[HN Gopher] My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala co...
___________________________________________________________________
My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community
Author : ingve
Score : 476 points
Date : 2021-04-27 21:00 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (yifanxing.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (yifanxing.medium.com)
| jdmoreira wrote:
| I have no clue on who this guy is nor do I have any sort of
| interest in Scala but this is terrible.
|
| If this is even remotely true I hope he suffers enormous
| consequences including being persecuted.
|
| How are people still getting away with this kind of abuse? How?
| QUFB wrote:
| > How are people still getting away with this kind of abuse?
| How?
|
| Read the comments in this thread six hours from now and you'll
| understand.
| sarakayakomzin wrote:
| bring in the stallmanites!
|
| I for one am glad there is someone to stand up for him - it
| makes it very easy to tell who wants to cherrypick and debate
| semantics due to their own biases.
| rodgerd wrote:
| Six hours? It'll be flagged out of existence by then, most
| likely.
|
| On edit: it took mere minutes for the HN rape apologists to
| show up!
| goblox wrote:
| She is definitely the kind of woman where a man shouldn't
| be making such advances. Let her be the acting party. She
| would have been telling another story if she were on top
| and had taken the initiative. One of the simplest ways for
| a man to avoid the problems of consent where he suspects
| there may be is to be the one from whom consent is needed.
|
| That is the absolute safest other than leaving. If you as a
| man attempt to get consent that may not be something you're
| able to obtain. She might be intoxicated and unable to
| consent. You might not know that. However what's safe is to
| let anyone initiate sex with you while you remain passive
| and let them have sex with you.
|
| If you leave then I would strongly advise to say it is
| because you are feeling sick and think it's something you
| ate. Go to the toilet first and say you have the runs. That
| will cushion her pride and make her just glad you left. No
| chance of something mean-spirited.
| dog_boy wrote:
| didn't even take an hour...
|
| so many absolutely disgusting comments already.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| I think I know what you are trying to say and I agree but I'm
| also on the camp that Richard Stallman didn't say anything
| necessarily wrong, just awkward.
|
| On the one hand I want people to be able to to speak their
| minds but on the other hand this guy might be a sexual
| predator at best and a serial rapist at worst. and he is
| getting away with it!
| rodgerd wrote:
| You're apologising for a serial sexual harasser. You _are_
| the problem.
| na85 wrote:
| >How are people still getting away with this kind of abuse?
| How?
|
| It's quite simple, really.
|
| You know that phenomenon you see here on HN with big names like
| Steve Jobs or RMS, or Elon Musk? The phenomenon where people
| give them a pass for being disgusting, abusive assholes because
| "he's a genius/luminary/visionary" or because "his
| contributions to $thing are so great"?
|
| It's the same phenomenon with people like Jon Pretty.
| [deleted]
| pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
| Alternatively: people diluting the signal, where people bring
| up serious accusations of rape, and then others show up and
| compare it to people who are considered assholes by some.
| na85 wrote:
| See I can tell that you're snidely implying that I'm
| falsely equating rape with "being an asshole", which I
| explicitly did not do.
|
| The phenomenon behind why these people get a pass is the
| same, even if their behavior is different.
| scala__alacs wrote:
| Being quite involved in the Scala community myself, I can
| tell you that the impact of his technical contributions is
| basically zero.
|
| None of the projects he developed along the years has had any
| momentum (save for one, called "magnolia", which has a modest
| userbase).
|
| He was giving more talks than anyone else in the community,
| solely based on vague ideas he couldn't even make happen. He
| was always bluffing somehow, presenting himself as some kind
| of grand architect pursuing grand ideas, while his effective
| impact was close to zero.
|
| I think he was tolerated just because he's been around since
| basically the language was created, and thus was friend with
| many people, and could tell stories about the early days of
| Scala.
|
| With him (hopefully) going away, this will have no impact at
| all on the development of Scala or related projects, apart
| from saving slots at upcoming Scala conferences.
|
| So it's definitely _not_ the same phenomenon as RMS or Elon.
| rodgerd wrote:
| The top comment on this thread is a "what about the MEN?"
| exercise.
|
| HN is incredibly pro-sexual harasser and anti-victim, along
| with the broader tech community, sadly.
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| The top comment discusses the fate of an accused in the court
| of public opinion, and the limitations of that court. The
| fact you conflate that with saying "what about the MEN?" is
| more an indictment of your world view than anything they
| actually wrote.
| ummonk wrote:
| It takes a critical mass of accusers to break past the inherent
| power differential and take down an influential figure without
| getting blacklisted. There are various reasons this often
| doesn't happen. For one, it's a coordination problem and second
| e.g. this post describes his clever choice in targeting
| immigrant women who don't have much knowledge of western sexual
| norms and can be gaslit more easily.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| Because people don't believe victims. They insist that somehow
| they gave consent, or that somehow the assaulter just couldn't
| have known. Or they blame the victim, saying that "they
| deserved it" or "they shouldn't have been in that situation in
| the first place."
|
| I guarantee you that someone will post in this thread, if they
| haven't already, that she should know better than to get an
| airbnb with a man she doesn't know well. No, this isn't her
| fault. The dude should not have abused her.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| It would be easier to judge if she said that she did not give
| consent.
|
| You may be right, but you also have to agree that some people
| will pause before judging definite rape for described
| situation where girl accepts invitation to sleep in the same
| airbnb, without anybody else, with single guy, bringing
| bottle of wine, not mentioning she did not give consent,
| feeling bad afterwards. From that description it's really
| difficult to pass rape judgement - maybe it was, maybe not,
| what we know is that it was creepy at least for her.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| > some people will pause before judging definite rape for
| described situation where girl accepts invitation to sleep
| in the same airbnb, without anybody else, with single guy,
| bringing bottle of wine,
|
| None of those things _even remotely imply_ consent for a
| sexual advance. Those are all things that should be fine
| for anyone of any gender to do together without there being
| fear of a sexual assault.
|
| Anyone who looks at that list and thinks that it's ok to
| have unwanted sexual intercourse because they happened to
| have a bottle of wine in an AirBNB I'm not sure I want to
| associate with.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| I think you cut the list a bit.
|
| As an thought experiment try to think that your
| husband/wife does those things with somebody (accepts
| invitation to sleep in the same airbnb, without anybody
| else, with single opposite sex, bringing bottle of wine)
| - would you be worried? And if yes, why? Is it not even
| remotely possible that somebody would feel weird about
| their partner doing it?
| foldr wrote:
| One thing you're missing here is that sexual consent is
| an 'in the moment thing'. Someone might be coming over to
| your place fully intending to have sex with you, and then
| change their minds. You have to respect that.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| My point is that she doesn't mention she didn't want it,
| said "no" or anything that implies not giving consent.
| toast0 wrote:
| > There was another time that he insisted on having
| intercourse regardless of me saying I didn't want to.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| > There was another time that he insisted on having
| intercourse regardless of me saying I didn't want to.
|
| Insisting doesn't mean doing it, does it?
| Pfhreak wrote:
| In English, it can mean doing it. "I wanted to split the
| check, but he insisted on picking up the bill." For
| instance, could mean that the person paid the whole bill
| or that they are putting up a strong resistance.
|
| It's unfortunately ambiguous.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| She says that he 'insisted'. Typically someone
| 'insisting' on something implies an initial 'no'.
|
| And furthermore, "not saying no" is not the bar for
| consent. An enthusiastic, unambiguous yes is the bar for
| consent. Not giving consent is the default, assumed
| position until that yes arrives.
| crdrost wrote:
| This is also the community that brought us, for example, the
| Fantasyland Code of "Professionalism," a code of conduct that
| rivals the GPL in how unpleasant I have found it to read and
| piece together what is going on...
| jenkstom wrote:
| Another person with a narcissistic personality disorder. I look
| forward to the day (I'll be long dead, unfortunately) when our
| society can recognize these people as evil and deal with them in
| a constructive way while protecting people from them.
| vsareto wrote:
| Actions make people evil, not personality disorders.
| [deleted]
| voces wrote:
| Since the pattern is so similar, I now recognize this as a form
| of harmful #metoo activism.
|
| - Attack entire community, not individuals
|
| - Court of Public Social Justice
|
| - The charges amount to unwanted advances being made during a
| social interaction where that would be acceptable -- not sexual
| harassment, nor illegal behavior.
|
| Compare https://medium.com/@kristianlum/statistics-we-have-a-
| problem...
|
| Make the problem about an entire industry: Holywood, Scala, MIT,
| Statistics. Garantuee public shaming and punishment for your
| target, by calling out criticism or disbelief as "victim
| shaming", people calling for you to lose your job, because they
| got angry reading a Medium post, not because you've been proven
| guilty by someone without a bias. Ending up in an apartment with
| someone in another country, drinking wine, but not remembering
| how much you drank, but you do remember that he did not drink
| anything (to play up him taking advantage over you), then crying
| and feeling upset, because someone makes an advance towards you,
| instead of feeling flattered and politely declining. Going skinny
| dipping at night in the sea with a bunch of clumsy rowdy tipsy
| researchers, then blaming an advance someone makes, on conference
| culture.
|
| Go to the police, get your day in court, and let justice prevail.
| Not going to join a mob, because someone made you cry once. Even
| giving the experience sympathy would needlessly rile me up. I'd
| like to think about other negative things when interacting with
| Scala and its community, preferably technical.
| skrowl wrote:
| All for a "he hugged me", not even anything sexual
| anon_tor_12345 wrote:
| >I felt being taken advantage of that he had unprotected sex
| with me when I was intoxicated.
|
| At least read the article before being dismissive.
|
| Imagine being 20, getting raped, and having randoms on the
| internet completely invalidate how traumatic it was because
| they think you're just meming. Like damn and we wonder why
| women struggle in tech.
| [deleted]
| GavinMcG wrote:
| > because someone makes an advance towards you, instead of
| feeling flattered and politely declining
|
| Convenient to leave out the rape in the next sentence, and the
| other rape in the next paragraph:
|
| > I felt being taken advantage of that he had unprotected sex
| with me when I was intoxicated. Nothing felt right. I remember
| panicking and crying.
|
| > There was another time that he insisted on having intercourse
| regardless of me saying I didn't want to.
|
| Sorry you don't like to think about that.
| dimgl wrote:
| Agreed 100%. One of the few levelheaded responses on this
| thread.
|
| On top of everything you said, which I agree with, I'd also
| like to see less of these kinds of posts on Hacker News...
| anon_tor_12345 wrote:
| >advance towards you, instead of feeling flattered and politely
| declining
|
| Do you know what "advance" means? It's old-timey English for
| aggression as in
|
| "The enemy advanced on the capital".
|
| No that's not how it's used to today but it still typically has
| very negative connotations. So I think it's rich irony that due
| to your own (probable) inarticulateness and (probable) bias you
| think something that could experienced as violence should be
| flattering.
| tiew9Vii wrote:
| > in the Scala community
|
| The allegations are serious. If the author believes she was drunk
| and did not consent to unprotected sex and taken advantage of
| that should be reported to the police and the courts due to the
| seriousness, it's rape.
|
| The title is damaging "in the Scala community" it tarnishes a
| programming language and individuals who use the language due to
| the act of one person. The language is dieing with dramas among
| 1-2 specific people out of thousands.
|
| No one in the right mind would condone the allegations or the
| perpetrator and sounds like at least one incident a matter for
| the police.
|
| The allegations are against an individual and the ScalaCenter
| handling, not the community. The blog post lists individual
| people in the community who supported the author. I do wish the
| title wasn't as click bait or more specific to the perpetrators
| as it is damaging, killing a really interesting industry and
| technology.
|
| I hope the author finds the peace and justice they deserve from
| sharing this. The public naming and shaming will have serious
| repercussions for the accused.
| the-dude wrote:
| I thought nothing in the post was particulary damning and all of
| it quite ambivalent.
| arkitaip wrote:
| You should come with a physical warning sign.
| mr_vox wrote:
| This case is one of thousands
| kweinber wrote:
| For those claiming this should be handled in courts: 1) you know
| it won't be... especially internationally at the expense of the
| accuser that has to go through an extradition process. 2) it is
| still valuable to warn others that a predator is on the loose. 3)
| it's already been publicly corroborated by someone else who had a
| similar experience and you can expect others to follow.
| mr_vox wrote:
| This case in one of thousands
| nindalf wrote:
| @dang I'm sad that this was flagged. It would be nice if you or
| some other mod could explain why this decision was taken.
| dang wrote:
| Mods don't flag submissions; users do. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
| o_p wrote:
| Women sleeps with infuential person and smears them after they
| are well positioned.
| willf wrote:
| > I have reported all of my experience to the ScalaCenter in
| 2019. I was hoping to see concrete actions, such as building a
| reporting mechanism, to protect minorities in the community.
| Unfortunately, I am not aware of such actions taken.
|
| That sounds like a community failure, not just One Bad Guy.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Moreover, it appears that his behaviours were sort of an open
| secret - apparently this went on for years.
| rayiner wrote:
| > As an inexperienced young woman from a patriarchal culture, I
| was running away from the stereotype of being thought of as
| someone "traditional". I should, like he implied, and wanted to
| be "cool about everything that happened".
|
| "Just be cool" is such an abusive and manipulative behavior I'm
| flummoxed at how it's lasted this long as socially acceptable.
| wrren wrote:
| This guy sounds like a practiced predator, he ought to be in
| jail.
| throwaway800869 wrote:
| Many Hacker News users belabor the "innocent until proved guilty"
| angle when it comes to sexual assault.
|
| Could it be that users of a software focused site are
| overcorrecting for the threat of being labeled creeps?
| joelbluminator wrote:
| It's not looking pretty for Jon Pretty...
| jghn wrote:
| I had the pleasure to get to know the author for a brief time in
| the period her article describes. Some of the surrounding events
| she describes were public knowledge via Twitter posts and such,
| for instance getting stranded in Berlin.
|
| From my outsider's vantage point I remember thinking something
| felt off about Jon's interactions/role in those stories. It was
| gut wrenching reading the article this AM realizing what was
| really going on.
| jliving207 wrote:
| John Pretty is a troublesome character and as he reads through
| this comment section to find out how his reputation will be hurt
| by this... I hope it becomes a barrier for him to participate in
| the Scala Community with influence over others and the
| Programming Communities all around. Punish John Pretty IMO
| merb wrote:
| first, a small rant: tbf. I dislike the title. the real title is
| sexual harassment from Jon Pretty a leader of certain Scala
| Community standups.
|
| because the current title actually sounds like it's the whole
| commnity, but the blog is about a specific guy.
|
| ---
|
| second I really do not understand, how other people can be so
| horrible. he basically abused her in a moment where she was
| really really desperate and I think such a thing is really really
| bad.
| nerdponx wrote:
| > In June, Heather noticed that I was upset at a dinner after
| ScalaDays. I shared with her about what happened. She warned me
| to stay away from Jon Pretty. And she wasn't the only person
| who told me that. Even though my experience in Berlin was
| awful, it was difficult for me to accept that someone, who
| seemed like a good friend, mentor, and ally, could be so
| selfish, manipulative, and cruel.
|
| It sounds like people knew about him and didn't do anything. If
| the community is allowing it to happen, then the community is
| as much at fault as the sick individual doing the abuse.
| merb wrote:
| > It sounds like people knew about him and didn't do
| anything. If the community is allowing it to happen, then the
| community is as much at fault as the sick individual doing
| the abuse.
|
| well around 2017-2019 I was active in scala aswell (more on
| the playframework side tough) and I dind't even knew about
| him until I read the blog. you know just because there are
| members from scalacenter and lightbend does not mean that the
| community as a whole wanted to have something to do with
| somebody like him. You know there are thousands of people
| going to ScalaDays every year, it's highly unlikely that the
| majority of the scala community would be happy about the guys
| behavior and it's also highly unlikely that the majority of
| people in the scala community knew about the guys behavior.
| [deleted]
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| It's a bit vague. I'm not involved in the Scala community and
| if someone told me a story like that about someone in it I
| would also tell them to stay away from them.
| ummonk wrote:
| The community has allowed this guy to continue to be
| influential, so while the perpetrator is just one guy, it's a
| community problem.
| capableweb wrote:
| Relevant passages from the post
|
| > In June, Heather noticed that I was upset at a dinner after
| ScalaDays. I shared with her about what happened. She warned
| me to stay away from Jon Pretty. And she wasn't the only
| person who told me that.
|
| > I have reported all of my experience to the ScalaCenter in
| 2019. I was hoping to see concrete actions, such as building
| a reporting mechanism, to protect minorities in the
| community. Unfortunately, I am not aware of such actions
| taken.
