My precautions serve a couple of purposes. First, they make it harder for someone to raise a false allegation against me: if I’m not alone with students, it’s harder to allege I engaged in awful behavior with students. More importantly, though, it comforts others: predators (whom, we know, actually exist) look for opportunities to get kids alone, where they can prey on them. By ensuring that I’m not alone with students, I communicate to people that I’m not posing a threat.
In addition, a big difference is that MMM considered and rejected his precautions. I use mine, in accordance with district policy.
MMM is talking about precautions in a case where they serve no real purpose. Since the risk of a false allegation is vanishingly small (seriously, I know of no case where a 6yo makes an unprompted false allegation against a stranger she’s never met and whom she first saw that day), they don’t serve to lessen the chances of a false allegation. Second, since sitting next to someone is normal behavior and there’s no policy against it, the precaution of moving seats doesn’t communicate “not a threat” in a meaningful way. Finally, precautions you think of but don’t do aren’t as effective as precautions you follow through on.
Darth, that sounds terrible, and that’s a fundamentally different circumstance from the one in the OP: it’s a kid who knows you, who is older (there’s a world of difference between 6 and 9), and who has a reason to dislike you (I’m sure you’re charming, but try telling that to the kid of the person you’re dating: all she knows is that you’re not daddy). If a dude is paranoid about spending time alone around the young daughter of their girlfriend, you bet I’d advocate precautions in that case, not so much to protect the kid as to protect the dude.
I get that is the link he’s making, but I don’t get how the media talking about accusations leads to “Hey, I’m in danger!” That seems to require that we believe the media are talking about accusations and those accusations are false.
So… let me preface this by saying I believe the accusations are probably true. At least the ones we’ve heard, up to this point.
But the concerning thing is, I don’t see any kind of due process. Someone makes an accusation, and the trial by media moves quickly. This is great for women who have been wrongly ignored for so long, but it also makes it very easy for right-wing proxies will exploit this credulous media climate for their own ends. (for example, I fully expected the O’Keefe hoax, and I expect that more competent hoaxers will learn from his mistakes).
I just hope this whole thing is headed toward a place where women feel confident reporting harassment/crimes to a proper authority, and that this authority will respond appropriately. I’m glad popular opinion has gotten the ball rolling on this, but I hope it doesn’t devolve into an unaccountable witch-hunt mentality, or an environment of battling false claims that suck the legitimacy out of everything.
I hear what you’re saying, and yeah, the hypothetical posed in the OP is markedly different from my experience. You were even spot on about the “you’re not my dad” assessment. But I based my reply on MMM’s (in what appears to be), summation of his thesis (quoted above yours). It was his quote that inspired me to login and reply because his summation accurately described what my experience was. I freely admit that I could be wrong about this and MMM was making that theater scenario, with its particulars included, the focus of his uneasiness. Either way, it was fucking terrifying.
Another reason I posted was because I was a bit peeved by what I originally quoted from Tee’s post.
While I’m sure you see a big difference between the two, I don’t. I mean, sure there are differences. I just don’t think they amount to as wide a chasm as you seem to think. Furthermore, there was a time when a person in your position didn’t have to take the ‘sensible precautions’ that you take today. What is now a ‘sensible precaution’ would have been at some point in the recent past ‘irrational paranoia.’
The accusations don’t have to be false, for a member of group X to feel put under suspicion. Truthful accusations against a member of group X can make many people in that entire group to feel that they are some “other” or threat.
Suppose the media talks on and on about black shoplifters in stores, and those accusations are in fact true. It would be totally reasonable for an innocent African-American shopper to feel that they are “under a spotlight” when they walk into a store. They might take precautions to make sure they are NOT falsely accused of shoplifting.
An Arab Muslim passenger might take special precautions to ensure airport security does NOT see them as a threat.
