I wouldn’t say I feel “threatened” every time I go out, but my radar is definitely working the whole time.
I don’t know about churches, but Title IX requires schools and universities to have procedures to address incidents/allegations of sexual discrimination, sexual harassment, and/or sexual violence, whether or not outside law enforcement is involved. There are things the institution can do even if the victim does not want to get the law involved.
Are you certain that if a woman was raped at your workplace by another employee , your employer’s response would be to call the police - and nothing more? I sure hope not - I would hope that they would investigate and suspend/fire the perpetrator without waiting months or years for a criminal conviction - if he ever gets convicted.
I think people sometimes get a little mixed up regarding institutions having an internal process. There’s nothing wrong with an institution having an internal process. Aside from the part where we don’t really want the institution to wait for a criminal conviction to take action , some of the acts covered by internal investigations are not crimes. My employer fired someone who repeatedly made inappropriate sexual comments to other employees. But the police couldn’t have done anything because it’s not illegal for someone to say he keeps the air conditioning on high so that he can see women’s “nippies get hard”. The problem is not that the internal process exists , the problem is that some of these institutions discourage the victims from reporting the crime to outside law enforcement. It’s supposed to be a parallel process , not a substitute for reporting a crime to law enforcement.
It’s somewhere in the back of my head. It lives there, and sometimes abruptly shoves its way to the front, though not often.
I don’t adjust my life by it. I live alone, men come by sometimes, some I know, some I don’t – new farm customers, or lost people who wound up on this road – I talk to them. I’ve taken into my house male farm interns who I had just met. I travelled around the country on my own in my late 20’s – and occasionally picked up a male hitchhiker (this was in the 1970’s, hitching was a lot more common.)
But it’s always there, somewhere in the back of my head. I’ve chosen not to live by it; but I’ve also been lucky. I’ve been grabbed, and verbally harassed, and exposed to (by a flasher intending to shock, I don’t count all the naked people in other circumstances); and once had somebody try to force me to have sex by threatening to tell lies about me to everyone else in the group of people I was intending to live with; but nothing further than that. (I told one person, a friend of mine in the group, about that last one, when he asked me why I didn’t like the guy. He didn’t take it seriously, and I didn’t think anybody else would either. It was 1973. Nobody would have called that attempted rape, in 1973.)
It seems IMO that you completely missed my point which was that, until recently perhaps, universities and churches seemed able to get away with not calling the cops and magically being able to deal with it internally. Otherwise it would have ceased in churches and universities decades ago. And “suspend[ing]/fire[ing] the perpetrator” would be hopefully irrelevant as he would be in prison awaiting trial.
And the last people who should be investigating are the workplace. The workplace, church, university, or whatever should have fuck all to do with it.
At least in universities, part of it is that historically police handled it so incredibly poorly, that the universities stepped in so that at least something could sometimes be done. Of course we’re all familiar with the problems that universities have had in dealing with sexual assault, but often reporting to the university was the better route for a victim to take.
What’s that Latin phrase that means the university is acting as parents? That thing, too.
In Loco parentis.
One issue is that it takes a long time to prosecute a crime, if it is prosecuted at all. So there needs to be some way for a victim to say, “My co-worker raped me, I don’t want to see him again” or “my schoolmate raped me, I don’t want to be in classes with him.” It would be cruel to expect a victim to have to be in regular contact with her rapist until he’s convicted, especially because it’s so hard to get a conviction. The upshot would be rape victims who never get any sort of protection. The problem is that universities and churches and employers in reality are terrible at handling this issue.
Yes. Workplaces that hide evidence are a problem. Workplaces that threaten employees who file charges are a problem. Workplaces (like the Catholic Church) that just move employees around instead of dismissing them are a problem.
But it’s on the victim to decide whether to tell the police. And it’s generally good for workplaces to also have an internal process. At least, there’s lots of room for an internal process to be a good one.
I’d be really curious to see how my agency would handle something like that. It’s never happened AFAIK. I know we have a zero tolerance policy but I’m not sure how high the burden of proof is.