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| Well I think the only problem with the title is that
| "harassment" is not a strong enough word.
|
| About using the word "community", the first paragraph of the
| open letter explains why it's relevant:
|
| "We, the undersigned, have become aware that, for some time,
| Jon Pretty has abused his position of privilege and stature
| within the Scala community to sexually harass and victimize
| women. He has used the community's conferences to target women
| who are new to the Scala community, offering mentorship,
| access, and other forms of support, and then abusing the trust
| that he has established."
| rodgerd wrote:
| "The standard you walk past is the standard you accept" applies
| here. When a good community permits bad actors, it is no longer
| a good community.
| fishnchips wrote:
| I have no interest in Scala and never heard of Jon Pretty nor his
| accuser but the accusations are of a criminal nature (either rape
| or slander) and it feels like as a society we've long developed
| more reliable tools and systems to deal with such matters.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| I don't give two damns about Scala and its community, and I
| neither believe nor disbelieve the linked post, but boy oh boy
| does it remind me of the academia in some (many?) countries,
| where educational/academic advancement per vaginam has been
| practically an unwritten norm for decades, to the joy of many a
| creepy professor!
| adflux wrote:
| Does this type of content really fit on this platform?
| mumphster wrote:
| yes
| melenaboija wrote:
| I hope it does
| fisf wrote:
| I hope it fits in a courtroom first and foremost.
| marcinzm wrote:
| The crimes were mostly committed in foreign countries of
| which neither party is a resident and which the parties
| were only visiting for a short duration of time. Countries
| whose language the victim may not speak fluently or at all.
| The chance of getting the local police to care is low and
| even if they did the cost of flights to testify at trials
| would be beyond the means of the victim.
| [deleted]
| yoavm wrote:
| Yes, hackers care about their communities.
| McGlockenshire wrote:
| > Yes, hackers care about their communities.
|
| The number of creep defenders in this thread suggests
| otherwise. See also: _any_ discussion about codes of conduct.
| calylex wrote:
| Please provide sources, hint: make sure not to include
| people asking questions and not categorically wanting to
| lynch the horrible rapist based on a single story and you
| interpreting that as "creep defenders".
| calylex wrote:
| Hackers care about 99% of what everyone else also cares about
| (you know them operating in the realm of humans.) What a
| ridiculous point.
| dimgl wrote:
| I actually don't want to see stuff like this on Hacker News.
| But I don't make the rules.
| phildenhoff wrote:
| Yes. It's important that as a society we come to terms with the
| fact that historically, and now, a lot of people use whatever
| little power and fame they have to abuse others. We can't sit
| by and let this happen.
| fabian2k wrote:
| The "share an AirBnB to be able to afford the conference" part
| seems particularly damning to me. That seems entirely
| premeditated and predatory.
| the-dude wrote:
| To me it sounds generous and possibly completely harmless.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| It creates a power imbalance, or increases the power
| imbalance that already existed between the two.
|
| If you have a boss/employee relationship, or a mentor/mentee
| relationship, or a professor/student relationship, you need
| to tread _extra_ carefully around consent. One party in those
| relationships holds incredible power over the other, and can
| coerce the weaker party into things they may not be
| comfortable doing.
|
| Likewise, enabling someone to attend a conference they would
| not otherwise be able to financially afford creates a
| possibility of coercion . It's not always coercive, but it
| needs to be handled delicately and appropriately. In the
| author's situation, if she refused, there was a chance she
| was thrown out onto the streets of Berlin at who knows what
| hour, with no money/luggage, and maybe no ability to speak
| the local language.
| noobermin wrote:
| I don't agree. The crime here seems to be rape and the use
| of power to extract sex from another. That's the problem. I
| don't see how sharing an AirBnB is by itself a problem. In
| light of everything else, it fits a pattern of
| manipulation, but it by itself isn't harmful.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| She would not otherwise have been able to attend. She is
| able to attend specifically because of his "generosity".
| This wasn't something she proposed, and when she tried to
| bring others into the arrangement he pushed back,
| insisting it was just the two of them.
|
| So yeah, sharing an AirBNB isn't necessarily bad, but in
| this case specifically it appears to be predatory.
| noobermin wrote:
| Oh, my bad. I missed that part. I didn't know he pushed
| back on others sharing. That's clearly to get them alone.
| Thanks.
| Tade0 wrote:
| The generous thing would be to fund a private AirBnB for her.
| fabian2k wrote:
| My experience with conferences is in a different field, but a
| senior participant proposing to share an AirBnB with a junior
| participant like a student would be extremely weird.
|
| If you want to support the student, you either organize
| another student for them to share accomodations, or connect
| them to one of the travel grants for that conference.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| "seems" doesn't mean "is", we have law systems to deal with
| those kind of issues. Judges are for determining where the line
| between "shitty partner" vs "rapist" lies.
| fabian2k wrote:
| I'm not a court, I'm a random person on the internet
| commenting here.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Me too.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The author doesn't appear to want to make the claim that Mr.
| Pretty raped her. She suggests, strongly, that he's a shitty
| person. She wants other people to know this. Courts don't
| adjudicate such matters, unless they have further
| consequences.
| Benlights wrote:
| Jon Pretty responds
| https://twitter.com/propensive/status/1387168037908910085/ph...
| hamburglar wrote:
| I always try to remain approachable and supportive. Through
| this openness, I've nailed a lot of girls.
| domano wrote:
| This is just downright disgusting, does somebody know if there
| have been consequences? I usually go to general or Go conferences
| and wonder if there is similiar stuff happening, but i have a
| good feeling since at least the go conferences alway emphasize
| inclusion. Lets hope this is true.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Everyone is migrating Scala projects as we speak.
|
| This has very little to do with Scala and everything to do with
| the darkside of the conference scene. Getting involved with
| conferences at the level she did introduces travel - drugs -
| drinking - partying with somewhat like minded young people. The
| culture at the top can be about money, stars and groupies but
| it revolves around power. Those in charge decide who speak.
| Those who speak can get opportunity and money. Money buys
| speaker slots.
|
| Conferences are an anti pattern to programming.
| domano wrote:
| I have been going to conferences regularly for the past 9
| years (eycept covid of course) and find them to be rather
| tame actually. Drinking is widely spread, but most other
| stuff i have not noticed. I also gave talks - maybe the
| community is different here in europe.
| andrewzah wrote:
| I must be going to the wrong conferences!
| jghn wrote:
| I straddle a handful of domains in my professional life. Each
| of these domains has these stories come up from time to time.
| Further each domain talks about whisper networks where people
| alert newcomers who the bad actors are. I have come to view it
| as more likely that every community has these problems than to
| view it as a localized concern.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| There is a lot about the sexual events in this post that, to me,
| highlights something I feel is important which is: we parents
| need to get better had having conversations with our children
| around sex.
|
| This girl was feeling uncomfortable and crying but at the same
| time "didn't think those behaviors were problematic". I can't
| help but wonder if her parents never sat her down and discussed
| situations like this and, I get it. That's a really uncomfortable
| conversation to have with your child. It is, however, and
| important one.
|
| This doesn't just apply to girls by the way. We parents need to
| be telling our sons what kind of behavior is and isn't
| acceptable. It's not enough to expect them to figure it out. Who
| are they figuring it out from if not us? Probably other
| inexperienced boys.
|
| Please don't rush to put words in my mouth by thinking I am
| suggesting the guy in the article is innocent of the accusations.
| I'm making no commentary on either party from this article.
| That's for the courts to decide should one or both parties choose
| to take that course of action.
|
| I'm simply saying it is important that parents overcome their
| discomfort around discussions of sex with their children so that
| the children can make informed decisions.
| clcaev wrote:
| I also think we can better build communities by ensuring people
| are in safe situations, especially when traveling or when they
| are in an unfamiliar environment. This is especially true of
| young adults who have yet to experience predators.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _we parents need to get better had having conversations with
| our children around sex._
|
| I'm a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I thought long and
| hard about this and decided that talking to my children about
| the existence of sexual predators would rob them of their
| innocence.
|
| I've studied how this works. Sexual predation almost never
| starts with rape. It starts with myriad instances of boundary
| violation and disrespect and culminates in rape.
|
| Rape hinges on the detail of consent. As a society trying to
| combat this issue, we seem to overlook that for the most part.
|
| I taught my children that hugs and kisses required consent. I
| taught that from birth. Even a baby too young to talk can turn
| their face away because they don't want a kiss or hold their
| arms up enthusiastically to receive affection.
|
| When they were older, I told them if they told someone "no" and
| their decision was not respected, come get me.
|
| I only had one of them come get me once. The person who felt
| entitled to get "sugar" from my child was utterly shocked that
| I told them they were wrong.
|
| This was an elderly female relative. My children are both boys.
|
| Most likely, she wasn't actually a child molester, but this
| practice of adults demanding hugs and kisses from children who
| have no right to say "no" is commonplace and gets treated as
| something _funny_ in movies. I treated it as no laughing
| matter.
|
| If you want children to understand consent and respect, the
| best thing to do is let them experience it firsthand from
| birth. And make sure they know that rule is a two-way street,
| not a one-sided privilege.
| sweetheart wrote:
| DoreenMichele coming in as a strong contender for Parent of
| the Year 2021. You rule.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Agreed. I can't believe a woman would be naive enough to share
| a room with a man. For crying out loud, if a man invites you to
| a room with him alone he wants to have sex. It's that simple.
|
| I think boys already are told what is acceptable and what
| isn't. We got taught, in no uncertain terms, what would be
| considered rape or sexual assault. But I think people are
| afraid to mention the obvious when it comes to things like
| putting yourself in uncomfortable situations.
|
| I predict this comment will be downvoted, so let me anticipate
| your objections. I had my bike stolen last week. I left it
| somewhere unlocked. This is considered my fault. Now you could
| say, no, it's not my fault, it's the bastard who stole it. And,
| sure, you'd be right. But the fact is I don't have a bike right
| now. Lock up your bike.
| Accacin wrote:
| I'm not sure if I'm different or not, but I've shared a room
| alone with female friends on multiple occasions (when
| younger) with literally nothing happening even when we shared
| a bed.
|
| Obviously, we were long time friends and this would be
| different if I was meeting a conference speaker, but as
| usual, nothing is as black or white as "men only want sex".
|
| However, I do agree with your point. Boys need to be taught
| what could be considered rape, and girls need to realise that
| sadly some men will abuse them sexually if given half a
| chance.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I've walked down the street before and not stolen things
| from people's houses. I assume you leave your front door
| unlocked at night?
| Zelphyr wrote:
| > I think boys already are told what is acceptable and what
| isn't.
|
| Maybe things have changed since I was young but, that may be
| overly generous. The kind of discussion I'm suggesting never
| happened with me, or, if it did, it happened only once. My
| parents left me to figure that out on my own. I don't want
| this to sound like I'm attacking my parents because I'm not.
| I had great parents, but the topic of sexual behavior was
| obviously something they weren't comfortable having with me
| at the time.
|
| Thinking back on conversations I've had with pretty much all
| of my male friends, they had the same experience.
| faitswulff wrote:
| +1 but especially our boys. Girls and women already learn so
| much about how to avoid being harmed by men. It's time for our
| boys to learn how to become kind men - and for those of us who
| are men to model that for them.
| analognoise wrote:
| Doesn't this remove agency from women?
| throway98752343 wrote:
| Boys should be educated, but this will still happen.
|
| I cannot believe this guy doesn't know that what he's doing
| is wrong.
|
| We should identify and mitigate high potential threats by
| public warning, ostracism or legal action. Overcorrect if
| necessary.
| swyx wrote:
| similar stories are emerging:
|
| - https://killnicole.github.io/statement/ (edit i see she has
| added it to the article itself)
|
| - https://twitter.com/brianclapper/status/1387115214064193537?...
|
| - https://twitter.com/adelbertchang/status/1387090351626723329...
|
| there seems to be some coordination here, as this came out pretty
| much at the same time.
| https://typelevel.org/blog/2021/04/27/community-safety.html
|
| Yifan also linked to this piece on What You Can Do:
| https://hypatia.ca/2014/08/05/what-you-can-do/
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Sometimes character assassination is coordinated.
|
| I personally only slightly increase the probability of
| something being true when multiple accusers come forward. I
| still want to see proof.
|
| What if a bunch of your ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends got
| together and decided to ruin your life with accusations?
| noobermin wrote:
| I don't want to stir the pot, but as a comment below links,
| Pretty responded with a statement[0]. He doesn't say this is
| what happened at all but that's a conclusion one can draw if
| you just read his statement. He doesn't insinuate it directly
| but he says they were consensual relationships and the two
| people are upset about how they ended.
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/propensive/status/1387168037908910085
| /ph...
| kelnos wrote:
| I'm seriously curious to know what kind of proof you would
| accept that would make you believe these accusations.
|
| I hear your sort of response a lot, but it's mostly from
| people who won't change their mind no matter what (and will
| continue to move the goalposts as more evidence comes to
| light), or set the bar so high that it's basically impossible
| to provide the proof they want.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| not OP and I believe the accusations. but if she would have
| wanted a) real justice and b) create even more hell for the
| accused while c) staying out of the firing line of
| misogynists on social media, and d) get closure sooner
| because people won't be after her for the next years to
| remind her, then she should have filed a police report.
|
| Given his situation (see my other comment[1] on why) she
| could have made his situation much (I repeat MUCH MUCH)
| worse than what she did. I wouldn't want to know the amount
| of abuse she now gets because of it and in the months (if
| not years to come).