FWIW, when I was a college freshman in 2005, all the male students had to sit in on a sexual-harassment briefing, given by the Dean himself. He told us, “If you are ever alone with a woman, and she accuses you of something, you have no defense. Society will always take the woman’s word over a man’s.”
That was twelve years ago. I wonder what similar briefings/seminars are like today, and also 30 or 40 years ago.
I got pretty much the same lecture in 1996 during college orientation.
It is something that I consider, though I’ve given it more thought recently. Right now, I am alone in a store with exactly one other person, a female. She’s my sister and business partner though, so I don’t think she’s going to be accusing me of anything, and I’m hoping she doesn’t fear my intentions.
It is more convenient, however, on slow days like today, to have an employee stick around, and let my sister go home to get some much needed rest, but that puts me in a position of being alone in the store with a female that I am not related to both familiarly and financially.
Not even a matter of being afraid of an accusation, but being afraid of maybe putting them in an awkward spot. I don’t think that any of my employees fear that I would rape them if I got them alone, but I haven’t asked.
So, yeah, due to an irrational fear on both of the sex’s part, I sent an employee home who could have liked to get the hours, and kept my sister here who could have like to get some sleep. NBD, sure, but it’s not like it has no effect at all.
He wrote, “A single accusation – from anyone - is a death sentence to one’s reputation.” You described a situation in which you were under the microscope, and it was awful to be under the microscope, but enough examination proved that you were innocent. Who regards you as a predator today, based on this single accusation? What is your reputation today? What was her reputation after it came out that she had lied, among people who knew about the entire incident?
I don’t want to minimize how awful that experience was for you, but I also don’t think it supports MMM’s claim of a “death sentence” for a reputation. On the contrary, it seems like an example in which our society did exactly the right thing: took an allegation of assault very seriously, investigated, found it was fraudulent, and cleared the accused.
Okay. I think they’re fundamentally different. And the fact that the precautions I described are taken today makes it harder for sexual predators to get away with things, and makes them stand out more when they try, so I think they’re good precautions.
The first is the assumption that the process works. That there are not those wrongly accused who do have their lives ruined over it. I do not know how to even begin the stats on how to tell how prevalent such things are, but to assume that in every case of wrongful accusation is acquittal and a clearing so that the accused goes on about his life with no damage to legal status, reputation or finances is a little naive, I think.
The second assumption is based on the first. As I have no idea how often a wrongfully accused person is cleared, I am truly quite concerned about being wrongfully accused. (Now, I need to unpack that, I am saying that if I were wrongfully accused, I would be quite concerned about the outcome, not that I am regularly concerned about being wrongfully accused.)
I think we are talking at cross-purposes here. You gave a detached analysis, which I respect, because you’re looking at what I said objectively. Maybe I explained myself badly, sorry about that. I admit that I’ve been looking at what happened through an emotional lens rather than a more rational one.
My point is that all those questions you asked up there? Not a one of them I considered when all the shit was coming down. My mind was chaotic with what-if’s? Before everything was settled, I envisioned a hellish existence going forward: being ostracized from society, losing my job, going to court, you name it. I was innocent sure, but you try being calm when such an accusation is made. It’s easy to believe the worst outcome due to the nature of the accusation when you consider public opinion about it.
Sure, rationality won the day, but what happened had a pretty profound effect on my thinking, especially considering that shit could have come down a much different way, (at the time) in my mind, because I still didn’t know my girlfriend’s family all that well. It was traumatic.
Yes, because the clearance is often not definitive. The accuser and those who sympathize with her will continue to view the accused as guilty, even if he is not. These opinions seldom change. An accusation alone is enough to put many celebrities out of business, even without an investigation.
Darth_Hamsandwich escaped with his reputation in large part by the chances of circumstance. The kid, under questioning, confessed to making shit up. What if she had stuck to her story? Quite possibly, sucks to be Darth_Hamsandwich if that had happened.
I know this. I am not dismissing this. But that is in no way a product of this recent movement, referred to as this this “sexual accusation thing”. I know this because the few instances I do know of that qualify as false accusations pre-date this “sexual accusation thing” by ten years or more.
