No, actually you don’t. You don’t have to believe either one, and unless you have a good reason to trust one more than the other that’s what you should do.
Take SlackerInc’s stpry about his friend, who wasn’t even in the same state as his accuser at the time the alleged assault happened. Why should people choose to believe either the accuser or the accused, and not just realise they don’t know what happened and leave it at that? That’s what should be done.
The only possible way that could happen would be if they offered no defence whatsoever, and for the harshest possible punishment even that’s not sufficient - the death penalty requires a defence to be provided and overcome.
They’re not, and I don’t think anyone here’s claimed that they are. My point is that they should require some level of proof beyond an unsupported accusation when there is a credible denial.
As opposed to the story mentioned earlier in the thread, where someone had strong evidence that they were in another state and people still considered him a rapist based on an unsupported accusation.
Based on that viewpoint, I could accuse you of molesting me, and people should believe me. Why wouldn’t they, I said it, I’m a victim, that should be enough, right?
Do you really feel the statements “It is ethically correct for victims to share their story, if they chose” and “Victims should always be believed by people who hear their story” mean the same thing?
It’s not even plausible human behavior. We can dismiss out of hand anybody who says that if their wife or child or best friend told them credibly that they’d been abused in some way by a specific person, that they would spend one second thinking about reputational harm to the other person before they decided how to respond.
You either have a serious neurological condition that allows you to compartmentalize your experiences in a way that isn’t healthy, or you’re just talking bullshit on the internet.
Say the alleged victim’s story is listened to.
The alleged assailant’s current or potential employer/school listens to it and makes a judgement.
The judgement is that the accuser is/ is not credible and the accused is exonerated/censured.
If so, so far fine.
Problems arise when those employers/schools decide they’d rather NOT bother either way and either dismiss the complaint out of hand, or adopt a “fire/expel first, ask questions never” policy so as to just make it no longer their problem.
It places a burden on the rest of us to listen and evaluate and make a considered judgment call and not try to render it “not our problem” - either by shutting her up, or by acting rashly.
And we need to accept that yes, in the eyes of the victim, if our conclusion is she’s not credible and this does not merit punishment, we will have inflicted an injustice upon her. We have to be willing to live with that if we trust our judgment.
I do accept that people lie, in fact you’re lying through your fucking teeth about the argument I am making, despite the fact you’ve been corrected and refuted several times. If for some reason you misinterpreted something that was said, I’ve clarified myself more than enough times by now as to what my actual stance is. You are either being deliberately obtuse or you’re just intellectually dishonest.
But please, keep setting up that strawman and knocking it down.
[QUOTE=Spice Weasel]
The mob justice thing bothers me a lot, as a general social problem. It harkens back to the days of stocks and stoning, and some studies have shown most people derive pleasure from punishing people they see as having violated a social norm. I heard a fascinating interview about it on the Nerdist podcast. Some guy whose name escapes me wrote a book called So You’ve Been Publically Shamed. It’s always bothered me, and even in the case of rapist assholes it still bothers me. I don’t believe in vigilante justice.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Spice Weasel]
People are either going to listen to the experiences of survivors, or they aren’t.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Spice Weasel]
You people, on the outside, having to make decisions about who to believe, that’s your own problem. Feel free to consider things like a) overall credibility of person making the claim, or b) corroborating evidence. I don’t care. If you were my mother and you knew, and you looked the other way, and then you punished me for it, you can go straight to hell. If you were my grandmother and you didn’t take me at my word, you can go straight to hell. My abuser’s business associate? Stranger off the street? Person who doesn’t know either of us? I don’t give a fuck, though I’m definitely not inviting anyone over to Sunday dinner who can’t take me at my word. I have already accepted that injustice is a permanent part of this experience.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Spice Weasel]
As Manda Jo pointed out, your argument is an argument for being skeptical of an accusation, it is not an argument for being silent if you are a victim.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Spice Weasel]
And hey, let’s not confuse the law with everyday life. i wouldn’t want my abuser to go to prison without the evidence to convict him. That’s a legal standard I respect.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Spice Weasel]
Again, we are talking about two completely different things. That is, the right of a victim of a crime to talk about it vs. the right of a person to make up their own damned mind about what happened. I don’t see any conflict there, but apparently you do.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Spice Weasel]
I agree with all of this. I agree the media/mob justice approach is terrible. I even agree the defendant shouldn’t be named to the media until a conviction is made. I totally agree with the legal standards and I totally recognize that standards change according to context. That is what I have been saying all along and what SlackerInc. is arguing against. In his view there is only one standard of evidence – the legal standard – and if you don’t meet it, you have to suck it up. You acknowledge the standard of proof varies according to context. What higher standard of proof can you have than having actually experienced it?