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26962280
| lukasb wrote:
| What proof would satisfy you? How is a victim of rape
| supposed to be able to supply that proof? Should women wear
| body cams at all times?
| colecut wrote:
| "What if a bunch of your ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends got
| together and decided to ruin your life with accusations?"
|
| This just pretty much does not happen without reason, and I
| think it is safe to say that if it did, you are probably a
| terrible person.
| sneak wrote:
| > _This just pretty much does not happen without reason,
| and I think it is safe to say that if it did, you are
| probably a terrible person._
|
| That's not a safe assumption at all.
| colecut wrote:
| That's why I threw in a probably.
|
| Innocent until proven guilty and all that jazz, but there
| will be assumptions nonetheless..
|
| I would love to know what these women stand to gain by
| humiliating themselves if it is all made up.
| tester756 wrote:
| >This just pretty much does not happen without reason, and
| I think it is safe to say that if it did, you are probably
| a terrible person.
|
| oh c'mon, it's insanely naive, let's dont try to push
| narration that those things do not happen
| colecut wrote:
| wow not an example or anecdote or anything huh... The
| parent comment provided multiple anecdotes. It might not
| be proof but it is at least evidence.
| colecut wrote:
| When do they happen, and why did they happen?
| tester756 wrote:
| Unfortunely I'm unable to come with some kind of
| recipe/equation for that.
| julianlam wrote:
| If a bunch of your ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends got
| together to assassinate your character, then between all of
| those separate relationship, there was only one common
| factor, you.
|
| A coordinated release in my opinion reinforces the statement.
| throway98752343 wrote:
| If a bunch of people who once had close, perhaps even loving
| relationships with you all come forward and risk their own
| reputation to say you're bad enough to warrant criminal
| action, I'd say it's on you to prove them wrong.
|
| Or maybe it's all a grand conspiracy, in which case let's
| follow the money and see that it leads... nowhere.
| dimgl wrote:
| There doesn't need to be a grand conspiracy to want to
| smear someone. Additionally, what happened to innocent
| until PROVEN guilty? Allegations are not proof.
| [deleted]
| monocasa wrote:
| I for one, while having a mountain of ex-
| girlfriends/boyfriends, haven't left them vindicate enough to
| do something like coordinate a character assassination
| against me.
| Accacin wrote:
| Seriously? How often does this happen? Unless you are a
| terrible person, I doubt anyone would try to ruin someone's
| life like this.
|
| This lady seems to have her head screwed on. Her post doesn't
| seem to me like she's trying to cause a witch hunt and it
| seems like she's sharing her story in a logical and sensible
| manner.
|
| I'll gladly read the post from another woman defending John
| Pretty, but I doubt that's going to be forthcoming.
| joe5150 wrote:
| why would they be motivated to do that?
| naurupatel wrote:
| Bummed I had to scroll this far into the thread to see some
| reason.
|
| This is horrifying if it did happen but I don't know Yifan
| and I don't know Jon Pretty nor the trustworthiness of
| either.
|
| It's disturbing to see HN readers jump to conclusions so
| quickly without proper evidence. If we continue to reduce our
| capacity for assessment of a situation to individual
| anecdotal accounts what kind of world will we live in 5 years
| from now?
| sweetheart wrote:
| When these things happen, it's often impossible to provide
| evidence. There is nothing could be proven in the court of
| law. So we have victims, and no justice in that case, so
| what are we supposed to tell the victim? Don't get raped?
| And if they are, and resort to the only form of vindication
| they have left (openly sharing it), we're supposed to tell
| them to shut up?
|
| Sharing these things often feels like (and IS) the _only_
| thing a victim can do to maintain even a shred of their
| personhood or agency. If we take that away, we are telling
| victims of horrific abuse to pick up the pieces of their
| lives alone, and quietly. That is not how one heals, and it
| will exacerbate a chilling system of victim shaming that
| leads to untold anguish.
| hamburglar wrote:
| If a bunch of mg ex-girlfriends coordinated a character
| assassination campaign against me I would probably be forced
| to consider that maybe I'm an asshole.
| tester756 wrote:
| this guy seems to be popular in Scala community, maybe
| somebody does not like him?
|
| meanwhile you're probably just normal person
| [deleted]
| tracer4201 wrote:
| Not to discount her story or what happened to her, but I'd be
| interested to hear his side of the story.
|
| I know nothing about this other than this one article, but I do
| know someone who committed suicide after a false rape accusation
| that stuck even after the accuser admitted to making it all up.
| dimgl wrote:
| I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. Why shouldn't we
| hear what he has to say?
|
| That being said, he's already said he's not going to be saying
| much on the matter.
| willeh wrote:
| This may be a tone-deaf sidetrack but also perhaps an important
| piece of advice for some. There should be an impenetrable barrier
| between ones love life and ones professional life. While there
| are certainly people who have met their significant other in a
| professional setting, there are much better ways of doing that,
| especially nowadays. By striving to keep this separation water
| tight we can avoid both unwanted advances and false allegations.
|
| The above is not comment on the allegations in the post, any more
| than if everyone followed the above basic principle we would not
| have to deal with disturbing stories such as this one. It is
| important that stories such as this one are told but perhaps with
| the names left out.
| thatswrong0 wrote:
| or maybe just don't rape people idk
| tucosan wrote:
| I've seen careers of members of both sexes ruined because
| people let the pheromones cloud their judgment.
|
| The number one golden rule of professionalism: never f--- at
| the factory. Don't make advances. Don't even flirt.
| jnwatson wrote:
| That's simply unrealistic and unhelpful.
|
| That the author met this person in a professional setting is
| beside the point. It would be just as serious if it happened at
| a hobby event.
| willeh wrote:
| Perhaps `professional` is too narrow then. I think the power
| differential is an enabling factor for behaviour like this.
| While there certainly are creeps in normal dating situations,
| they are often easier to avoid. This story is very much about
| how this power differential allows one person to abuse
| another like this.
|
| Being aware of how this affects human relationships is
| neither unrealistic nor unhelpful. It is something to take
| seriously and talk about in groups where it could arise.
| noobermin wrote:
| This is probably good advice but if people are spending more
| and more of their time at work and work starts becoming half of
| their life, with outings with coworkers, bosses being your
| friend and not just your boss, then where can you meet people
| exactly?
|
| You can't honestly demand both that people be disconnected from
| their coworkers and that they make work be 90% of their life.
| One part has to give (preferably the latter part).
| chovybizzass wrote:
| I'm just going to stay away from Scala altogether now.
| umvi wrote:
| Jon Pretty's response:
| https://twitter.com/propensive/status/1387168037908910085/ph...
| JPKab wrote:
| Jon Pretty sounds like a complete creep and yes, based on this
| account, a predator.
|
| That being said, there is a court and criminal justice system for
| a reason. While I empathize with the author, and utterly despise
| the archetype of high-status men who use their status within
| programming communities as a tool to target women, I find the
| nature of these kinds of posts to be counterproductive.
| Therapeutic to the author? Likely. A way to mobilize support?
| Certainly. But the method can be abused. Imagine a letter like
| this targeted at you one day, except unlike Mr. Pretty, you are
| innocent. Ask yourself if that's a possibility, and if you think
| that there is a zero probability of anyone maliciously
| weaponizing accusations of sexual misconduct.
|
| My brother was a victim of a vicious smear by a female colleague,
| who falsely accused him of stalking her as a result of him
| calling her out one day for stealing his project and presenting
| it while he was traveling to the funeral of his wife's
| grandfather. He was able to show video footage of him picking up
| his son and daughter at a daycare the very moment the woman
| claimed he was at her house, but by then, the HR department
| couldn't turn back, and he was fired. (He was later sent a large
| gift basket by several of his coworkers who had heard from
| someone in HR that the charges were false, but "optics" were the
| reason they had to move forward with his termination.)
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| > I find the nature of these kinds of posts to be
| counterproductive. Therapeutic to the author? Likely. A way to
| mobilize support? Certainly. But the method can be abused.
|
| I feel like you made your own point with the story about your
| brother. Everyone below is ready to boycott the company which
| you basically named already.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| We have a criminal justice system so that, when the standard of
| proof can be met, the state can punish and deter wrongdoers
| through fines, forcible incarceration and other limitations on
| freedom.
|
| No-one is entitled to maintain a positive reputation just
| because they've yet to be convicted in a criminal court. One
| can be a creepy sex-pest without that behavior rising the level
| of criminality, and one should not be surprised if rumors of
| such behavior gets around.
|
| For those who feel they are being slandered, there is a law of
| defamation and a civil courts system for a reason. At least
| there, the burden of proof is only balance of probabilities.
| noobermin wrote:
| I'm sure what your brother faced is terrible but how exactly
| does this relate to the story?
| swyx wrote:
| its a reminder that mob justice is really terrible when it is
| wrong. we dont have all the facts. we should absolutely take
| precautions from this guy causing further harm, but the rape
| accusation needs to go thru the legal process including
| allowing the accused to defend themselves.
| ummonk wrote:
| Well, in this instance given that his coworkers sent him a
| gift basket, it sounds like the mob came to the right
| conclusions while the institution took the wrong action.
| noobermin wrote:
| My point is that these are not that analogous. The linked
| account is one of many accusations against John Pretty.
| What the comment is referring to is an accusation that
| sounds like it's one person's word against another and
| primarily a conflict confined to one HR department. It
| isn't really "mob justice" then, it's HR siding with one
| party.
| JPKab wrote:
| Behavior like this should be punished within the framework of
| the civil and criminal court system. The court of public
| opinion has no rules as to the validity of evidence
| introduced, and relies on informal enforcement mechanisms as
| well, which are prone to abuse.
|
| The court of public opinion still thinks that the riots in
| Kenosha were justified (the actual courts heard and saw real
| evidence that determined that Mr. Blake was indeed sexually
| assualting his ex and was indeed reaching for a knife when he
| was shot). The court of public opinion thought that the
| invasion of Iraq in 2003 was justified because they thought
| Saddam helped OBL. The recent case of the teenage girl shot
| in Columbus featured the Court of Public Opinion weighing in
| that the girl should have been allowed to stab the other girl
| pinned against that car, and the cop should have "shot her in
| the leg", which any expert on use of force would immediately
| explain would not have worked. Why? Because the public as a
| whole is filled with smart individuals, but an an aggregate
| level are a bunch of moronic lemmings, like all large groups
| of people are.
| noobermin wrote:
| You've listed a number of disparately connected recent news
| events and referred to some ominous "Court of Public
| Opinion" which has come to some perspective as if it
| somehow unites them. My point is you're drawing some thread
| and connecting this all to your brother. I'll echo again
| something I said in another reply, I'm not sure how
| analogous or connected these things are. It sounds mostly
| like your brother had his word against another accusation,
| and HR sided against him. Is HR now the "court of public
| opinion?" I thought that qualifies as due process in this
| case.
|
| Again you're making some bigger point only you seem to be
| hearing but spell it out for me and for everyone else.
| emilsedgh wrote:
| It was an example of how this method can be abused comparing
| to the criminal justice system.
| caconym_ wrote:
| Arguably the problem in your brother's case is more his
| organization being willing to ignore evidence in favor of
| "optics", and less the ability of women to make their
| experiences with predators public.
|
| When accusations like this come out, organizations with a stake
| in the outcome should act with integrity to find the truth and
| respond to it. Witch hunts are never a good idea. But the fact
| that some men may be falsely accused doesn't mean women
| shouldn't speak up when they have experiences like this.
| Ironically, many (if not most) women who _don't_ speak up
| publicly end up being gaslighted and marginalized by the very
| same kinds of corporate entities who were willing to throw your
| brother under the bus for _optics_. By the same token, it's
| often a last ditch attempt to get some help after all other
| avenues have failed.
| [deleted]
| Ankintol wrote:
| > there is a court and criminal justice system for a reason
| Having supported a few friends trying to push these kinds of
| complaints through the courts, I think the precise reason this
| kind of naming and shaming has become so common place is the
| criminal justice system isn't working well.
|
| Even for fairly straightforward sexual assault case in a
| liberal jurisdiction _with witnesses_ I 've watched a friend
| struggle with members of the justice system verbally insulting
| and degrading them as they try to obtain justice for
| themselves.
|
| Having seen all that when I see a post like this I understand
| why the author did not go to court, and don't question it. If
| we took the time to actually fix the courts I'd be much more
| skeptical of claims that had not been presented to law
| enforcement.
|
| I feel for people like your brother who are victims of people
| abusing the trend, but as long as our justice system fails
| victims so horribly I think this is the least bad solution
| available.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Can you please provide proof that our justice system is
| failing victims? Do you just mean that the conviction rate is
| anything less than 100% for accusations?
|
| Also, can you clarify what you mean by "verbally insulting
| and degrading them"? It's possible you just mean the lawyer
| is accusing them of lying... which is what you do when you
| think a person is lying. The accused does have a presumption
| of innocence, and the accuser may need to be cross examined
| under some reasonable amount of emotional stress to see if
| their behavior under stress reveals that they are lying.
| There's not really any way around this other than "well,
| we'll just assume they're telling the truth and anyone they
| accuse is guilty" which is a far worse solution in my
| opinion.
| Ankintol wrote:
| > Can you please provide proof that our justice system is
| failing victims? Do you just mean that the conviction rate
| is anything less than 100% for accusations?
|
| I'm confused that you think this is something I can prove
| through citations. The way we adjudicate whether someone is
| a victim is through the courts, my claim is the courts do a
| bad job of this. There are only two things I can think to
| poinnt you at:
|
| 1. The numerous written accounts online of women attempting
| to get justice and being stonewalled. Some of the more
| famous cases during the beginning of the #metoo era showed
| this.
|
| 2. I can say that the lived experience of every woman I
| know to have gone through the courts found it unnecessarily
| degrading (n~=20) and while I believe all of them, only a
| quarter (n~=5) received a guilty verdict. I know far more
| women who did not go through the process due to stories
| from women they know.
|
| I'm personally convinced, if you're not I understand but am
| not ready to expend the energy digging up cases to try and
| convince you.
|
| > can you clarify what you mean by "verbally insulting and
| degrading them"
|
| Literal slurs, misogynistic generalizations about women
| being temptresses, stereotypically horrible questions such
| as "were you asking for it?"
| toast0 wrote:
| > That being said, there is a court and criminal justice system
| for a reason.
|
| The alleged crimes are difficult to prove in general, but in
| this case the victim seems to have been only visiting the
| country where the crime occurred. And didn't fully understand
| what had happened contemporaneously. I would hope she
| approaches the appropriate criminal authorities to report, and
| I would hope something is done, but without local knowledge of
| how these reports are handled in Berlin, I would expect it to
| mostly be written down somewhere and no further action taken.
|
| Speaking out in a public way like this helps others who
| experienced the same pattern of behavior to recognize it, and
| possibly share similar experiences to the point where a
| criminal investigation may be started, if relevant. It also may
| help put people who might be exposed to similar behavior in the
| future on notice, so they can attempt to avoid it, or report it
| as it happens, if it happens in the future.
| arthur_sav wrote:
| Yes, what happened to due diligence?
| klyrs wrote:
| What happened to free speech? If you think this is slander,
| don't the same rules apply; mustn't we presume the innocence
| of Yifan until she's proven guilty?
| arthur_sav wrote:
| I think you made my point.
|
| We used to have a process to figure out what happened and
| make a judgement after the facts have been laid out.
|
| What we get now is emotional responses to outrageous
| headlines and mobs ready to crucify the accused.
|
| What a farce.
| suifbwish wrote:
| It's the modern day equivalent of being accused of witchcraft.
| You get a trial but good luck getting your reputation back.
| People are trained not to doubt this sort of thing end assume
| guilt, then when confronted they rattle off some supposed
| statistical fact that it's virtually impossible for the accuser
| to be lying.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| Except there's no such thing as witchcraft but sexual
| harassment is very real. Victims have every right to speak
| up.
|
| Libel and slander laws are also real. If someone is actually
| making a false accusation, there's already legal ways to deal
| with it.
| matz1 wrote:
| >there's already legal ways to deal with it
|
| suing can cost money, time, effort, and may not able to
| necessarily clear your name even if you won.
| hulahoof wrote:
| As the parent mentioned, the problem isn't recourse it is
| by that stage your life is already ruined. I don't think
| there is a clear answer though, the only moral thing to do
| is to support the accuser.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| What are people supposed to do then. If your friend sees
| somebody at the store and says "that guy is an asshole, he
| used to beat me up in middle school" do you respond "wait I
| can't develop any opinion of that person without a trial"?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Of course not, but that's because I know my friend
| personally. If I saw someone putting up posters outside my
| apartment complex saying "the guy in Unit 214 is an
| asshole, he used to beat me up in middle school", I
| wouldn't spread the accusation without knowing more about
| what's going on.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Even if you had multiple other people corroborate it?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I can't imagine a situation where I would spread an
| accusation against someone I don't know based on the word
| of other people I don't know. I'm frankly a bit confused
| why this is controversial - it seems like common sense to
| me, and nobody I know in real life has ever done this.
| (Of course, this is symmetric, so I wouldn't _dis_
| believe the accusation either.)
| matz1 wrote:
| What are you going to do ? Just believe it ?
| nindalf wrote:
| You see the double standard you're preaching?
|
| When a woman is sexually assaulted, you tell them to use the
| justice system. You stick to this despite other folks telling
| you the chances of conviction are low. You don't want people to
| make public accusations.
|
| And yet you, in this thread, have no problem making accusations
| against Nike for wrongful termination. Why not use the legal
| system to pursue this? You answer that too - low chance of
| success apparently.
|
| Within a few minutes you've done exactly what you're asking OP
| not to do.
| [deleted]
| joelbluminator wrote:
| > who use their status within programming communities as a tool
| to target women
|
| In general I don't like it as well because it could lead to
| abuse as we just read - but that's also not always black or
| white. In some cases it could be real romance or attraction
| between two adults, even if one has a higher status than the
| other (that's of course not what happened in this story! I'm
| just saying it could be consensual, even if the "high status"
| person uses his status just to get sex. Movie stars and rock
| stars do the same thing.
