questions which she clearly lied about. The doctor then said to me “Hey, the emergency beds are getting filled up, can you wait in the waiting area?” and then I left the area and went and waited in the waiting area.
Afterward, my wife told me that doctor asked her “Do you feel safe?” and she answered “Yes” and then they released her. Besides the fact that nobody asked ME if I felt safe, I experienced no problems with anything after this visit. Because I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s pretty clear to me that “Not doing anything wrong” goes a long way to making sure I’m not falsely accused of anything.
Laying in bed with my then wife. Just laying on top of the covers, talking. Nothing in the world wrong.
Suddenly she rolls away from me, back toward me, leaps up into air and comes down on my genitals knee first with all of her weight.
While I’m in a fetal position thinking about going to the emergency room, she goes from “It was an accident” (NO) to “why are you still PRETENDING to be in pain when I’ve apologized?” in a single breath.
I didn’t go to the ER, because I was afraid of what she would tell them after something like that came out of her mouth.
That was one of the three times she violently assaulted me in bed.
Okay Ludovic. The answer to “on what basis” is “none whatsoever.” Thanks for answering clearly.
Is avoiding sitting in parks is to you equal to being able to sit comfortably in a park? Then why complain that you feel you don’t feel you can do it? It’s the same to you either way. Me, I like being able to sit in the park. YMMV.
The cases I can find of men being arrested for being near a park are ones like this one where a man was exposing himself. And cases in which a known convicted child sex offender was charged with “Unlawful Communication with a Child in a Public Park” (unlawful because of being a convicted sex offender). A few people questioned by police after taking pictures of kids they were not related to. And definitely a few cases of paranoid irrational mothers acting badly usually involving photos being taken which tends to ping the paranoid as creepy. (Harm level in those rare cases? Man leaves, maybe annoyed. Not much of “danger”.) Not surprisingly not a single case can I find of a man just sitting in a park being arrested. OTOH many of us males can bear witness to sitting in parks to enjoy the day on benches near playgrounds, watching kids at play, with no adverse outcomes. Your giving up that pleasure on the basis of no risk of anything that reaches the level of “dangerous” - again only rational if you don’t want to be there anyway.
Reductio ad absurdum means trying to disprove a sensible point by citing an extreme, absurd example.
It’s a long way from “being prudent and aware regarding situations where your behavior might be called into question” to “never leaving the house and being afraid ALL THE TIME.”
An example of being prudent and aware might be for a an adult man alone choosing NOT to sit on a bench near a children’s playground every day at the same time for several weeks with binoculars and a camera. Maybe you’re actually bird watching and a rare species nests in the trees near the playground, and you never even notice the kids, but such behavior would not be prudent.
However, it’s absurd to leap to the conclusion from that example to “a man should NEVER leave his house and ALWAYS be afraid.”
See what I mean?
I’m sure most people are never falsely accused, but I make judgments based on my rule of “what are the consequences of a miscalculation?” and the consequences these days for a man of hanging around a kids’ playground with a camera could be devastating to him. Sad but true.
One of my favorite movies is the original Miracle on 34th Street with Natalie Wood as a little girl (age 10-ish) who doesn’t believe in Santa Clause but meets a man who might indeed BE the real Santa Claus. There’s a scene near the end where Natalie is tucked up in bed and the white-bearded Kris Kringle comes in and sits on the side of her twin bed so she can show him a picture of something she really wants for Christmas. They’re in her bedroom alone with the door shut. You would never see that in a movie made today. Right or wrong–the world has changed.
ETA:
This seems to me unrealistically optimistic. Just ask the men who have been exonerated after years of incarceration for rape after DNA evidence became usable.
As a man I know their have been times when I misread what I thought were signals. Usually a man can avoid great embarrassment in these cases if he makes his first advance a little more on the subtle side. We still might be up for a little embarrassment but nothing too drastic. Another thing that I have experienced mostly as a young man and have heard many other men relay stories where I suspect the same type of thing was going on. When we get into that mode where we think sex is going to happen part of our judgment goes out the window. We can miss subtle cues that this is just harmless flirting. When a guys says she led me on then got pissed when I tried to kiss her I suspect this is what might be happening. I do think women should understand men are wired slightly different on how we read signals.
