In general most companies don’t have a problem with supervisors meeting privately with their employees of the opposite sex. Why would they? Forgetting for a moment any worries about claims of discrimination this would just be bad for office morale. The only time we suggest a third party be brought in is in cases where the meeting is particularly sensitive. A warning, an investigation of some kind, termination, etc., etc. But the third party shouldn’t be some random person it should be someone in HR or another manager or director above the employee who is the focus of the meeting. It’s just a good idea to have another witness during these times. But for general meetings? Nah, meet in private.
If it supposedly happens all the time, but there’s evidence whatsoever that it happens, only impossible-to-follow-up anecdotes, then I don’t believe that it happens often enough to worry about. The lack of evidence is pretty damning here, people (especially in the other thread) talk about it like it’s a constant worry, and that false accusations are always hanging over their head, but there seems to be a distinct lack of anyone being able to show it happening.
He said that he touched her without her consent, that is confession to the actions that constitute harassment, which is confession to harassment. He may not believe that it is harassment, but he confessed to it regardless of whether he thinks he did something bad, much like a rapist could confess to having sex with someone without her consent, but refuse to use the word rape because he knew she really wanted it, or her clothes meant she wanted it, or some other excuse.
I agree that this is another problem with the scheme that prompted this discussion, that it doesn’t actually offer protection against false accusations. In fact, it probably makes them easier since the ‘always have a third party’ behavior is pretty suspicious.
The first one is worse, obviously.
Not so obvious?
The first case can end up with a person spending time in jail for something they never did, or their career and/or social standing ruined permanently. You don’t think it worse to be vilified for the rest of your life for something heinous you didn’t do as opposed to passing through an awful experience once?
For example, at 12 or thereabouts, a young man sexually harassed me on the street, as in grabbing my ass and asking me to have sex. Would I rather live with that (which doesn’t bother me in the least) or with the extremely serious stigma of a false accusation (let alone a conviction) of being a child molester? That’s as much a non-dilemma as I’d ever encounter.
The rape myth acceptance (RMA) scale is here:
There is a significant amount of information that low RMA scores are correlated with both justification and future offenses.
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Hopefully he was required to undergo treatment, or that his new manager has the ability to try and reduce these risks over time.
Because the fact that he though “that she neither invited nor rebuffed him and also that she was generally flirtatious.” directly matches up with RMA and/or rape positive attitudes.
Hold up. If the question is which makes my life worse going forward, I’d way rather have someone not believe me about harassment that occurred than not believe me about harassment that didn’t occur. The first one means my harasser suffers no consequences; the second one means I’m fucked.
But I don’t think that’s a great way to frame the situation.
What about these teachers and their students? I see it on the news all the time. A youngish looking female teacher in a highschool full of hormonal teenage boys. The teacher always gets fired. We had a Coach for the girls basketball team and he got touchy-feely with one young lady, it took about, oh , I don’t know about 5 minutes for him to be fired. There was a choir director in a church I attended for awhile, who supposedly made a pass at one if the pianists, he was ‘let go’ after a church officers meeting.
I’m sure there are any number of people who have had only one accuser and not lost their job. And the OP specifically asked not to introduce these. But good work trying to make this a right v left political argument.
It’s simply begging the question to assert that false accusations are a “rape myth.”
On what do you base your assertion that “if you keep working conditions professional, the risk of false-accusations is insignificant”? An enormous percentage of rape accusations have no proof one way or the other whether it happened. It is impossible to know what percentage of accusations are false.
Feminists throw around numbers like “only two to eight percent of rape accusations are false” which simply counts the cases where the accusation was more or less proven false, while simply assuming all the other allegations are true. They also say something like more than 90% of rapists are never convicted. You could just as easily assume the undetermined rape accusations are all false, and assert that 90+% of accusations are false since they were not proven true in a courtroom. (Not to mention that some people get falsely convicted-rape is the most common crime the Innocence Project exonerates people for-and also 8 percent is not an insiginificant number, it is one in 12.5.)
In cases of verbal sexual harassment or groping, it’s even less possible to know how many accusations are false. There’s generally no evidence at all unless there is a recording of the incident, or if someone confesses to the harassment or to a false allegation.
Actually several women have made accusations of sexual harassment against Thomas.
This observation emerged from a discussion started by mikecurtis who offered the observation “We are finally in an era where women are begining to feel empowered enough to speak up and tell their stories and be believed. If the occasional false accusation slips through the cracks, I, for one, am OK with it!”.
Might I respectfully suggest that one injustice does not make another injustice OK. Nor is there anything at all to be gained by trying to compare the degree of injustice involved as between two cases - whether or not one injustice is “worse” than another does not make that other no injustice at all. This is not a Victim Olympics, and neither injustice is trivial. The attitude that lead to these observations I have referred to is the stuff that witchhunts are made of. Recognition of prior wrongs against other women does not mean that a wrong against a different innocent man is to be brushed aside.