| furyofantares wrote:
| We have criminal and civil justice systems that have different
| levels of burden of proof, and correspondingly differ in the
| severity of their outcomes.
|
| It makes sense to also have social justice systems that are
| lower burden of proof and have lesser consequences. Especially
| for crimes that are difficult to prosecute and have low
| visibility.
| supernintendo wrote:
| This kind of mentality is exactly why predatory behavior is so
| prevalent in the tech industry. A victim speaks out against
| their accuser and the first thing you do is reduce her
| experiences as "counterproductive" and nothing more than
| therapy for the author. Then you deflect to some personal
| anecdote of a false accusation that has nothing to do with the
| issue we're talking about. The issue is about sexual harassment
| and assault within the Scala community. Your post derails a
| very important conversation by appealing to the same sorts of
| narratives that ends up normalizing this kind of behavior -
| that it is in some way shameful for victims of abuse to speak
| out because it contributes to some sort of culture where
| innocent men are more likely to be falsely accused. You're
| worried about that and not the culture we have now where it's
| accepted that it's normal for men to harass women through
| catcalling, stalking and casually making sexual comments about
| us or judging our bodies. It's no wonder that real instances of
| abuse would be overlooked.
|
| Anyone who has been through sexual assault knows the trauma you
| have to live with and how agonizing that can be. There comes a
| point where abusers need to be called out, if only to protect
| members of the community who wouldn't know otherwise and might
| become end up becoming victims themselves. In the case of Scala
| and Jon Pretty, we see more accounts coming out in the
| aftermath of Yifan's post [0][1][2]. I wish her and all other
| victims peace of mind, compassion and healing from the trauma
| that was forced upon them.
|
| [0] https://killnicole.github.io/statement/
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/brianclapper/status/1387115214064193537?...
|
| [2]
| https://twitter.com/adelbertchang/status/1387090351626723329...
| nicklecompte wrote:
| > Imagine a letter like this targeted at you one day, except
| unlike Mr. Pretty, you are innocent.
|
| "Imagine that you were convicted of murder but, unlike John
| Wayne Gacy, you were innocent."
|
| Seriously what is the point of comments like this? False
| convictions are real and very very bad, but I know very few
| social justice advocates who are opposed to locking up serial
| killers. Likewise, the existence of unscrupulous people who
| make false accusations of sexual assault/etc is a real problem.
| But that's a very shitty excuse to trash every public
| accusation - especially when in practice it is the public
| accusation that leads to more victims speaking out.
|
| More to the point: Jon Pretty is a notable public figure who
| has been credibly accused of extremely toxic and disgusting
| behavior towards large portions of the Scala community. At
| least some of this behavior is clearly not illegal, merely
| dangerous and profoundly unethical[1]. Therefore the court of
| public opinion is the only court that has solid jurisdiction,
| so to speak.
|
| [1] That said: some of the accusations and the large number of
| alleged victims merit a criminal investigation.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| > Therefore the court of public opinion is the only court
| that has solid jurisdiction, so to speak.
|
| based on what his public info shows about his location this
| medium post (and the ensuing public outrage) cops in that
| country will have to press charges (in case they haven't been
| pressed already).
|
| There is a high chance he is a flight risk so they will book
| him, _unless_: - he is actually a passport
| holder of that country (doesn't seem the case), and -
| has a proper address registered as is law, (many Brits don't
| care since British law doesn't require it) - has a
| strong social family network in that country, (unlikely)
| - has a job in that country (contracting/freelancing doesn't
| count here)
|
| ... then he is looking forward to spending 6 months minimum
| in "Untersuchungshaft" (hard time) or for whatever length of
| time investigations are ongoing (until trial).
|
| What I'm getting at is that this is a very serious allegation
| that _will_ result in hard time if convicted but also until
| he actually gets his day in court! But for that to happen she
| needs to do more than a Medium post (make a statement with
| the cops which can be scary but shouldn't be if she actually
| brings a lawyer). In case she doesn't then it needs to be
| considered a character assassination which itself is a
| felony. In any case posting such a piece is legally risky for
| her and if she would have bothered getting a lawyer, they
| most certainly would have advised her against it. The best
| option for her would be to go through the court system of
| where he is currently located.
|
| Most other options have a high risk of this going nowhere
| (cost + extradition etc) and even give more room for
| speculation and he-said-she-said which shouldn't (imho) be
| the goal of the metoo movement and indeed it should be called
| out for mob-justice.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think there are a few problems with this:
|
| Another commenter mentions somewhere here that the specific
| thing that happened may not have been illegal in Germany
| then (but is now). I don't know how to verify that as I
| don't speak German.
|
| This happened several years ago; there is no physical
| evidence that remains. This, as you allude to, is a he-
| said-she-said situation. I assume there are
| emails/texts/etc. that might speak to Pretty's poor
| character and ill intent, but that's not much. In the US
| this would almost certainly not be enough for a conviction.
| Maybe it would be in Germany or the UK, but I suspect not.
|
| Agree that she may have opened herself up to legal
| liability (at least an accusation of libel or defamation).
| As I recall, in the UK it is harder than in the US to
| defend oneself in court against accusations of libel.
|
| It is possible, though, that Pretty might be dissuaded from
| bringing any legal action because doing so will only draw
| more attention to his bad behavior, and could result in a
| worse situation for him than just going and hiding under a
| rock for a few years.
| philwelch wrote:
| I think there's a crucial point that you missed:
|
| "...there is a court and criminal justice system for a
| reason"
|
| John Wayne Gacy was convicted in a court via the criminal
| justice system. As a society, we have chosen this as our
| mechanism for adjudicating these types of accusations, and
| that mechanism has evolved certain safeguards over time. It's
| not perfect, but it is a far fairer venue to be tried in than
| the "court of public opinion". That's not an insignificant
| point, and you're glossing over it entirely.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| No, because Gacy was accused of things that were actually
| illegal, whereas much of what Pretty was accused of is
| clearly not illegal, just shitty. So, _as I said in my
| comment_ and hardly "glossed over," the court of public
| opinion (and the possibility of social / professional
| sanction) are entirely appropriate!
|
| This idea that individuals aren't allowed to publicly
| criticize the actions of public figures, or report on their
| own experiences with public figures, is so painfully stupid
| that I find it astonishing that you are arguing in good
| faith. This is not something you would actually believe in
| other contexts (say, if a CEO is accused of verbal abuse).
| Cyril_HN wrote:
| You are conflating conviction with mere, non-legal
| accusation.
|
| Conviction means someone made an accusation at a legal level,
| then it was considered worthy by police, then by a country's
| prosecution service, then by a jury, and then (probably) by
| an appeals court too. Under normal circumstances, that's a
| bar infinitely higher than, "I'm claiming to have a story
| about someone."
| andrewzah wrote:
| Someone should coin a law for this phenomenon: Every single
| time a ~~woman~~ victim makes a public statement like this,
| in the comment sections a man must be discussing false
| accusations or the court of public opinion. I don't think
| I've ever not seen this.
|
| People who are abused are damned if they do, damned if they
| don't.
|
| edit: removed specific gender
|
| edit2: I'm not trying to be inflammatory here. This is a
| phenomenon that I've noticed over the years.
| JPKab wrote:
| People who are accused are damned if they do, damned if
| they don't.
|
| If I lived in a simplistic world like you do where only the
| rights of the accuser matter, and the rights of the accused
| are ignored, my life would be easier. But I don't have that
| luxury.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| We need to be able to listen to accusers. We also need to
| be able to evaluate the accusations honestly. If it's taboo
| to express doubt or skepticism of accusations of sexual
| impropriety, then that isn't functional either.
|
| I think you've got the phenomenon backwards: when people
| are skeptical of a murder accusation or an alleged robbery,
| it's accepted as part of normal discourse. But showing
| skepticism of allegations of sexual impropriety is not.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| It's also a completely false argument since there's libel
| and slander laws. If the accused was innocent, they would
| simply sue the false accuser. That they don't says
| everything.
|
| The barrier and punishment for coming forward as a victim
| of sexual abuse, rape or harassment is great indeed.
| Questioning every case is ignorance of existing laws setup
| to handle any false accusations.
| pc86 wrote:
| If it's hard to demonstrably prove actual cases of sexual
| assault, doesn't it follow that it would be _as_ hard, if
| not harder, to prove the negative?
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Not trying to sue someone for slander doesn't actually
| say anything.
|
| There's a lot of factors. How much will it cost? How much
| publicity will it generate and is that worse than just
| letting it go? What is the standard of proof that must be
| met and are they confident they can prove that it's a
| false statement? What are the consequences if they
| somehow fail to meet that burden? Etc.
|
| Also, how did the left become the party of "if he's in
| the courtroom he must be guilty of something"?
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| So are you saying that victims must win a court case to
| have their story believed but perpetrators should be
| taken at their word?
|
| If someone wants to clear their name, go to court and sue
| for slander. If it's two people's word against each
| other, I'll believe the victim every time since there's
| such a high cost of coming forward and slander laws
| exist.
|
| EDIT Since I'm now throttled...
|
| I'm saying that coming forward either means:
|
| 1. Something really happened to you.
|
| 2. You're breaking the law and can be punished.
|
| High stakes, no? Which is one of the many reasons false
| accusations are exceedingly rare if not non-existent.
|
| I will always believe the victim unless the perpetrator
| wins a libel case. It's the legal mechanism for fighting
| back.
| pc86 wrote:
| > _So are you saying that victims must win a court case
| to have their story believed but perpetrators should be
| taken at their word?_
|
| Not the person to whom you're replying, but the
| presumption of innocence means this exactly. If you are
| accused of a crime, you are _presumed innocent_ until it
| can be proven you 're not.
| endominus wrote:
| So are you saying that victims (of slander) must win a
| court case to have their story believed but perpetrators
| (of slander) should be taken at their word?
|
| The sword cuts both ways.
|
| Except it doesn't, because if you're in the news for
| {serious crime} and later clear your name, your
| reputation is still probably trashed. There is no real
| mechanism for recovery in the modern panopticon. Lowering
| standards of evidence required for conviction (to
| basically nothing, if some people are taken seriously) is
| such a kludgy, cumbersome hack to solve this problem that
| it shocks me that people present it seriously. It's
| utopian thinking.
| JPKab wrote:
| So in your judgement, a person who is accused is guilty
| if they don't retaliate with a slander/libel lawsuit? Did
| you ever stop to think that maybe, just maybe, lawyers
| and filing lawsuits might be expensive, prohibitively so?
|
| The "existing laws setup to handle any false allegations"
| exist only for accusations made in the court system.
|
| It's amazing to me how little thought people like you
| have behind your beliefs. You basically just regurgitate
| what you heard from your college electives with zero
| mindfulness or introspection.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| > The "existing laws setup to handle any false
| allegations" exist only for accusations made in the court
| system.
|
| This is wrong though.
|
| > Did you ever stop to think that maybe, just maybe,
| lawyers and filing lawsuits might be expensive,
| prohibitively so?
|
| Indeed, and reporting a crime, and ensuring it is handled
| appropriately by a police force is also exceedingly
| costly, though perhaps not financially.
|
| Significant portions of your post violate the HN
| guidelines.
| djbebs wrote:
| That's not how libel and slander works. You not only have
| to prove that the statements were false, but that the
| accuser knew they were false and was deliberately
| malicious in spreading the falsehoods
| Sebb767 wrote:
| And people who are accused are damned, period. I can see
| why mob justice can sometimes be the only options for
| victims, but the abuse potential is _massive_.
|
| By the way, I see no reason a woman or a trans person could
| not make this statement.
| andrewzah wrote:
| "but the abuse potential is massive."
|
| I think people grossly exaggerate this. We have libel and
| slander laws. Individual companies aside, entire
| communities of people aren't that stupid. In my opinion,
| this is a really pessimistic view of people and also not
| based in reality in my experience.
|
| At the end of the day, we need to be able to listen to
| victims. The amount of fake accusers compared to real
| victims is microscopic.
|
| "And people who are accused are damned, period."
|
| Not really. There are literally countless examples of
| accusations/allegations and nothing happening to people
| for whatever reason, usually influence/popularity.
| philwelch wrote:
| > I think people grossly exaggerate this. We have libel
| and slander laws.
|
| Yeah, but think about how those work. (IANAL).
|
| If I can convince enough people that you are an awful
| person, I can ruin your reputation. As a recourse, you
| can sue me for defamation. But once you do that, we've
| switched sides--now I am the defendant and you are the
| accuser. Unlike a criminal defendant, the defendant in
| the court of public opinion never enjoys a presumption of
| innocence. Instead, he has to carry that burden of proof
| through a civil lawsuit just to clear his name.
|
| > Individual companies aside, entire communities of
| people aren't that stupid.
|
| If that's true, why bother with courts of law in the
| first case? If the mob is capable of adjudicating
| questions of guilt or innocence, we're wasting a lot of
| money on lawyers as a society.
| zo1 wrote:
| >"I think people grossly exaggerate this. We have libel
| and slander laws."
|
| I don't understand what those laws have to do with this?
| As if they somehow protect a potentially innocent party
| from incorrect accusations? At what point would an
| accusation such as the one in the blog post even
| constitute as libel/slander?
| JPKab wrote:
| I should note that my brother thought exactly the way you
| did, before this happened to him. Just an FYI.
|
| He didn't move to Portland randomly. He's the most
| liberal of the liberal. Just remember that you almost
| never hear media coverage of accusations that turn out to
| be false. You just hear about the accusations when they
| are first made. Do you think the coverage of the Duke
| Lacrosse case was equally high after the accusations were
| proven to be fabricated?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Imagine that you were convicted of murder
|
| OP points out that we have criminal courts for a reason -
| he's not comparing this scenario with an actual conviction
| after a trial with presumed innocence. In your analogy, it
| would have to be common for people to be fired from their
| jobs (and blackballed from entire industries) on the strength
| of a murder accusation that hasn't even been presented to the
| police, much less been through a trial.
| [deleted]
| JPKab wrote:
| John Wayne Gacy was convicted in a criminal court of law,
| with rules, where he was presumed innocent until proven
| guilty.
|
| You attempt to draw a connection, but it's a false analogy
| out of the gate.
| [deleted]
| kelnos wrote:
| I mostly agree with the point you're making, but I think
| it's a bit of a stretch to assume that the jury actually
| really presumed Gacy innocent at the start of his trial.
|
| Like everyone, they were certainly biased toward assuming
| his guilt in the run-up to the trial.
|
| No system is perfect, and humans are fallible. But that's
| kinda the underlying issue with this entire discussion: if
| she had gone to the authorities (especially if only years
| after the incident in question, and also consider that the
| incident happened in a different country), would there be
| any legal remedy here? I think it's pretty likely that
| nothing material would have come of that.
| throway98752343 wrote:
| I'd never heard of that guy, so to save others the trouble,
| in 1980 he was found "guilty of 33 charges of murder; he was
| also found guilty of sexual assault and taking indecent
| liberties with a child" and was executed by the USA in 1994.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| All true, but you forgot the money shot:
|
| "A clown can get away with murder." --John Wayne Gacy
|
| John Wayne Gacy, often called the "Killer Clown," was one
| of the worst serial killers in U.S. history, raping and
| murdering at least 33 young male victims.
|
| https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/john-wayne-gacy
|
| John Waters hangs one of John Wayne Gacy's infamous clown
| paintings on the wall of his guest room, so his guests
| never stay too long.
|
| Politically Incorrect with John Waters
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7zFp7CaJqE&ab_channel=luri
| e...
|
| Chilling paintings by 'killer clown' John Wayne Gacy
| expected to sell for PS7,000 each
|
| https://metro.co.uk/2017/10/09/chilling-paintings-by-
| killer-...