Having had to throw a guy out of a dance group for creeping on young women, it’s really hard. You kinda do need more evidence than “he makes me uncomfortable”.
If he’d actually assaulted anyone, i think we would have acted just on her word. But it’s hard to just throw someone out of a club, and throwing them out of their job must be harder
It’s not an easy situation to address. There’s always the possibility that the alleged perpetrator is innocent. I’ve always been in this weird place when trying to judge these things because I know what it’s like to not be believed, and it’s a fucking nightmare. But I also was raised by a woman who makes all kinds of accusations that are not credible, due to her mental illness. Some of the trauma she claimed is corroborated and other stuff she just invents out of whole cloth which I know because I was there or someone else was there.
I once read an account of a man who was falsely accused of rape as a teenager and his experience was very much like my own even though it was the other side of coin. Having everyone believe you are a liar who has done something bad can be really traumatic.
I think ideally there would be a separation with nobody being punished or forced out unless there were other reports or some kind of corroborating evidence. But that’s a lot harder in a smaller workplace.
There is some difficulty but this thread points out time and again that much of the difficulty is a result of pre-conceived notions and attitudes that don’t first concentrate on rape as a crime to be investigated like any other. If your car is stolen and you report it to the police they generally don’t start with the assumption that you’re engaged in insurance fraud.
Those who are saying things haven’t changed much are correct. Yes, slight progress in the right direction, but so much of it is still the same. And of course there are false accusations of rape, nobody should be considered guilty only based on an accusation, but neither should any conclusion be made without investigation, and the reality is clear, far more actual rapes occur than false accusations, and there are still so many unreported rapes. That doesn’t matter in any one case, but it certainly should be the incentive to change attitudes and procedures to deal with a widespread problem in our society.
Let’s try a thought experiment; there’sone that I think will be helpful here. It is called the Veil of Ignorance. Let’s imagine two worlds from two points of view. In one world, we are victims; in the other, we are falsely accused.
Our goal is to decide on the goals of the system that would handle these sorts of accusations. For this thought experiment, we are just dealing with the design goals behind the system - don’t worry about the details yet.
The purpose of the Veil of Ignorance is this. We are here, on one side of the veil, designing the system. We will then pass through the veil into one of the two worlds - the one where we are a victim or the one where we are falsely accused. Our goal is to design a fair system; since we don’t know which world we will end up in, it is in our best interest to create a system that is as fair as possible regardless of the world we end up in.
Now, we could complicate matters by introducing a third world where we really did the act (but I don’t want to minimize suffering in that world, since you only end up there if you are a rapist) or by pointing out that there are many more worlds in which we are victims than worlds in which we are falsely accused. But none of that is really necessary.
With just the two worlds - victim and falsely accused - is there a system that satiafies both?
And the answer is, yes. A system that takes accusations seriously and thoroughly investigates them is exactly what we want whether we are faslely accused or victims. It isn’t what we want if we are victimizers, but in that case, fuck us.
NM, I get what you’re saying. Move along. Nothing to see here.
The idea behind Veil of Ignorance is that the way to ensure that the society you design is fair is by imagining that once the society is designed you could be born into that society as anyone living in it. So a society designed by a king would not fit this framework beacuse the king likely designs the system to favor himself at the expense of the peasantry. But it’s incredibly unlikely that someone passing the Veil of Ignorance would be born as the king - there are far more peasants whose life you could be born into.
I simplified this by looking at just two possibilities - victim or falsely accused. But in reality we should look at the possibility of being anyone in the system. People who never experience or perpetrate sexual assault obviously don’t really interact with the system we design so we can ignore them; people who really are perpetrators deserve to suffer consequences so I’m not concerned with them; and while there are a lot more rape victims than people falsely accused of rape, and thus we should give more weight to their situation since it is more likely to arise (at least, by some moral frameworks) - this is unnecessary for my point, which works even if we weigh victim and falsely accused equally.
Eta: missed your edit but I’ll let my post stand now, ha
Yeah, I was thinking something like this. I understand “this man is innocent until proven guilty.” The problem is, a lot of people add an addendum: " Which means this woman is guilty until proven innocent."