To answer the OP seems to require addressing two sorts of questions, first of principle and second, empirical.
First, is it possible in principle for a superior to be fired on the say-so of a lone employee? Yes. There is no rule that there must be external corroboration of a sexual complaint. Might in principle a complaint in those circumstances be false? Again in principle, yes.
Assertions that in these circumstances there is no “evidence” of who is right are misplaced. The evidence is the conflicting accounts themselves. The task is to determine who is telling the truth, and that is difficult, even with the overlay of prior allocation of an onus of proof. It is commonly possible to determine the relative probabilities of a complaint’s account vs that of her alleged assailant just on the relative likelihood of their accounts. If the subordinate suggests she was groped on the breasts for 3 minutes, and the supervisor says he was just brushing off lint, then it would be very likely she would be believed.
But these things must be done by a close examination of the detail on a case by case basis. There is no one-size-fits-all rule that generally the subordinate should be believed or the reverse, except to the extent that one side will bear an onus of proof. But an onus of proof merely means that one side is to be believed to some standard. It does not mean that there must be some species of “extra” evidence before they can be believed to that standard.
Indeed, I would go further and say that the idea that there is “no evidence” one way or another in a he said/she said situation is pernicious. It implies by default that nothing is to be done, which is the attitude that historically left subordinates unprotected.
But the more significant question is not whether it is in principle possible for a supervisor to be dismissed on the basis of a false accusation of a subordinate, but whether it happens and if so, how often. This is the empirical question.
Other sorts of false complaints occur not uncommonly. Embattled subordinates make false (or at least misconceived) claims of bullying to fend off managerial action against them. Some non-trivial proportion of “whistle-blowers” do so for similar reasons. In the literally billions of daily interactions between supervisors and staff in the US alone, it is difficult to imagine that a false accusation has NOT been made by a single unsupported subordinate, and that she has been wrongly believed. How often has this occurred? Very difficult to say.
For reasons given upthread, if we had a meta-process available to researchers for determining the cases where a complaint was false/true, we would use that process in the first place in the original investigations. As a result, there will inevitably be lots of breadth in the sorts of numbers that might be generated to answer this question, with varying degrees of reliability. But that does not mean research in the field must be dismissed, merely that the inherent weakness in such research must be taken into account in assessing the error bar.
But none of this means that we should resolve this difficult issue by adopting a default policy of never believing a subordinate, or of always believing a subordinate. Will a decision about where the truth lies, with the best will in the world, sometimes be made wrongly? Yes, across the entire spectrum of business in the world. But historically, it seems clear that when a wrong decision was made, it was overwhelmingly made in favour of the supervisor rather than the subordinate.
“rape myth acceptance” is a sociological term, and has lots of data behind it. The claim that they are myths have actually been identified as such through systematic research.
The unsubstantiated claim rates are similar to other felonies, yet there is bias in victim blaming
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](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0886260515591975)
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](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ab.21553/full)
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](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1097184X15602745)
I actually tried to find data that didn’t agree with my claims,
That said feel free to provide a cite as a rebuttal, but I couldn’t find any that stood up during peer review.
https://www.uni-potsdam.de/fileadmin01/projects/sozialpsychologie/images/pdf/Comment_Reece_Paper.pdf
And the pattern holds for stalking:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1068316X.2014.951648
And as for false claims,
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](https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/Publications_NSVRC_Overview_False-Reporting.pdf)
But feel free to come back with cites and an argument.
Because as presented, your argument first resorts to ad hominim attack of “Feminists throw around numbers”. Did I ever self-identify as a feminist, or can show show that my cites are purely feminist, or that the goal of equal rights and protections as the cause of feminism is a bad thing? To be fair, I do consider myself an ally to feminism, because I believe in equal rights…but you do realize you are talking to a middle aged white professional male?
The rest of the presented argument is just fear uncertainty and doubt, and borders on a straw-man. I never said that allegations were true and the claim that many “which simply counts the cases where the accusation was more or less proven false” is incorrect. In several of those studies included reports as “false” if the women failed to continue co-operating, even if that was out of fear of retribution or if there wasn’t enough evidence.
If it helps, there is also work on developing methods that can detect false reports.
And hell I lost the rest of my post due to an auth timeout…
I can’t speak for everyone’s “Real World”, but in mine, as a mid-level salaried employee in an company (not public), during our yearly “Harassment” training sessions, the following is stated directly from the corporate headquarters:
#1 - If you are accused of sexual harassment, we will err on the side of the accuser, and you will be terminated.