| tootie wrote:
| I think that's a pretty cynical POV. False accusations happen,
| but aren't the norm. Far more abusers get away with their bad
| behavior than good people are wrongly punished. Yifan already
| has a second woman coming forward describing similar behavior
| as well some witnesses to some of the public parts. It's
| probably unlikely she'd be able to prove a criminal case in
| whatever country this happened, but we don't need bad behavior
| to be criminal to declare it unacceptable and stop rewarding
| it. It's likely we'll see a few more pretty soon, hear Pretty's
| side and then the court of public opinion can render a
| decision. Right now, her story is pretty plausible and she has
| seemingly no motive to fabricate. He won't go to jail, but he
| will stop being invited to conferences and likely lose his
| livelihood.
| devilduck wrote:
| You know the reason people started leaning into social justice
| is because the cops and the courts weren't doing a very good
| job? That's why we are where we are. Also the fact that a lot
| of dudes just can't imagine a world where they just keep to
| themselves doesn't really help the problem. But again, this is
| where we find ourselves and it is going to keep continuing.
|
| And frankly the idea that there are people that believe "smear
| campaigns" are as normal as every day sexual harassment is
| extremely laughable.
| matz1 wrote:
| > Imagine a letter like this targeted at you one day, except
| unlike Mr. Pretty, you are innocent.
|
| You already assume he is guilty ?
| [deleted]
| btilly wrote:
| I only kind of agree.
|
| In this case a Chinese woman living in the USA apparently got
| raped in Germany 3 years ago. To involve law enforcement she
| would have to travel to a country where she doesn't speak the
| language, to make an accusation for which she has no evidence
| but her word, against a man who lives in another city.
|
| What, exactly, do you imagine that the police are likely to do
| with her report?
|
| I hate the court of public opinion as much or more as the next
| guy. But if this is a real pattern and he is as practiced as it
| sounds, after 10-20 women come forth then I'll be very
| confident that the crime is real. And there is also a chance
| that we can hit a critical mass where law enforcement somewhere
| may take an interest after all.
|
| I agree with you that ideally this would go to the police first
| and they would actually act. But in the real world, she picked
| one of the best of the bad options available to her.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > raped
|
| I agree with everything else in your post except for the
| description of events as "rape". According to the story she
| wrote, they had sex when she was drunk, and she thought for
| months after the fact that the sex had been consensual. To me
| it sounds like sexual abuse / exploitation, not rape. (Unless
| you're making the pedantic argument that having sex with an
| intoxicated person is always rape, in which case 2
| intoxicated persons having sex would mean that both persons
| rape each other.)
| gambiting wrote:
| >>To involve law enforcement she would have to travel to a
| country where she doesn't speak the language, to make an
| accusation for which she has no evidence but her word,
| against a man who lives in another city.
|
| Well, that's not strictly true. At least the official advice
| in the UK is that even if the crime happened elsewhere you
| should still report it locally, then the case _should_ be
| forwarded to the authorities in the country where it
| allegedly happened.
|
| https://www.helpforvictims.co.uk/content/Q1.htm#:~:text=You%.
| ...
|
| No idea how/if that would work in US, but in general you
| _should_ be able to report it locally.
| Fern_Blossom wrote:
| >To involve law enforcement she would have to travel to a
| country where she doesn't speak the language, to make an
| accusation for which she has no evidence but her word,
| against a man who lives in another city.
|
| That's what an embassy is for... they help deal with these
| situation.
|
| >And there is also a chance that we can hit a critical mass
| where law enforcement somewhere may take an interest after
| all.
|
| Don't complain that a law enforcement agency doesn't do
| anything if they're never made aware of the problem.
| nawgz wrote:
| There are plenty of stories of law enforcement ignoring,
| downplaying, and even harassing victims of sexual crimes
| who try to report it. Please do not act like the police are
| a high trust authority who act only in good faith - we have
| overwhelmingly seen the other side of that in these past
| years.
| suifbwish wrote:
| There are also plenty of stories of the legal system
| working as intended. You can create any narrative you
| want from selectively paying attention to data.
| nawgz wrote:
| Yes, sure. Instead, by holistically paying attention to
| data, we can see that rape is a wildly underprosecuted
| crime[0], and thus we can stop acting like there are no
| possible barriers obstructing these victims from justice.
|
| Actually, it's kind of hilarious when I put it this
| way... you're the one selectively looking at the data to
| justify inaction.
|
| [0]:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/06/less-
| than...
| suifbwish wrote:
| It's clear that emotion clouds judgement on this issue
| more so than even murder.
|
| Did you just cite Washington Post as an authoritative
| source?
| [deleted]
| cogman10 wrote:
| > That's what an embassy is for... they help deal with
| these situation.
|
| Have you ever worked with an embassy? I have, it's no
| picnic even in the best of circumstances (lost passport).
| It takes time to setup such an appointment and you are
| expecting a young college student to have the wherewithal
| to navigate that all while being on a budget and having
| their current lodging with the aggressor.
|
| You are expecting an abused person to do everything right
| in a foreign county while currently staying with their
| abuser.
|
| Don't blame a sexual abuse victim for not doing everything
| right and by the books.
| pydry wrote:
| >What, exactly, do you imagine that the police are likely to
| do with her report?
|
| If it's anything like the UK (and I suspect it is), they'll
| likely take it seriously. For example, see the police's
| reaction here:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/mt1kw4/withd.
| ..
|
| If she got robbed, on the other hand, or she reported
| something like this ten years ago, they'd probably say "meh
| we are busy, here's your crime reference number now go away".
| belorn wrote:
| Sweden and Uk spent tens of millions dealing with extradition
| case for just getting a hearing over an accusation with
| similar amount of evidence.
|
| Technically the legal system could do the same in her case.
| bashinator wrote:
| Technically correct is the least useful kind of correct.
| api wrote:
| I don't like this court-of-public-opinion stuff much either and
| the abuse potential is real. At the same time: what else are
| people going to do? There seems to be no other recourse.
|
| Most people let bullies get away with it because even stepping
| in as a third party means standing up to a bully. It can be
| scary, but even if there's no real risk it's still a fucking
| pain in the ass. Who wants to get into a mud slinging
| competition with a predator? Or get a harassment lawsuit? If
| someone is willing to harass other people this way, they will
| certainly harass you this way.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I don't blame the people who go public - I just wish that the
| rest of us would be a bit more hesitant to immediately signal
| boost them. (For example, I might avoid upvoting a story like
| this to the top of a tech news aggregation platform when the
| accused hasn't had time to respond.)
| darig wrote:
| The 2nd amendment still exists (for now). Protect yourself
| and eliminate a predator in 1 easy step. Please. For the
| children.
| [deleted]
| fishnchips wrote:
| Contact law enforcement.
| marcinzm wrote:
| You mean the law enforcement in a foreign country that you
| are visiting for only a few days? The one that would
| require you to spend untold thousands of dollars, that you
| don't have, on flights if you had to testify in a court in
| a language that you do not fluently speak?
| varjag wrote:
| What do you do if you're mugged in a foreign country?
| marcinzm wrote:
| Generally count yourself lucky to be alive and then fly
| home in a few days.
| varjag wrote:
| So you suggest the victims should just shrug it off.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| The chances of the police and the court system doing
| something are not many and it will cost you.
|
| I tried fighting injustices in court, it often doesn't
| work and you just end up wasting money.
|
| I would have rather spent the money on a guy with a
| wrench.
| marcinzm wrote:
| I mean they could post on social media about their
| account and see if the community acts.
| [deleted]
| vkou wrote:
| Law enforcement will tell you to pound sand. Much (not all)
| of this kind of abuse isn't _illegal_ , and DAs rarely want
| to prosecute the parts that are. It ruins their district's
| crime stats, it's difficult to prosecute, and many of them
| just don't care.
|
| Not to mention that this took place while traveling to a
| foreign country.
|
| Edit: I'm assuming that folks disagreeing with this post
| have had nothing but success with reporting sexual
| harassment and assault to police departments, foreign and
| domestic... Because the alternative assumption is a lot
| less charitable.
| rodgerd wrote:
| Yes, I'm sure they'll treat it with the seriousness that
| they treat the decades-long ignored pile of rape kits.
| domano wrote:
| This seems international though, this is not simple. As a
| victim doubly so, since you also have to combat your
| damaged pyche. In the end there needs to be an
| investigation, but sadly some uproar is needed for
| something to happen in cases like these.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| This is generally a good idea and the right thing to do,
| but cancel culture still exists for some reason. Probably
| it's because people do not trust conventional justice and
| do not believe in law enforcement?
| fishnchips wrote:
| Publicly taking high moral ground when it costs you
| nothing is insanely gratifying and as old as the humanity
| itself.
| api wrote:
| In the legitimate "cancel culture" cases you generally
| find that all other avenues have been tried multiple
| times, often for _years_.
|
| In the original #metoo Hollywood case it's that the whole
| culture was/is rotten and has been for decades. There's
| no other recourse because the culture normalizes "casting
| couch" type stuff. That's where the term comes from after
| all.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Law enforcement is not perfect and these crimes are often
| hard to prove in isolation. So worst case you go to law
| enforcement, they talk to the perpetrator but do nothing,
| and then the perpetrator mostly destroys your future
| career. A lot of downside and risk for the victim. You
| can look at the film industry for numerous famous
| examples of victims being blacklisted in retaliation.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| That's exactly my point. The law enforcement is not
| adequate to the needs of society and cannot offer
| efficient protection for victims. Cancel culture can be
| ugly, but for many it's the only way to get justice, and
| it is a sign that some reform is needed.
| devilduck wrote:
| Yes because that has proven to be extremely effective!
| Amazing insight here.
| xahrepap wrote:
| A relative ran an online community. It was small, but not
| tiny
|
| There was some cyber-bullying (for lack of a better word)
| going on. My relative called law-enforcement, then was
| referred to the FBI. A case was filed and was told they
| would circle back on it to collect details. They never
| called back. My relative was never able to make contact
| with them about it again.
|
| Completely ignored. I can't remember the details, but it
| wasn't just a "you're fat and ugly" type of bullying. But
| it was a real safety issue for a member of the community.
| Law enforcement completely failed in this case.
|
| Now what?
|
| I despise the "public court". The internet and viral online
| comments deciding who's innocent and who's guilty. (the man
| during the US capitol riots who lost his job because he was
| seen in a photo holding a black woman. Turns out, he was
| actually saving her life! But the "public court" announced
| him as guilty and they went after him, contacting his
| employer, people saying awful things about him online.
| https://kfor.com/news/washington-dc-bureau/white-man-seen-
| in... )
|
| But on the flip side... what do you do when law enforcement
| completely fails?
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Public law enforcement doesn't have any incentive doing
| anything.
|
| We need private police and a new legal system
| klyrs wrote:
| Private police??? Like, uber but for swatting? No thank
| you
| UncleMeat wrote:
| My sister has been raped. The officers laughed. My wife has
| been harassed. The officers wrote some things down on forms
| and did nothing.
|
| It achieves little.
| knodi123 wrote:
| The redress for a false accusation that results in serious harm
| to your career is a slander lawsuit. Sounds like all the ducks
| are in a row, evidence wise, so just figure out how much damage
| she caused, and sue her for it.
|
| I know it's not quite the same, and an ounce of prevention is
| better than a pound of cure- but there's this narrative that a
| person who is falsely accused is utterly powerless before the
| power of any angry woman willing to yell "perv", and that's
| just false.
| vkou wrote:
| What's doubly ironic is that the bar for convicting an actual
| predator in a criminal court of law is incredibly high, but
| the bar for winning a libel case against a false accuser in a
| civil court is... A lot lower.
|
| It's far easier to obtain justice when you are falsely
| accused, then when you have been assaulted - but HN threads
| on the subject are predominantly full of arguments about how
| awful the falsely accused have it.
| JPKab wrote:
| My brother was suicidal at one time due to the accusations,
| and more importantly, the fact that everyone immediately
| believed them. When his wife got the idea to call the daycare
| and ask if they had video footage, he thought for sure he'd
| be saved. (His employer also had his company cell phone
| location data which further corroborated his alibi). He
| literally proved himself innocent to his HR department. But
| if you've ever been involved on the inside in one of these
| situations, once HR has initiated a termination, they end up
| introducing additional liability if they halt the termination
| (effectively admitting they were in the wrong).
|
| He certainly COULD have sued for slander, but the cost of the
| lawsuit and retaining a lawyer, and for him, the emotional
| toll, was too high.
|
| And I completely understand that there is a huge toll for
| accusers as well.
|
| I think, depending on the venue, that the process can be very
| traumatic for accusers with real claims, and also accused who
| are targeted by false accusations. The colleague who accused
| him was a woman who his coworkers had warned him "not to
| cross" because she was "a total sociopath" according to his
| other team members. One of them even told him "you should
| have listened to me" after he was terminated.
|
| It's interesting how poorly most coders understand the
| realities of human nature. People aren't devils, but they
| aren't angels either.
|
| I just really resent the fact that any attempt at injecting
| nuance into these kinds of conversations brings out attacks
| from the un-nuanced, tribalists who reduce everything down to
| bumper sticker slogans and identity groups. It's disgusting
| and reminds me of the sectarian conflicts I've witnessed in
| other nations.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > heard from someone in HR that the charges were false, but
| "optics" were the reason they had to move forward with his
| termination.
|
| Time to name the company.
| JPKab wrote:
| A massive company that makes overpriced, low-quality athletic
| products that double as status symbols, which they
| manufacture overseas (often using child labor) but then sell
| for massive markups in the US, Europe, etc. They have an
| extremely aggressive "woke" presence in their advertising,
| because as long as you care about social justice for your
| targeted customers, who cares that "people of color" in the
| developing world are being paid slave wages to create your
| products. You probably know who I'm talking about now, but
| I'm not going to name them.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| So is this company's products more of a status symbol with
| the Chryler 300 and Newports type crowd or the Lada and
| vodka type crowd?
| darig wrote:
| you spelled "nike" wrong.
| medicineman wrote:
| Nike.
|
| Hell, I'd do anything for a downvote.
| Elof wrote:
| Seems like your brother can probably sue for damages if
| this is the whole story
| donnythecroc wrote:
| Yes clearly, if he has corroborating evidence. Also, it's
| easy to get an unfair dismissal lawyer on compensation
| share I.e. they take 40% of any compensation as their
| fee. Plus if it's a major corp and your brother has
| evidence then they'll usually have a budget/insurance for
| paying off these types of claims.
| JPKab wrote:
| He was told his case was legitimate, but the cost was too
| much for him to afford. Also, large corporations have
| massive legal teams.
|
| The narrative that is widely believed is that "the cost
| of making an accusation is so high that nobody would do
| it, so automatically believe accusers" and they pretend
| that there is no cost to being accused.
|
| It's an oversimplification and ignores the game theory
| involved in these things.
| baryphonic wrote:
| Sounds like your brother believed in something and
| sacrificed everything. If I were him, I might hire an
| employment lawyer and sue the shit out of them. Ya know,
| "Just do it."
| JPKab wrote:
| The cost was hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the
| company would have fought it for about 3 years, based on
| the advice of the wrongful termination specialist he
| consulted. He would have been bankrupted, and did what
| most people do, and just moved on.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| So now you see why most women who are sexually assaulted
| don't report it.
|
| https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system
| ummonk wrote:
| Seriously! The justice system is often ineffective for
| delivering justice both to victims of sexual abuse and
| victims of false accusations.
| tomp wrote:
| Can you explain the reasoning a bit more? _JPKab_ 's
| argument is that the estimated costs were $100k+. In my
| uneducated eyes, the estimated cost of reporting a crime
| is 30 minutes trip to the police station and filling some
| report / talking to someone, maybe 2 hours of your time?
| Essentially trivial.
| orwin wrote:
| Ok, my sister was raped by her boss, was found in her
| appartment three days later my father, who immediately
| called a lawyer (female, specialized in criminal law).
| She told my sister that since they were only two in the
| kitchen with no surveillance camera, she couldn't sue but
| only report (its called "main courante" in my country)
| and "hope" that another girl is raped before 2039 and
| report it. The policeman concurred, nothing to be done.