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Spice Weasel]
Do you think men who actually commit sexual assault deserve to have a reputation as someone who committed sexual assault? I’m not talking about picketing their house or sending death threats, I’m talking about the women who are around them (or men, or whoever) knowing that they have done this thing, so that future victims can protect themselves?
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Spice Weasel]
We are not talking about people who lie about sexual assault. That is a completely separate issue from this subject, as we’ve repeatedly pointed out. People who lie about sexual assault are terrible. That is a terrible crime that has absolutely nothing to do with people who tell the truth about sexual assault.
[/QUOTE]
If you want to try responding to my actual fucking argument, and not the one you’ve invented in your head, I’m game.
As as aside, there was a time in my life, in the raw, early days of recovery, when I would have agreed with your strawman, because not being believed when you are telling the truth is utterly fucking gut-wrenching, and when I read about accounts of people having been falsely accused of rape, they describe feelings of betrayal and disillusionment with society that are not unlike what I went through. It totally shattered my worldview, and it’s one of the reasons I can’t leave this thread alone, because I struggle to separate things that matter (like the punishment I received from my mother for telling the truth) from things that don’t (like what some random person on the internet thinks.)
As I’ve developed both emotionally and intellectually, I have come to recognize that ‘‘because I said’’ is a not a fair standard for people who do not know me or who do not have any reason to believe I am credible. I recognize that people lie, but I honestly do have a hard time wrapping my head around why people lie. I was punished harshly for any hint of deception growing up (and I mean threatened to be thrown into the streets, punished – for lying about say, checking if the garbage can was empty before bringing it back up the driveway.) I was also accused of lying anytime I made an honest mistake. I am compulsively honest, and I am so honest it gets me into trouble, and being accused of lying is personally very painful because of this unreasonable standard I was held to growing up.
As such, I am 100% certain that I am received as highly credible by the vast majority of people in my life. The ones who do not view me as credible are not welcome in my life. Meanwhile, my perpetrator has finally been exposed for what he is through other heinous actions he’s committed against others. Generally speaking, he uses people like tissues. They finally figured out his game.
Now let’s say I did write a memoir. Say I want to write this book because I’ve led an interesting life and it helps me resolve some of my trauma. If I did, I’d use pseudonyms, but I’d still publish under my own name. I intend to launch a professional writing career so I want to put my name on anything I produce. Let’s say someone got a bug under their ass and figured out the exact identity of the men who molested me. Let’s say they started an internet vigilante justice mob, picketed their houses, doxxed them, sent them death threats, etc.
I would be publicly, staunchly, 100% against that. I would work with the police or whomever necessary to stop it. I view that behavior as unnaceptable regardless of the guilt of the person involved. People who are guilty of sexual assault should have natural consequences for their actions, up to and including being viewed with suspicion by those who know them, or going to prison when convicted in a court of law, but vigilante justice is NOT a natural consequence. I find it morally unnaceptable.
Clear enough?
[QUOTE=JRDelirious]
And we need to accept that yes, in the eyes of the victim, if our conclusion is she’s not credible and this does not merit punishment, we will have inflicted an injustice upon her. We have to be willing to live with that if we trust our judgment.
[/QUOTE]
Any attempt to evade that responsibility is nothing more than cowardice and narcissism. If you conclude neither person is credible, fine. If you conclude one is more credible than the other, fine. But the attempt to push the responsibility and the burden entirely onto victims of assault is sickening.
The thing people are still failing to understand is that it isn’t the accusation that makes them guilty, or even the “actual” actions as they are unknowable, it’s having a convincing amount of evidence that makes someone guilty.
We’ve had people in this thread apparently sincerely advocating for people losing their jobs and families based solely on someone’s accusation. That’s not their “reputation”, it’s their life, and it’s unacceptable to harm it based on an unsupported accusation.
No-one is saying you shouldn’t talk about your experiences. We are saying that it’s wrong to spread unsubstantiated rumours, and that it’s wrong to act on those rumours. You keep acting as though whether the accused “actually” did what he’s accused of is relevant. It isn’t, all that matters is what he can be shown to have done, to whatever is the appropriate degree of certainty in different situations.
You yourself told me that if I were sexually assaulted at work, I should report it to my boss but that it “wasn’t my place” to tell others.