I’m proud of the people who cobbled together this recent movement on the fly, and if you think for a moment that it was built upon exploiting the vulnerability of innocent men, then you haven’t paid much attention to it. It was about surmounting and dismantling institutional protections that ensure the guilty will never be held accountable.
If it becomes something more than that, a club to wield against innocent people, I’ll start thinking differently. In the meantime, your risk of being accused is the same as it ever was.
I think the point you’re missing has to do with being accused of actually perpetrating something which you regard with mortal horror. If a shark bites me or lightning hits me, meh, there’s no morality involved, just an unfortunate (if terribly uncomfortable) occurrence. Bit of a difference.
Women and children don’t exploit ‘vulnerable’ men. But district attorneys seeking convictions certainly do.
Is that really true with respect to children? I feel like I’ve been hearing about the risk of false accusations from children (or false suspicion from parents if you’re near children while being a male) my entire life. Stories about men avoiding mentoring or teaching positions because of the perception that false accusations were both likely to occur and likely to be believed. (And, even if recanted, the reputationtional damage would be significant as people would believe you were guilty).
I mean, I get that there is a long and problematic history with respect to dismissing adult women in both the assault and harassment contexts. But I always got the sense that it was different with children.
Okay, I see what you’re saying (I think). I’m arguing that your experience–awful as it was–doesn’t support the idea that a single accusation is a death sentence. On the contrary, it shows that a single accusation CAN BE (as it was in your case) an entry to a terrible, traumatic period of time, but is not necessarily a death sentence for a reputation.
As I see it, that girl wronged you as surely as if she’d cut the brake lines on your car. In both cases, she put you in a lot of danger. In neither case do I think she should be tried as an adult. in both cases I’d think the kid needs some serious counseling and discipline to see how dangerous her actions were. And I can certainly see how undergoing that trauma would affect your emotional outlook on the situation, and how it’d lead to a totally understandable paranoia for you, based on that experience.
But I come at it from my experience. I’m a male teacher who works around kids, and I have very little fear of false accusations, and I think that’s reasonable. There are half a dozen or so other male teachers at my school, and I taught at another school with more male teachers. I was once in an environment where someone was arrested for indecent liberties with a minor. The charges were substantiated (I won’t give more details because I really don’t want to identify the specific situation). Of all the male teachers and teacher assistants and principals and custodians and such that I’ve known, in our collective centuries of time in the classroom, none of us have faced a serious false allegation of misconduct.
I have, however, known teachers who have been stabbed with a pencil by kindergarteners, hard enough to pierce the skin. I have seen kids throw chairs. I have been cussed out by parents, and I know more than one teacher who has received a death threat from a mentally ill parent. I’ve sat in my closet during a lockdown because of a kid’s relative that brought a weapon onto campus, and didn’t tell anyone except a kid, and staff found out about it indirectly. And we all catch regular viruses from the walking germ factories that we educate each day.
When I’m thinking about the threats I face on the job, the nongendered ones are a lot more at the forefront of my concerns. I think that’s true for my male colleagues as well.
I’m sorry Tee, I see now that you were referring to exactly what MMM posted in regard to his fears being directly correlated to the recent floodgates being opened. I took your quote out of context. But as someone mentioned upthread, I think that the fear is justified, even before all this stuff started coming out in the news. You mentioned that yourself actually, since I agree with you that the risk of being accused is the same as it ever was. I read your reply as being ultimately dismissive, and I shouldn’t of done that.
However, for me, it was a club being used against an innocent man.
He wrote, “A single accusation – from anyone - is a death sentence to one’s reputation.” You described a situation in which you were under the microscope, and it was awful to be under the microscope, but enough examination proved that you were innocent. Who regards you as a predator today, based on this single accusation? What is your reputation today? What was her reputation after it came out that she had lied, among people who knew about the entire incident?