|
| I still shout "rapist owned" each time i pass his
| business, as do my brother and my father, my sister
| privately shared her story with his daughter on facebook
| last year (his daughter is one year younger than my
| sister, the creep), basically destroying their
| relationship, and the cooking school my sister went to
| directly called all female student and ex-student to tell
| them to avoid his restaurant. I also scraped social
| networks (only public data, nothing illegal) for his
| activities two years ago but only found business
| contacts. Each of them still received a nice email
| though.
|
| I will move back next month, so i will continue my
| shouting campaign harder after the pandemic end and hope
| his business can't survive covid. Since his restaurant
| will be between my place and the place i keep my boat,
| i'm pretty sure i can be successful.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| So they swooshed it under the rug, and you don't want to
| air max facts about the case in public?
| baryphonic wrote:
| That's awful. Even more reason for me to despise That
| Company.
|
| My father managed a mom & pop shoe store in the 80s. That
| Company got its start distributing through small local
| shoe stores, and as soon as they started making big
| bucks, began treating the local stores like garbage.
| Throughout my childhood, we were banned from buying or
| wearing their, as you accurately put it, overpriced, low
| quality crap.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| IANAL, but if the story is true, would it be reasonable to
| sue that coworker for defamation/slander and for lost wages?
| ratsmack wrote:
| The average person doesn't have the means to launch an
| extensive and hard to win lawsuit like that.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| >That being said, there is a court and criminal justice system
| for a reason.
|
| If you come to my home and act in a way that my family and
| other guests find offensive, we're not going to invite you
| back. We're also not going to try to prosecute you.
|
| There is a huge set of behaviors that are not criminal nor
| civil offenses, but still things that if experienced would
| likely lead people to want to avoid you, not hire you, not work
| with you etc.
|
| The author did not claim that Mr. Pretty broke any laws. She
| doesn't call for any legal consequences. There's no basis for
| suggesting that the story needs to be judged by a legal system.
| jfengel wrote:
| The problem is that only a tiny percentage of harassers and
| rapists are ever convicted. The court -- rightly -- sets a very
| high bar to conviction, and police and prosecutors often won't
| even attempt it unless the evidence is overwhelming.
|
| You're concerned that this is stacked against you, but the
| courts are stacked against the victims. So it doesn't really
| suffice to decry the one problem without addressing the other.
|
| So perhaps you can see what it looks like to many women when
| you say, "Hey, I'm sorry this happened to you, but this bad
| thing happened to my brother, so _shrug_". Did your brother go
| to the courts and police to address these issues? It may been
| unlawful termination.
|
| There is a large domain of behavior that is either nebulously
| legal or difficult to prosecute but which makes our communities
| much, much worse. It's counterproductive to tell the people
| victimized by that to stop talking about it. The solution is to
| go forward and find ways to set up our communities to protect
| people. And that can't mean just asking victims to accept that.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| > the courts are stacked against the victims
|
| Ah, that pesky presumption of innocence getting in the way of
| our 100% conviction rate. /s
| orwin wrote:
| The first sentence is literally:
|
| "The problem is that only a tiny percentage of harassers
| and rapists are ever convicted. The court -- rightly --
| sets a very high bar to conviction, and police and
| prosecutors often won't even attempt it unless the evidence
| is overwhelming.".
|
| First, its a poor place and topic for sarcasm (it just an
| observation, i'm not against it, i do have good friends
| like that) but more than that, GP actually adressed the
| point you're trying to highlight in his first sentence.
| supercheetah wrote:
| That wasn't being disputed. It does mean that, in the real
| world, a lot of victims will never see justice until
| there's overwhelming evidence, if ever.
| bitwize wrote:
| > The court -- rightly -- sets a very high bar to conviction
|
| Rape convictions are so abysmally low that there's been a lot
| of rethinking in feminist circles as to whether the "beyond
| reasonable doubt" standard -- or even the presumption of
| innocence -- is fair or just. Some countries have been
| looking for ways to ameliorate this. For example, in thr USA,
| college date rape is such a problem that universities are
| required to investigate accusations of sexual harassment or
| assault and discipline offenders based on the looser
| preponderance standard, or be found in violation of Title IX
| by the federal Department of Education.
| chmod600 wrote:
| "The problem is that only a tiny percentage of harassers and
| rapists are ever convicted."
|
| How can that be known? Why do you presume that someone is a
| harasser or rapist if they weren't convicted?
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Because I know people who have been harassed and raped and
| whose harassers and rapists weren't punished.
|
| I know literally dozens of stories like that, and maybe a
| handful where the harasser or rapist was punished at all.
| Of those, even fewer where they were convicted of a crime.
|
| The majority of these cases the victim isn't public in
| their accusation, there's no argument that they're trying
| to gain something or hurt someone else. So by comparing the
| data that is presumably more honest, that people make in
| private, to that in public, we can assume that most
| instances of harassment go unpunished.
| throwaway0427 wrote:
| I'm one. I'm also male. It was brutal. No, I did not go
| to the police. I was far too afraid.
| lukasb wrote:
| Less than 1% of rapes lead to felony convictions:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/06/less-
| than...
|
| Same article notes that between 2-8% of rape complaints are
| false. Worries about false rape claims are wildly
| overblown.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >Less than 1% of rapes lead to felony convictions
|
| Car break-ins outnumber car thefts by several orders of
| magnitude. Assaults outnumber murders by probably a
| similiar amount.
|
| I'd be very suspicious if there was a class of crime
| where any large fraction of instances result in higher
| level charges being brought.
|
| >between 2-8% worries about false rape claims are wildly
| overblown.
|
| If 2% of the time cops fired their weapons it blew up in
| their hand or 2% of car crashes resulted in a fatality it
| would be an outrage.
|
| 2-8% is huge when you're talking about people's lives
| being permanently altered for the worse.
|
| If anything the worries are under-blown. But then again,
| when compared to the rest of the court system (not that
| long ago they were framing random minorities in order to
| close cases) and prosecution process 2-8% might not be
| that bad.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The number of fake rape complaint surely depends on how
| they're treated.
|
| If an accusation only has effect if it's proven in court,
| there will be few of them.
|
| If you can destroy someone's life by a mere accusation,
| false accusations will be very common. Also, just a
| _threat_ of such an accusation will be very powerful.
| JPKab wrote:
| You're on point with this.
|
| I think we can all agree that the accusers in the Salem
| witch trials couldn't have been telling the truth, unless
| they were hallucinating (there's a theory that lysergic
| acid in grain could have caused hallucinations, but its
| weak and not proven).
|
| Let's just agree that none of the women executed in Salem
| were actually practicing black magic. Why were there so
| many accusers claiming they were? I mean, false
| accusations are "exceedingly rare" and accusers "gain
| nothing".
|
| Yeah, people in the 18-35 demographic, to quote Bill
| Maher, "are the favored advertising demo because they're
| gullible." They don't know anything about human nature
| either.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Doesn't your set of statistics show that rape accusations
| are 2-8 times as likely to be proven false as they are to
| be proven true?
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| And yet you wouldn't like to fall within those 2-8%.
| lukasb wrote:
| Aren't you more worried about the 99% of rape victims who
| receive no justice of any kind?
| suifbwish wrote:
| No. The two concepts have nothing to do with eachother.
| It's bad that victims don't get justice but it's also bad
| if people are convicted of crimes they didn't commit.
| Wrongfully punishing people without sound evidence just
| to satisfy the feelings of someone who was wronged is not
| a sane justice system.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| I am, and still I prefer a system where some guilty
| people will avoid a punishment versus an overreaching
| system which will also punish some innocent people for
| some kind of a greater good.
|
| What the linked article is talking about, though, does
| not seem to be ,,rape" as defined by a criminal code, so
| all this rape discussion hardly applies.
|
| Nevertheless, one can be a creepy disgusting asshole and
| still not do things which are illegal, technically
| speaking.
| suifbwish wrote:
| The article notes that 2-8% of rape cases are PROVEN
| false. The real number is definitely higher than that as
| people do go to prison under wrongful conviction. Bottom
| line is if you don't have compelling evidence for a crime
| you don't have a case. That's a good thing as it protects
| us from unjust punishment most of the time. It's real sad
| that victims that can't prove their case don't have
| justice but it's much more important that the innocent
| are not wrongfully punished.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| It doesn't actually say that.
|
| The article cited[0] is a review of analysis from ~1980
| to 2005. If you restrict yourself to only analysis that
| don't count cases involving alcohol as false reports, the
| number drops to 2-3%.
|
| The article also notes that false reports are usually
| different from real reports, important among these facts
| is that false reports are often attention seeking, and so
| are examples of what society thinks rape "should" look
| like (violent, anonymous) as opposed to what it often is
| (ambiguous and often by someone the victim knows and
| trusts). As such, the percent of false rape accusations
| where a particular individual is accused of the crime are
| likely even lower than this 2-3% number.
|
| > but it's much more important that the innocent are not
| wrongfully punished
|
| This depends. It's much less morally cut and dry than you
| claim.
|
| [0]: https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publicatio
| ns/2018-...
| suifbwish wrote:
| This doesn't seem very scientific. You can't determine if
| someone is lying based on them "seeming like an attention
| seeker or not" deductive reasoning in a legal system
| demands "beyond a shadow of a doubt" certainty before
| convictions are made.
|
| Also no it's pretty cut and dry: if you punish someone
| who is innocent under ANY circumstance without reviewing
| the case under a very critical eye you might as well
| throw out the justice system entirely, break out the
| torches and pitchforks and start gathering wood for the
| witch burning.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| > Same article notes that between 2-8% of rape complaints
| are false. Worries about false rape claims are wildly
| overblown.
|
| That is a HUGE percent of false accusations! On the high
| end that's 1 in 10! In the middle, it's 1 in 20. That's a
| LOT.
| nawgz wrote:
| Yet you express no concern at the amount of unprosecuted
| cases...
| suifbwish wrote:
| The cases would be prosecuted if there was evidence to
| support them. You can't just punish people without proof.
| Contrary to popular belief the purpose of the legal
| system is not to make wronged people feel better.
| nawgz wrote:
| So you think a crime as endemic as rape which is punished
| at vanishingly low rates indicates innocence of the perps
| instead of a fundamentally flawed justice system,
| starting at the point of evidence collection? Even after
| seeing those very evidence collectors, the police, flaunt
| their duties and the law repeatedly?
|
| Interesting.
| stickfigure wrote:
| I am curious. What percentage of all rape convictions
| would you tolerate being wrong (that is, the person
| behind bars is innocent) in order to ensure sufficient
| coverage of convicting the guilty?
| suifbwish wrote:
| The idea of someone being able to accuse someone else of
| a crime without evidence should terrify anyone who
| believes in freedom and democracy. Rape, murder, or any
| other crime.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| What does that have to do with this article? Are you
| saying that the OP has requested this person be
| criminally convicted?
| suifbwish wrote:
| Not from what I have read. It seems like they chose the
| internet mob as their bringer of justice.
| void_mint wrote:
| Do you think that OJ was innocent?
|
| And if not, doesn't that imply you also agree (to an
| extent) that trials/law enforcement on heavily politicized
| cases have the potential to be totally mismanaged and end
| in injustice?
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| OJ probably did it but the prosecution failed to prove
| him guilty so he walked free as he should.
|
| He's lucky he was a wealthy celebrity or he wouldn't have
| gotten the full protection that the courts supposedly
| afford to the accused.
| DaveExeter wrote:
| > The court -- rightly -- sets a very high bar to conviction,
| and police and prosecutors often won't even attempt it unless
| the evidence is overwhelming.
|
| Huh? Have you ever heard of the Central Park Five? Google
| "Central Park Five" and you'll have a more enlightened view!
| ummonk wrote:
| The Central Park five voluntarily confessed and were almost
| certainly guilty. The only issue was that there was a sixth
| perpetrator who had raped the victim after and wasn't
| caught at the time.
| DaveExeter wrote:
| If you did a little research you will find they got paid
| $41,000,000 by the City of New York!
|
| You think the City just handed over tens of millions of
| dollars because settling would be cheaper then going to
| trial?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| "Almost certainly guilty," huh? Citations please? Are you
| talking about a DIFFERENT "Central Park Five" than the
| ones who were exonerated? Or are you just ironically
| quoting Trump? Do you agree with him that hate is what we
| need if we're gonna get something done?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case
|
| >From the outset the case was a topic of national
| interest, with the commentary on social issues evolving
| as the details emerged. Initially, the case led to public
| discourse about New York City's perceived lawlessness,
| criminal behavior by youths, and violence toward women.
| After the exonerations, it became a high-profile example
| of racial profiling, discrimination, and inequality in
| the media and legal system. All five defendants
| subsequently sued the City of New York for malicious
| prosecution, racial discrimination and emotional
| distress; the City settled the suit in 2014 for $41
| million.
|
| https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-central-park-
| five/convictio...
|
| >On December 19, 2002, Justice Charles J. Tejada of the
| Supreme Court of the State of New York granted a motion
| to vacate the thirteen-year-old convections in the
| infamous case. He did so based on new evidence: a
| shocking confession from a serial rapist, Matias Reyes,
| and a positive DNA match to back it up. A year later, the
| men filed civil lawsuits against the City of New York,
| and the police officers and prosecutors who had worked
| toward their conviction. In 2014, they settled that civil
| case for $41 million dollars. Despite their exoneration,
| the police and prosecutors involved in the case maintain
| that they were guilty of the crime.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-48609693
|
| >Five black and Hispanic boys, aged between 14 and 16,
| would be found guilty and jailed for the crime.
|
| >They became known as the Central Park Five.
|
| >But they never committed the crime.
|
| [...]
|
| >The role of Donald Trump
|
| >New York in the 80s and 90s was much more dangerous than
| it is today.
|
| >Race relations were strained - especially when it came
| to the police.
|
| >Meanwhile, Donald Trump - then a New York property mogul
| - seemed convinced the teens were guilty.
|
| >He spent a reported $85,000 (around PS138,000 today) on
| four full-page adverts in New York newspapers titled:
| "Bring Back The Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police!".
|
| >He wrote: "I want to hate these murderers and I always
| will. I am not looking to psychoanalyse or understand
| them, I am looking to punish them."
|
| >In an interview with CNN at the time, he said: "Maybe
| hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done."
| ksm1717 wrote:
| Very tactful. You should respond with this story in real life
| when someone tells you they were sexually abused.
| kelnos wrote:
| It's a bit strange that you claim that the proper venue for
| this sort of thing is the justice system, but then relate a
| story where your brother for some reason did not avail himself
| of the justice system to right a wrong against him.
|
| And that just rams the point home: often the justice system
| doesn't help, and actively hurts. If he'd brought suit against
| his former employer for terminating him, even if he won, he
| would have gained a reputation in his field for being litigious
| toward employers, and that would have greatly hurt his future
| employment prospects.
|
| So maybe, just maybe, there are reasons the justice system
| isn't going to work so well in this situation either.
| jlebar wrote:
| > Ask yourself if that's a possibility, and if you think that
| there is a zero probability of anyone maliciously weaponizing
| accusations of sexual misconduct.
|
| As a straight, white man: False accusations of sexual assault
| are extremely rare, but they do happen. It's not a zero
| probability event.
|
| I guess my response is, right now there's a nonzero chance of
| someone assaulting someone else, and then a nonzero chance
| they'll away with it. And there's a nonzero chance of someone
| making a false accusation and another nonzero chance of them
| getting away with it. We as a society have to weigh the
| likelihood of each of these four things occurring.
|
| All experience (and you can look this up) is that sexual
| assault is perpetrated relatively frequently, and people
| frequently aren't held accountable in the criminal justice
| system, for a variety of reasons. OTOH the evidence is that
| false accusations are vanishingly rare in comparison.
|
| So we should just...keep this in mind, is all, before saying
| that this kind of public statement is counterproductive. Maybe
| it protects someone from him, or maybe it protects someone from
| someone like him. Sure, I'd like him to be in jail, but maybe
| in the flawed system we live with today, the best we can hope
| for is he's kicked out of the Scala community. Maybe that would
| be productive?