Slacker explicitly said that if I were assaulted at work, telling anyone other than the cops wpuld be to no purpose other than to stir up bad feelings.
Because we don’t always have that luxury in life. Because we need to make decisions about who to date, who to hire, who to have watch our children. Unless you have the luxury to never have to deal with either of these people again - at least one is a liar, one is perhaps a sexual harasser, an abuser, a thief.
If you have the luxury in life to never have to make a decision in regards to believing one person over another, you have lived either a charmed life, or one where your levels of responsibility have been minimal.
So, I want to make sure I understand. If someone rapes me, it didn’t happen if it was not proven in a court of law? The person is not guilty of the action (not the crime, but the action) unless a judge and/or jury has weighed all the evidence? The “actual” across are not unknowable *to the victim. * I don’t care if you believe me; I still have the right to recount my experiences.
And yes, people have been saying in this thread that victims shouldn’t talk about their experiences. And yes, whether or not the rape “actually” happened is “relevant” to the victim of rape.
Perhaps part of the problem is that you seem to be approaching the question from the perspective of a third party. You have no way of knowing if something happened, so it is unsubstantiated rumor. While others in the thread are coming from the angle of the victim, and we are being told we shouldn’t risk the reputation of the rapist.
The problem is that people who think they have a right to be believed if they claim something bad happens to them fail to understand that anyone could falsely accuse them of anything, and the reason for not automatically believing anything is to protect everybody.
If you are making those decisions based solely on believing one person’s word above another’s without any other evidence you are the one shirking your responsibility, in most cases. I can see the argument for needing very little evidence to reject a babysitter, simply because young children are effectively helpless, but pretty much every other case should require more than unsubstantiated rumour.
Much of this discussion started because of an anecdote about someone who’s life was ruined by an accusation made against him that could not have been true because he was in an other state (at least according to the majority of the evidence). Doesn’t that tell you something about how weak an unsubstantiated accusation is, given how bad the consequences are? And yet you’re fine with denying people jobs or relationships based on them…
Can you give an example of this? A direct quote, perhaps? Because I haven’t seen that at all.
I saw Dangerosa go into great detail about her own rape experience and what a conundrum it presents for managers who have to protect both parties until the facts are sorted out. I saw her present several different examples of ways that HR managed or mismanaged such cases. I saw her talk about the realities of having to try to set aside your own prejudices when making hiring/firing decisions. All part and parcel of being in a management position, I’d wager.
If anything a recurring theme in this thread has been the need to balance and evaluate based on different standards in different contexts. If anything we’ve been arguing about the inherent nuance of these situations and how difficult it is to generalize about any of them. If anything all I’ve been advocating for is the right for a victim to talk about her experience, without having to bend over backward to protect the reputation of her abuser. I feel no responsibility toward my abuser. None whatsoever, though as I said before, on moral principle I’d be opposed to his tar and feathering. I have no real desire to see him burn and I never have. I think he is a sad person and I am a better person despite all attempts to twist me into something like my parents, and that’s enough for me.
I think I believe much more in the value of corroborating evidence than you realize, and while I don’t have any physical evidence, and while I never pursued a court case against him (in part because I was too overwhelmed at the time, in part because I’m just not a vengeful person) I think I could make a solid case that he did sexually inappropriate things to me, assuming other people involved told the truth. For example, my mother asked me point blank, when I was about 11, if he was molesting me, because I returned from a solo trip with him very distraught. My response to her was ''Are you happy?" She dropped it completely.
My mother also recalls a time where he told her he was going to put her in the mental hospital so that he could have me all to himself, where I’d be his new lover. I was maybe 15 at the time. I’m talking really fucked up shit. I believe her because he told me almost the exact same thing during the same time period, only in a more diplomatic way. And I was scared shitless. That was shortly after she threatened to shoot me in the face with a shotgun.
Problem is, if she tells the truth about that, it makes her look like a bad Mom. It’s pretty tough when your witnesses are more unreliable than you are.
Then there would be the eyewitness testimony of people who saw us in public and assumed we were dating because of his behavior toward me. Then there would be the testimony of my school counselor and my therapist and the social services people. Then there’s the extensive clinical history I have of telling the same abuse story consistently over the course of the last 13 years, the various treatments I’ve received for that abuse, the documentation of my symptoms, documented history of sexual problems as the result of PTSD, letters I’ve written to both of my parents, diary entries from when I was a child, etc. etc. It may not be sufficient to put him in jail, but I think a reasonable person, reviewing the evidence, would conclude that I was in fact, sexually abused by him.