I had never heard of the Veil of Ignorance before. That’s interesting.
The problem is that a lot of false accusations aren’t lies, they are mistakes. And some perps are mistaken, too, although I have less sympathy there.
I know three cases of men I believe were falsely accused:
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my brother was accused of stalking a coworker. His side of the story is that they were going to the same industry event, the admin asked if he wanted her to book my brother on the same flight as his co-worker, and he said, “yes”. Her side is that he booked the same flight so as to stalk her. She was later fired by the company for lying about unrelated stuff, so maybe she was just. lying, but my guess is that she was unstable, and really did find it threatening for a male co-worker to pick the same flight she picked.
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my SIL accused her uncle of raping her as a child. She said this was a recovered memory that she was unaware of until her 30s (maybe 40s, I forget the exact timeline.). Her mother (the sister of the uncle) said that she didn’t trust her brother, and had never left SIL alone with the uncle in the time period in question. Now, uncle was unambiguously creepy towards women, and I never left him alone with my daughter, either, from before that accusation. (And I did leave her with other men.) I don’t think he actually raped SIL. I do think he made her uncomfortable because he was a creep, and that is what turned into those recoverd memories.
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A student accused a friend of my husband’s of …showing too much interest in her. She spent a lot of time hanging out around office hours and stuff. My husband thought she was crazy and was very careful never to be alone with her. His colleague was getting married, and distracted, and less careful. She didn’t allege that he touched her or anything, just that he displayed inappropriate interest in her. The university investigated and said, “we don’t believe her, but she’s going to sue us and neither we nor you want that publicity, so we’re firing you.”
I don’t think any of those women were lying. I also don’t believe any of those men were guilty of the specific accusation. (And I think 1 and 3 were totally innocent.)
For that matter, in the case where we threw the guy out of the club: we investigated, and there was ample evidence that he did stuff that an objective witness would consider threatening and stalking. (Like, a group of people left the club together to walk home. He wasn’t part of the group, but followed behind it. When one of the women peeled off close to her home, he caught up and followed her the rest of the way. Creepy.) BUT, he was, shall we say, not very socially competent, and it was clear that he was not aware he was doing anything wrong. I felt bad for him, and counseled him that he needed to learn how to interact appropriately with women, or he was going to get into more trouble than just being banned from a dance club, and even looked up some resources for him to investigate.
Sometimes it’s black and white. My college roommate was raped at gunpoint by three strangers. That’s black and white. But a lot of real situations have at least a little gray. Babale’s thought experiment is a good one – how can we set up society so as to protect people and also be fair? Training kids around consent is a clear win – we are all better off if we are all playing by the same rules. Investigation is good, although sometimes it will be hard to know all the facts. What else should we be doing better?
Ohh, don’t even get me started on “recovered memories.” That fiasco really didn’t help abuse victims’ credibility.
Trauma for some reason is a field that attracts a lot of pseudoscience. It really bothers me a lot.
But you are correct, your SIL probably genuinely believed that happened and suffered the same effects as if it had.
ETA: Reminds me of a podcast recently where a person who probably had PTSD said she was told by a therapist that people who can’t cry probably have preverbal trauma (true? Seems farfetched and how do you prove it?) So she’s like, “I don’t even remember all this terrible stuff that happened” and I’m just frustrated because how would she know?
I was molested at age two (three?) and I remember a couple of key events, but nothing of the abuse itself. Because it wasn’t a big deal to me, it was normal, there was no reason to retain that memory. I only know it happened because he confessed, was convicted and went to prison. What I remember was being interviewed by a judge, because that was outside my normal experience.
One of the weird things about my mother’s failure to protect later in my life is that she did everything right the first time it happened. But I think that first time psychologically broke her.
I learned about it in that Philosophy 101 class I have mentioned before - seriously, that was one of the most enlightening, eye opening experiences of my life. It’s amazing how much we take for granted, and how dangerous an unexamined stance can be.
Thanks, but I won’t take credit - you can thank John Rawls for that one.