| jmcgough wrote:
| I can empathize with your brother's situation. That kind of
| thing is horrifying for anyone to imagine.
|
| With that said, creeps like this continue to proliferate
| because the courts only do anything in very rare cases (Cosby
| or other serial abusers). It typically only hurts people who
| were abused, not helps - it can take years to go through court,
| and in this situation because it's across borders there's
| likely no court to file with.
|
| People come forward in blog posts because it's often their only
| reasonable way to try to hold someone accountable and warn
| other potential victims.
| ummonk wrote:
| HR should have fired the female colleague upon discovering the
| allegations were proven false, not left it up to the courts and
| criminal justice system.
| bjarneh wrote:
| I agree with you about the accusations. He sounds creepy; but
| one blog-entry is not exactly hard evidence. An internet mob
| may assume its all true anyway.
|
| > men who use their status within programming communities as a
| tool to target women
|
| Wouldn't "programming communities" be one of the worst places
| for a true predator? There are so few women compared to men
| here. I would think most predators would choose the modeling or
| acting industry; where this type of behavior is almost
| expected...
| hulahoof wrote:
| Abusers will use the platform they have
| endominus wrote:
| I would presume that many predators have followed that exact
| line of thinking, and there may be population pressure
| pushing them towards other fields. Any ecological model will
| show that a certain population of prey can support only so
| many predators, if you'll pardon the pun, so some must
| naturally migrate to fill other niches that, while not as
| abundant, are less crowded with competition. You'll probably
| find less sophisticated predators in these sparser
| environments, as they were outcompeted by "stronger" (read,
| more careful, charismatic, and effective) predators in the
| richer ecologies.
|
| An interesting thought. Under this model, (and I realize that
| this is a post-facto realization, but what can we do?) we
| would expect to see significantly more reports of predator
| behavior in these less competitive niches than the objective
| number of predators would imply, because the predators in
| them are less skilled at hiding their predation than
| predators in the more prey-rich environments.
| js2 wrote:
| Yes, of course she should have contacted law enforcement, but she
| was in a foreign country, intimated and young. And law
| enforcement still fails women:
|
| https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/how-po...
|
| In an ideal world, the criminal justice system works. In the real
| world, it's a patchwork system that sometimes works and sometimes
| doesn't.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/09/17...
|
| So this is why we see women continue to post these stories. Her
| story is backed up by other women.
|
| I believe her.
|
| Meta: I don't know how to make the justice system work better in
| a case like this. The presumption of innocence is critical and I
| don't want a system easily abused by false accusers, but it's
| also clear that predators can take advantage of the presumption
| of innocence. Even if she had gone to police at the time,
| ultimately she would have to convince them it wasn't consensual.
|
| https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/11/how-cops-respond-to...
|
| Edit 2: found this paper from 2012 written by a police
| organization that talks about the complexities of dealing with
| sexual assault in the criminal justice system:
|
| https://www.policeforum.org/assets/docs/Critical_Issues_Seri...
| dbg31415 wrote:
| It's not that I don't believe her. It's just such a slippery
| slope.
|
| This is vigilantism -- the same as if you went out and shot a
| guy who stole your wallet.
|
| We don't trust victims of crimes to dole out punishments.
| Justice is tempered by due process, checks and balances,
| proportional response, all that.
|
| So I believe her, but I don't think the world is a better place
| when people use this approach to conflict resolution. I'd much
| rather see her go to court and get a conviction.
|
| This is just revenge.
| hamburglar wrote:
| It seems that this may be the _only_ consequence of raping
| someone in many cases.
| danShumway wrote:
| > This is vigilantism -- the same as if you went out and shot
| a guy who stole your wallet.
|
| Nobody has shot John Pretty.
|
| I don't understand how "justice" says that Yifan has to lie
| or pretend that she hasn't gone through a traumatic
| experience. Writing a blog post is not equivalent to shooting
| someone. Someone truthfully and honestly describing their own
| life experience is not violence.
|
| And if nothing else, surely she has the right to warn other
| women and let them make their own decisions about how to
| calibrate their risk around John.
|
| > I don't think the world is a better place when people use
| this approach to conflict resolution.
|
| I'm not always thrilled with public shaming, but to argue
| that people shouldn't be able to speak about their
| experiences, or that people shouldn't be able to choose who
| they associate with, or that people shouldn't be able to warn
| each other about abusers -- that is also a very slippery
| slope. Especially in a world where the vast majority of rape
| cases are never reported or prosecuted.
|
| It's just such an extreme position to say that people even
| just talking about abusers is 'revenge'. It's like arguing
| that because courts sometimes convict innocent people that we
| should abolish all laws. There is a middle ground between
| attacking someone for a poorly phrased 10-year-old tweet, and
| arguing that people shouldn't be talking about personal
| experiences they've had with sexual harassment.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Justice is tempered by due process, checks and balances,
| proportional response, all that._
|
| That's the ideal, but in the real world justice is pretty
| lacking.
|
| What other action would you suggest she take, right now? What
| authorities should she go to? Does she need to get on a plane
| back to Germany and file a police report three years after
| the fact? Another commenter noted that this specific thing
| might not even have been illegal in Germany when it happened
| (but is now).
|
| Even if there is no legal remedy, is this the sort of thing
| that we want to continue to happen in our technical
| communities? If not (and I seriously hope not), then what do
| we do to neutralize these sorts of people?
|
| So what's the alternative? She just shuts up, gets no
| closure, and we allow a serial manipulator and probably
| rapist to keep trolling the Scala community for new,
| vulnerable victims?
| ummonk wrote:
| If you think ostracizing someone and removing him from
| positions of influence is equivalent to shooting him, I don't
| know what to say to you.
| morelisp wrote:
| It was also, disgustingly, probably not legally rape in Germany
| at that time. (Or only recently so.)
| dheera wrote:
| Related:
|
| Open letter of support for community members targeted by Jon
| Pretty
|
| https://github.com/scala-open-letter/scala-open-letter.githu...
| mirekrusin wrote:
| I don't know anything about it, but this starts to look a bit
| like public lynching.
| ezluckyfree wrote:
| no, a lynching is a murder by a racist mob
|
| this is a community realizing that John Pretty is a predator
| and deciding that they don't want a predator in a position of
| power
|
| frankly, it's weird as hell for you to be confusing those two
| things
| kbelder wrote:
| The similarity is that both are mob actions, done without
| legal charges or rules of evidence.
|
| I'm not defending the guy specifically; I have no idea
| whether he's a guilty scumbag or a persecuted innocent. But
| even jerks deserve a certain amount of due process before
| punishment. Maybe she's the scumbag? I don't know, and
| neither do you.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| A lynching is done by a literal mob. This is being done
| by a metaphorical mob.
| huachimingo wrote:
| Not necessarily by a racist mob, just an angry mob[1].
|
| [1]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lynch#English
| mirekrusin wrote:
| not me or you are to judge this, we don't know the details,
| it may as well be that he is completely shit partner and
| not much more than that, which is not unlawful.
|
| do you think after those posts his
| scala/programming/whatever he's doing career won't suffer?
| he's dead in many professional circles regardless if he's
| jail material or not.
| klyrs wrote:
| He wasn't her "partner", he was her _mentor_ ; he abused
| his position, tricked her into staying in an apartment
| alone with him, got her drunk and forced himself on her
| against her wishes.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| >no, a lynching is a murder by a racist mob
|
| no, a lynching is an extra-legal murder by a mob.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| In the US, lynching has extremely strong implications of
| racist violence. It's not _strictly_ the definition of
| the word, but most folks in the states will understand a
| lynching to imply race related murders.
| cbmuser wrote:
| > In the US, lynching has extremely strong implications
| of racist violence.
|
| Please don't assume everyone is a US citizen.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| I'm not. In fact, I'm the opposite. That's literally why
| I wrote that comment. It was for the benefit of people
| who were not US citizens who may not understand that a US
| reader will likely interpret the phrase that way.
| throwawayfrauds wrote:
| That's not what lynching is. Lynching is mob justice
| without a trial. The name came from Charles Lynch, who
| punished Loyalists during the American Revolution.
| trynton wrote:
| @mirekrusin: "I don't know anything about it, but this starts
| to look a bit like public lynching."
|
| Trial by Internet.
| [deleted]
| dimgl wrote:
| Make no mistake. This is a public lynching.
| jjeaff wrote:
| No, I don't think open letters are anything like public
| lynching.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| Which part?
|
| The part where people are saying they've become aware of
| several independent, substantiated accusations against
| Pretty?
|
| The part where they state that sexual assault is
| unacceptable?
|
| The part where they demand that Pretty stop this behavior,
| and that communities put stronger code of conducts in place
| to specifically call out preying on/sexually assaulting
| members of that community as unacceptable?
|
| Refusing to associate with Pretty, who they believe is an
| sexual abuser?
|
| Which part of that is 'a bit like a public lynching'? I want
| you to be specific, because waving your hand loosely at a
| document and being like, "Well I dunno, but this seems like
| an execution designed to drive fear into a community" is not
| only wildly inappropriate but also rhetorically hollow.
| tryonenow wrote:
| Look, both accounts read like naive women who accepted
| favors from a mentor-like figure and did not say "no" to
| advances. The other accuser starts her letter by admitting
| that she and Pretty were in an "on and off" long distance
| _relationship_. I think a significant component of the
| discomfort that these women feel is a manifestation of a
| sort of social indoctrination, wherein young women are led
| to believe that historically normal and mutually beneficial
| relationships are somehow dehumanizing because of a power
| dynamic. There is also an underestimation of the amount of
| clout and positive attention that accusers receive from
| communities for coming forward, and vicious, public
| condemnation of anyone who dares to question the stories or
| claimed harm to the alleged victims.
|
| Humans are biologically predisposed to trade sexual access
| for favors. I believe the harm that many victims claim to
| have experienced is mostly or purely a manifestation of
| social conditioning and sometimes clout chasing where
| claims are exaggerated or fabricated. Blindly believing
| alleged victims carries a significant risk of victimizing
| otherwise innocent people and we need to move back to some
| middle ground. Especially considering the biologically
| determined nature of human sexual interaction - which is
| never black and white and, frankly, has always been a game
| of overcoming reluctance. Hesitating and not saying NO
| cannot be treated the same way as overt rape without
| criminalizing desirable (for both men and women) sexual
| interaction. Yes, the chase is extremely important, for
| both sexes, and we see the same dynamics throughout the
| animal kingdom.
| ipaddr wrote:
| "We will not use or promote any software artifacts that are
| maintained by Mr. Pretty"
|
| This part seems over the top. You go down this road and you
| end up in some foss hell. Later you find out someone who
| abused someone checked in code in linux. You can't use
| windows or a mac because of jobs and gates and you are back
| on a c64 until you realize what a bad person Jack was and
| you end up on OS/2.
|
| I guess those who signed want to use an unmaintained
| version?
|
| I get that people want to do something. Maybe conferences
| are not the best avenue for the community to meet safely.
| Providing gender safe housing would go a long way to having
| a more successful conference if successful means less
| rapes.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| Edit: Would you characterize that part as "a bit like a
| public lynching"? Because I definitely wouldn't, even if
| I disagreed with it or felt it was too much.
|
| ---
|
| I think you are very uncharitably reading that comment.
| There's a difference between, "This person checked some
| code into a repo" and "this person is the maintainer of a
| project".
|
| And I think that it's reasonable for people to hold the
| stance of, "I don't want to run this person's code
| because I believe they are a serial abuser" and to
| clearly state why. If other repos see that, maybe they
| decide to take on that stance, maybe they don't.
|
| They encourage others to consider doing the same, but the
| don't _demand_ them.
| melenaboija wrote:
| It starts looking to me like a bit of explaining what
| happened repeatedly
| calylex wrote:
| You have no evidence to be smearing someone's name and defaming
| them on HN in this way. Stop this behavior until there is legal
| grounds for doing so.
| eloff wrote:
| > I don't remember how much I drank. I don't remember him
| drinking. But I remember feeling uncomfortable when he made
| advances on me. I felt being taken advantage of that he had
| unprotected sex with me when I was intoxicated. Nothing felt
| right. I remember panicking and crying.
|
| I don't want to victim blame here because this guy sounds like a
| grade A creep and predator. But does a person not have some
| responsibility here to not get so intoxicated when alone with a
| member of the opposite sex in a private space? Because sometimes
| the person is consenting at the time and then regrets it later -
| and then proceeds to ruin the other person's life by accusing
| them of taking advantage of an intoxicated individual. I just
| find this whole area very slippery about when consent means
| consent and when it doesn't - especially the way sex, alcohol,
| and drugs are so intertwined in our society. I rightly or wrongly
| think you have to have some responsibility for putting yourself
| in such a vulnerable place where you are not in the right frame
| of mind to resist advances or make sensible decisions. Am I wrong
| about that?
|
| I don't know if she gave consent, and again, I'm inclined to give
| her the benefit of the doubt, based on her story, age, etc. I
| just want to discuss this whole business of consent while
| intoxicated on which I do not have a clear opinion.
| donohoe wrote:
| Hello. A few answers...
|
| >> But does a person not have some responsibility here to not
| get so intoxicated when alone with a member of the opposite sex
| in a private space?
|
| No. You are shifting the blame to the victim here. You should
| not be assaulted/attacked/whatever whether you are sober,
| tipsy, drunk, unconscious.
| dmit wrote:
| > I don't want to victim blame here
|
| And yet
| colechristensen wrote:
| It is... complicated, but if a sober person takes advantage of
| the apparent willingness of a very intoxicated person, they
| have done something wrong.
|
| In general regardless of your state of mind, you should be
| deciding if somebody is actually capable of giving consent in
| their state of mind regardless of how they act.
|
| A drop of alcohol does not remove all ability to give consent
| but there is a point where it is no longer possible and so
| you're left with a situation where there isn't right and wrong
| absolutely but a grey area of many degrees... which as a decent
| person you should always err on the side of caution.
| fabian2k wrote:
| A person that is in an incapacitated state is not able to
| consent, in that situation the burden is entirely on the other
| person. Just because someone is not able to say no doesn't
| meant they did consent.
|
| I'm talking about close to blackout drunk, heavily
| incapacitated, not slightly tipsy.
| eloff wrote:
| So question then, what if the other person is equally
| incapacitated?
|
| What if the other person believes the incapacitated person is
| not so far gone as to be unable to consent?
|
| Is consent only consent if you give a breathalyzer test in
| front of a witness?
| retrac wrote:
| The front door of one's home always seemed a good analogy to
| me.
|
| Is it good practice to lock your front door, on the assumption
| that some people are malicious and will take advantage and rob
| you if you don't? With particular caution suggested in some
| areas? Yes.
|
| Is someone who is robbed when they did not lock their front
| door responsible for the crime in some sense? No, not really. A
| normal human failing to carry out a precaution that shouldn't
| be necessary in the first place, perhaps. I've forgotten to
| lock my front door once in a while, haven't you?
| choeger wrote:
| Responsibility is the wrong word. There is a difference between
| good advice and victim blaming. Just because the victim was
| careless doesn't make them in any form responsible for the
| crime. Nevertheless, I would certainly advise my daughter
| against getting drunk in such a situation.
| yason wrote:
| >> But does a person not have some responsibility here to not
| >> get so intoxicated when alone with a member of the
| opposite >> sex in a private space? > > Responsibility is the
| wrong word.
|
| It's not a responsibility in ethical sense yet it is street
| smart behaviour.
|
| A less amplified example: if you walk into a biker bar,
| insult that the regulars are assholes whose bikes you just
| kicked over outside, they have no moral justification to hurt
| you just as people are ethically bound to not sexually abuse
| intoxicated persons in our society. But there's some chance
| the guys in the biker bar won't just call the police and
| politely retain you until they arrive and, instead, you get
| beaten into some half-liquid state of matter.
|
| The reason for that is because the regulars likely follow
| their own rules and not yours or the greater society's.