IF I write a memoir, and that’s a big IF, if only because I much prefer writing fiction, it’s not out of some desire to ruin anyone’s life, it’s out of a commitment I made to myself that I would no longer subordinate my needs to his. I have always been a staunch public advocate for mental health and if the next step for me is advocating for abuse survivors through sharing my experience and making them feel not so alone, I am going to do it. I have an ethical obligation not to deliberately hurt that man, but I have no ethical obligation to protect him from the consequences of his own actions.
Also, I was just thinking, there’s no way someone would report sexual harassment to the police and the police wouldn’t immediately interview the boss and the alleged perpetrator involved. I just don’t see that happening. So the idea that one should tell the cops and not the boss (as Slacker advocated) seems virtually impossible to accomplish, from my angle.
[QUOTE=Steophan]
The problem is that people who think they have a right to be believed if they claim something bad happens to them fail to understand that anyone could falsely accuse them of anything, and the reason for not automatically believing anything is to protect everybody.
[/QUOTE]
The problem is that nobody is claiming people have the right to be believed, and you keep insisting that they are. We are claiming people have the right to speak about their own experiences without bending over backward to protect the reputation of their abuser. Whether that claim is believed or not is irrelevant to a victim’s right to make the claim. I can tell the truth, and whether you believe or not is up to you.
I am curious about one thing. Let’s say I wasn’t a 17 year old legally emancipated minor when I disclosed my abuse. Let’s say I was 15 and living at home. Let’s say my Mom totally denied knowing anything about my abuse. Let’s say I had no physical evidence. Let’s say you have no idea whether or not I’m telling the truth or not.
Would it be right to keep me in the home with the person I claimed abused me?
I did say that I’d fire a new guy if a trusted employee of long standing came to me with a credible complaint. But that’s not a contextless accusation, it has the substantiation of years of credibility.
I’m really wondering how Slacker’s friend’s life was ruined. The accuser made an unfounded accusation , the police made some inquiries, discovered he was out of town, and dropped it.
Slacker started off by saying his friend was not well liked before this happened, out of his element, in a school where he felt a lack of community. The rape accusation was the final straw and he quit school - but frankly, it sounds like he was already depressed and not set up for success. Did he avail himself of the school’s counseling services? Did he take any responsibility for his own decisions. Or did he say “fuck this” and fall in with a bad lot. His choice in friends after he left school has little to do with him getting falsely accused of rape.
Tons of women go through the SAME pattern when they’ve been sexually assaulted. There is nothing unusual about a women without a support system getting assaulted, then devaluing herself, turning to drugs, ending up in another abusive relationship - dying from her own hand, an overdose, or abuse. Its almost the anticipated ending to a story like Spice Weasels.
The thing I’ve learned from having been a sexual abuse survivor is that I’m not a victim - I’m a survivor. But in order to be a survivor I need to take responsibility - not for my own abuse - but for my own reactions to my abuse. I suffer from anxiety and depression. Probably PSTD. But my mental health is my responsibility. Had I not been raped, I might still suffer from depression and anxiety - its likely given my family history. So I don’t sit around saying “poor me, I’m depressed and anxious due to having been abused.” To me, it doesn’t sound like Slacker’s friend took responsibility - or perhaps he did, but Slacker is looking for someone to blame.
You fail to understand how the criminal law system actually works. A jury can choose to convict based on nothing more than believing the testimony of one person. No other evidence need be introduced in order to support that conviction. A jury can decide that one person’s testimony is credible.
Your idea that “corroboration” (whatever you think that means) is necessary is wrong in a legal context. The testimony of one, single witness, if found to be credible by a jury (or a judge, if the trial is a bench trial), can convict someone.
Now that’s in a court of law, where the state has the power to take your freedom and other punishments.
In our regular, everyday lives, we have the perfect right to find someone to be credible and believe him or her. When it comes to an accusation like sexual assault or rape there is no neutral position.
If you choose to act upon disbelief of the accuser, then you might be unfairly visiting harm on the victim by forcing him or her to remain in proximity, to be subject to more abuse, to have to choose between her livelihood and her mental or physical well-being. And you might be exposing other potential victims to the risk of abuse.
If you choose to act upon disbelief of the accused, then you might be unfairly harming his or her livelihood or reputation.
If you can’t determine which one is more credible, you might be doing one or the other.
But you, as a person who holds responsibility, have to understand that it’s your burden to bear. There is no neutral; there is no default; there is no “fair” position. Sometimes life is that hard.