#2 - If you express any negative opinion, or act in a derogatory way towards any protected class, and are accused of such, we will err on the side of the accuser, and you will be terminated.
#3 - We suggest that you do not participate in any social media, as any negative statements there, or harassing statements will be considered hard evidence against you.
#4 - Don’t go to a bar with a co-worker and be overheard making statements against protected classes, or sexual comments about other employees. This is also grounds for termination.
Sounds harsh, but in all honesty, it does protect the company from being held liable for the actions of an employee.
Minus the thing about ‘feminists’ (I don’t think this has anything to do with ‘feminism’ per se, it has to do with understanding of statistics), your claim is true. That being said, while the actual underlying false accusation rate is higher than “two to eight percent”, it’s still not that high. Lisak is the originator of the “2% to 10%” meta-analysis, he did an original study in 2010, and if you look at his tables and take out the “equivocal” cases, the rate of false accusations goes up from 6% to 17%. Which means that any given rape accusation is still five times more likely to be true, than not.
There’s another more recent meta-analysis where, when you substract equivocal cases, the overall rate of false accusation is around 10%. These numbers are higher than the ones Joe Biden was trotting out a year or two ago, but they still aren’t very high.
There is one study that found a false allegation rate of 50%, and I think some of the criticisms of that study are really weak, but two criticisms are really strong: it’s a very small study, it was from one university, and it’s wildly an outlier from the studies that find rates more in the 10% range. You can’t conclude much from a study that size at one university.
I doubt false accusations of sexual harassment are all that common either.
It sounds like the company is guaranteeing that if you accuse somebody of any of several different offenses, they promise to fire them without any further due process. Wouldn’t the company be liable for improperly terminating people?
Note, I don’t think empty accusations are common, and I think this policy would typically be terminating guilty employees. But to broadly announce that they will always side with accusers regardless of proof, by terminating the accused on the first offense, seems pretty extreme.
When I was a college freshman in 2005, my college had the male students sit in on a session like this. The message from the Dean was to the effect of, “If you are in a 1-on-1 situation with a woman, and she accuses you of something, and it’s your word against hers - well, we all know who everyone’s going to believe, and it’s not going to be you.” Harsh but straight to the point.
Sounds like the company stating a hard line to discourage people pressing the boundaries of what’s OK and to CYA. Whether the harsh policy will actually be applied when a long-time, respected manager who’s friends with the higher ups is accused of harassment by an intern is an open question though, and from my experience corporations like to say a lot of things about their policies that don’t actually happen IRL. Like ISO9001 compliance, where there will be books and books of procedures that people can point to when an auditor comes through, but that otherwise don’t have any effect on how the business operates.
That’s the way I see it. The company can’t be accused of failing to have a policy against sexual harassment but it doesn’t change the practices. It’s likely to put even more pressure on anyone who comes forward knowing themselves and being told that someone will lose their job if they go forward with their claims.
You are quite wrong in that statement. The threat is quite real and the damages are quite real.
Here’s an example: I am a martial arts instructor. I own my school and have a licensed affiliation with my sanctioning organization. I have a substantial financial stake in this school.
By the terms of my license agreement, if I am accused of sexual harassment or the like, I am banned from my own school. I cannot teach, I cannot even set foot on the premises, even though I own the school. This ban stays in place until the incident is investigated and I am cleared. Such an event would bankrupt me. I cannot afford the loss of revenue or the costs of an attorney for such a situation.
This is why we have instituted a mandatory 2-on-1 policy and installed video cameras in the school.
What is the point of having cameras if simply the accusation gets you banned? Do the cameras record sound? I could walk into your school, go right up to you in full view of everyone else, and then say you sexually harassed me verbally in a low voice that no one else could hear. How does a 2-on-1 policy and cameras prevent that?
I mean, that policy you have is a bunch of crap.
I’d be interested in a source for these various stats.
But in any event, it’s worth appreciating that it’s not like the percentage of false accusations is a fixed number unaffected by outside influences. To the extent that accusations - whether true or false - have limited impact on the accused and potential repercussions for the accuser, then they’re more likely to be used in extreme circumstances and less in ambiguous or invalid circumstances. By tilting the playing field and making such accusations more high impact for the accused and lessening the likelihood of blowback for the accuser, then it would increase the incentive and decrease the disincentive for false accusations. The implication would be that it’s likely that such accusations have increased in recent years, such that older studies might not capture it fully, and also that they’re likely to increase going forward.
“long-time, respected manager who’s friends with the higher ups” is a strong qualifier, and was not part of your original question.
A “long-time, respected manager who’s friends with the higher ups” can survive a lot of things that ordinary employees might not survive. That’s not a valid reflection of corporate policy.