| Similarly, predator-type people don't follow the morals that
| we recognize. If all you can resort to is morals, you will
| lose with people who don't play by your rules. If someone
| doesn't see a moral problem in the sexual abuse of a passed
| out person it won't help to merely remind this person of just
| that: the abuser _simply doesn 't give a shit_ but plays a
| whole different game.
|
| This is where the society could step in with its justice
| system and link the abusive behaviour to something the abuser
| does actually mind, like a harsh enough conviction to make
| the abusive behaviour less inviting. But society also has to
| be fair so as to not give harsh convictions to people who
| have not abused anyone despite being accused of doing that,
| and then the waters get muddy again. In many cases there's no
| objective verdict to be reached because no third party can
| ultimately tell what the heck happened, even if actual abuse
| did take place.
|
| This leads to the bizarre but common pattern where the
| potential victims have to become proactive in taking measures
| to not actually become victims, and in doing so limit their
| choices and decisions of what to do, where to go and with
| whom. The onus somehow gets transferred to the person who
| shouldn't have to use time and energy to prevent these things
| from happening. The potential victims are the only party in
| the game who follow the society's rules and they have that
| losing stance because of that.
|
| They shouldn't have to have -- and they don't have -- a
| _moral_ responsibility to prepare for the worst: the moral
| responsibility single-handedly falls on the perpetrator --
| the one who doesn 't ever consider morals! So, the result is
| that the potential victims are imposed by purely practical
| concerns to limit their choices in order to secure themselves
| against wrongdoings, just in case. It's not right but it's
| also smart -- that's the big dilemma.
| claudiawerner wrote:
| >I don't want to victim blame here because this guy sounds like
| a grade A creep and predator. But does a person not have some
| responsibility here to not get so intoxicated when alone with a
| member of the opposite sex in a private space?
|
| No. The idea that being around a member of the opposite sex
| (and does this apply to members of the same sex? e.g. men
| raping men, and women raping women?) in a private space while
| being intoxicated levies some kind of 'responsibility' to be on
| the lookout for rape is absolutely victim blaming. It's
| insisting that her non-sexual actions of literally just being
| around someone confers a responsibility of _any_ kind
| pertaining to a sexual act _on her_.
| eloff wrote:
| > No. The idea that being around a member of the opposite sex
| (and does this apply to members of the same sex? e.g. men
| raping men, and women raping women?)
|
| I specifically used the word person because I think this
| could happen between any two people of any sex. I'm certain
| it even happens to men, by women. Just men are much less
| likely to regret it the next day.
|
| > levies some kind of 'responsibility' to be on the lookout
| for rape is absolutely victim blaming
|
| If you gave consent because you were drunk, that's not really
| rape, it could be poor judgment. The perpetrator might
| reasonably think you're sober enough to make your own
| decisions. Especially if they are also inebriated.
|
| Just calling it victim blaming is missing that this is a
| pretty gray area.
| dmit wrote:
| > If you gave consent because you were drunk, that's not
| really rape, it could be poor judgment.
|
| No, it's lack of judgement. Total inability to judge, in
| fact.
|
| > The perpetrator might reasonably think you're sober
| enough to make your own decisions. Especially if they are
| also inebriated.
|
| It doesn't matter what the perpetrator thinks. And
| _especially_? Is the perpetrator less guilty of rape
| depending on his blood alcohol level?
| eloff wrote:
| > It doesn't matter what the perpetrator thinks.
|
| I think it may be the only thing that can decide the
| difference between a crime here or not. If the other
| person gives consent, then how you judge their ability to
| make their own decisions here is the difference between
| having intent to rape or not having intent. Intent
| matters in a lot of crimes, I don't think it matters in
| rape cases - I could be wrong.
|
| > Is the perpetrator less guilty of rape depending on his
| blood alcohol level?
|
| So the victim has no responsibility if blood alcohol
| level is too high for good judgment, but the perpetrator
| is responsible no matter their blood alcohol level and
| judgment? That seems self-contradictory.
| dmit wrote:
| > So the victim has no responsibility if blood alcohol
| level is too high for good judgment, but the perpetrator
| is responsible no matter their blood alcohol level and
| judgment?
|
| Exactly. That's why they're called 'victim' and
| 'perpetrator'.
|
| If the victim got triple blackout drunk, the only person
| they'd hurt is themselves. But the rapist, in addition to
| physical damage, inflicts deep, lasting psychological
| damage upon their victims. It's not just "regret".
| eloff wrote:
| Ok, let's say it's a man and a women, she's the
| "perpetrator" and he gives consent. She's his boss and
| they're on a business trip and drank too much at the bar.
| In the morning he feels taken advantage of and deeply
| regrets it because he's married. Do you still stand by
| that?
| dmit wrote:
| > she's the "perpetrator" and he gives consent
|
| If "he gives consent", then she isn't a perpetrator. By
| definition.
|
| If one of the parties gets drunk, they _can 't_ give
| consent. Again, by definition.
| eloff wrote:
| > If "he gives consent", then she isn't a perpetrator. By
| definition.
|
| > If one of the parties gets drunk, they can't give
| consent. Again, by definition.
|
| Say she comes on to him, and he responds
| enthusiastically. But he's too drunk to give consent by
| your definition. Then she's just committed a rape? From
| her POV, also drunk, she made a move, he reciprocated,
| all in all it was a pleasant evening.
|
| She clearly didn't mean to commit a crime in this case,
| and both their judgment was impaired. Whose fault is it?
|
| I don't think it's fair to say it's all her fault - and I
| don't think a court of law could find fault here, fairly,
| with no witnesses and no evidence.
| indymike wrote:
| Would it be ok for the guy to get her drunk, then go to an ATM
| and talk her into emptying out a bank account?
| eloff wrote:
| Strawman argument.
| totony wrote:
| Is it ok for bars to take advantage of drunk people so they
| spend frivolously (or alcoholics who throw away their
| paycheck every week?)
| Pfhreak wrote:
| > I don't want to victim blame here ... but does the victim
| bear some responsibility?
|
| The answer to your question is no. The victim bears no
| responsibility. The abuser took advantage of someone, who bears
| no fault for the result. There's no "well, both parties were in
| the wrong here". The abuser should not have abused the other
| party, no matter how vulnerable the other party made
| themselves.
|
| You specifically said you didn't want to victim blame, then
| _immediately_ blamed the victim.
| eloff wrote:
| And what if they were consenting - I'm not saying that's the
| case here, I don't know obviously, I'm asking in general,
| just like my comment is a musing about the vagaries of when
| is consent not consent.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| It's not vague. Consent is an enthusiastic and unambiguous
| yes. Was there an enthusiastic and unambiguous yes? You
| have consent. Was there not an enthusiastic and unambiguous
| yes? You do not have consent.
| eloff wrote:
| I think we can agree on that.
|
| I'm not arguing about what consent is, I'm arguing about
| whether you bear responsibility for what happens to you
| if you put yourself in a vulnerable position, give
| consent without being of sound mind, and then regret it
| later. I think 1) that's pretty dumb to put yourself in
| that situation, and 2) you do have partial responsibility
| for what happened.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| Sure, but do you believe that's what's described here? I
| don't see anything that suggests that consent was ever
| given.
| eloff wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I wrote that I don't know what the facts
| are here and that I'm inclined to side with her.
|
| I'm asking about this situation in general, not about her
| specific case.
| faitswulff wrote:
| Yes, you are victim blaming. Men aren't wild bears, they're
| human beings who should be held accountable for their actions.
| How drunk someone is around another human being has nothing to
| do with the perpetrator's culpability.
| calylex wrote:
| Speak up HN, don't let voices like this dominate and
| represent you. Of course what the OP said was not victim
| blaming. How ridiculous! Several times the commenter
| expressed doubt and kept asking if he/she is wrong and how
| would like to be corrected if that is the case.
|
| You come in here with the high moral ground and make such
| wild indignant proclamation that "men are not bears." Please
| take this to another community.
|
| > How drunk someone is around another human being has nothing
| to do with the perpetrator's culpability.
|
| This is just stupid on its face. DUI exists for a reason and
| DUI tests are given not because police assumes the drivers,
| of course would, "take responsibility" and not drink, but
| because the police exercises common sense if an idiot driver
| is unable to walk a straight line.
| eloff wrote:
| > Yes, you are victim blaming. Men aren't wild bears.
|
| They're also not harmless. And I chose the word person for a
| reason - this could happen between a straight man and a gay
| man, or a woman could take advantage of a drunk man (although
| he's not likely to regret it, unless maybe he's married or
| something - or she gets pregnant)
|
| The thing is I think you have some responsibility for your
| own decisions, drunk or not.
|
| I don't think it's right to take advantage of someone who's
| drunk - but it's tough to prove that after the fact and many
| a young man has had their lives ruined by a woman who they
| thought consented and then later accused them of rape.
|
| On the other hand I can really empathize with the woman's POV
| here, and think that it's terrible that there are men out
| there who take advantage of them when they're under the
| influence - and I'm sure that's more common.
|
| This just doesn't seem cut and dried.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Without being too flippant, I'd like to point out that we do
| actually hold wild bears accountable for their actions. There
| was a news report last week about a bear shot somewhere in
| the US because it had attacked someone (it seemed to have
| been trying to guard a particularly valuable food stash).
| faitswulff wrote:
| The point is that many comments here are assuming that men
| lack the agency to keep themselves from assaulting people.
| That lets the men off the hook. To your example, _if we
| blame the bear, we should blame the man, as well._
| totony wrote:
| I don't think that's what the parent meant.
|
| If someone is intoxicated, I agree that it seems weird to
| disregard their consent when drugs+alcohols are the social
| lubricant of society (and very interwined with sex).
|
| Also, of course you are responsible for your actions even
| when under the influence (drive and kill someone? no excuse
| because you were intoxicated - it's your fault). It's crazy
| to me that people call that "victim blaming". Although I
| understand how someone can take advantage of others, I don't
| think the distinction is intoxicated = taken advantage of.
| faitswulff wrote:
| Someone being assaulted when they're intoxicated is not
| equivalent to someone knowingly driving a car when they're
| drunk. The sexual predator consciously chooses to assault
| their victim; the car doesn't choose to crash.
|
| EDIT - a lot of you seem to think that this is equivalent
| to a DUI. It is not. If you are driving under the
| influence, then you are the perpetrator of the accident. If
| you are drunk and somebody else sexually assaults you, then
| the other person is the perpetrator.
| eloff wrote:
| Cars don't choose, the driver does. The driver is always
| responsible, regardless of state of inebriation.
|
| There's a very big distinction to be made here between an
| assault and if the person gives consent - or sometimes
| could even be the initiator. Again, to be very clear, I'm
| not saying that was the case here.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| If you get drunk downtown, does it make getting your
| pockets picked and your smartphone stolen your _fault_?
|
| You're _stupid_ if you get drunk downtown with an expensive
| smartphone where it can be easily stolen. Still, does it
| mean that you have somehow to share jail time with your
| thief, or does it mean that the thief has to serve less
| time, or that your thief may go with your smartphone
| because it's your fault to get drunk downtown in the first
| place?
|
| Explain please.
| choeger wrote:
| Some men decide to behave like wild bears, it seems. So while
| it indeed doesn't change anything about the responsibility,
| it is still a good idea to take steps that could prevent
| becoming a victim in the first place.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Victim blaming or not, I think most parents wisely caution
| their children about alcohol, intoxication, and making good
| decisions about their own personal safety, when they reach
| the appropriate age. What parent doesn't have that
| conversation with their teenage kid?
| pseudalopex wrote:
| I don't think eloff is Yifan's parent.
| dmit wrote:
| > I think most parents wisely caution their _daughters_
| about alcohol, intoxication, and making good decisions
| about their own personal safety
|
| > What parent doesn't have that conversation with their
| teenage _daughter_?
|
| Sorry, a-reduced your comment. Force of habit. Also, the
| pattern matching checker complained your examples only
| apply to a subset of possible genders.
| Graffur wrote:
| I don't know who he is, who she is and I don't care about the
| scala 'community' too much, especially the types that give talks
| at conferences.
|
| The writing is like a story that is missing pages. Surely the law
| needs to be involved here?
| Shadonototro wrote:
| What this story has to do with the whole "scala community"?
|
| Seems like she is naive and got seduced by someone, nothing crazy
|
| Why always portraying womens as weak people, c'mon
| rozab wrote:
| There has been a common theme in this thread that the justice
| system should just sort it all out. Leaving aside all the issues
| of jurisdiction and citizenship that make a prosecution
| vanishingly unlikely here, the criminal justice system is just
| not cut out for dealing with cases of rape.
|
| To prove it beyond reasonable doubt would require a level of
| evidence that is simply not present here. And in the UK, _a
| suspect is only charged with a crime in 1.4% of reported cases_
| [0]. This is why its so sickening when people gloat that some
| defendant in a sexual abuse case was found not guilty; it really
| doesn't mean they didn't commit the crime.
|
| But even though the criminal justice system is not cut out for
| this kind of thing, that doesn't mean we have no other recourse.
| The reason the standard for evidence is so high is because the
| system would otherwise be vulnerable to abuse, and the
| consequences of wrongful conviction (loss of liberty or even
| execution) are so grave. Whether or not you agree that this very
| high standard is justified (I don't), it is clear that the
| consequences of publicly calling out this behaviour are less
| serious. Social ostracisation within a very specific community
| isn't such a big deal, but the direct benefits (protecting women
| through awareness) may be almost as good.
|
| Whether or not you agree with the above, it's definitely an issue
| we need to think about. All it takes is someone close to you
| going through this to realise that the pre-MeToo system is
| inadequate. This new one isn't ideal, but it's a million times
| better. If you can think of a way to make things better then I
| want to hear it.
|
| [0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48095118
| Kattywumpus wrote:
| Let's just do away with the justice system entirely since social
| media seems to fulfill its functions perfectly.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Right. Just like the justice system would, social media will
| sentence him to the extremely harsh punishment of... not being
| invited to conferences anymore.
| datavirtue wrote:
| This is actually a serious theory called anarcho-capitalism.
| calylex wrote:
| Yes. By Chomsky:
|
| "Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system
| which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny
| and oppression that have few counterparts in human history.
| There isn't the slightest possibility that its (in my view,
| horrendous) ideas would be implemented, because they would
| quickly destroy any society that made this colossal error."
|
| Except we're seeing its horrendous ideas flourishing.
| [deleted]
| tester756 wrote:
| was there a quarter without drama in Scala community? :o
| [deleted]
| rlmenu wrote:
| Lots of comments obviously focus on the issue whether this is
| truth or slander. There is another angle to this:
|
| A word of advice for new people in OSS. You do _not_ need to go
| to conferences to be successful in the field. Many of the
| developers who actually write code do _not attend conferences_.
|
| On the other hand, people who want to associate themselves with
| the work of others, narcissists, activists of all kinds,
| parasites and a lot more are to be found in the conference
| circuits. There are some legit people as well but you'll also
| find them online where the work happens.
| noobermin wrote:
| Painfully true but kind of unfortunate as young professionals
| are often pushed into going to conferences as a way to get
| ahead in their career.
| ramtatatam wrote:
| > "There was another time that he insisted on having intercourse
| regardless of me saying I didn't want to"
|
| This is rape is it not? Whoever this guy is, in my opinion this
| case should get in front of the judges. I can't imagine what the
| author of the story have gone through.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Rape is doing it, not insisting, I think.
| ramtatatam wrote:
| > "I felt being taken advantage of that he had unprotected
| sex with me when I was intoxicated. Nothing felt right. I
| remember panicking and crying."
|
| After reading above and then seeing the part about
| "insisting" I feel there was more behind this statement. The
| author's circumstances was also very easy to be taken
| advantage of. I'm not woman but my guess is there probably is
| shock involved in situations like this. People are not acting
| in reasonable ways when in shock..
| eloff wrote:
| Insisting could mean doing it in this context. English is
| weird.
| [deleted]
| Pfhreak wrote:
| Sex was had while she did not consent, she mentions in the
| fifth paragraph.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Slightly later she writes "I maintained friendship with him
| for a few months after May, because I was convinced that it
| was all consensual". I think it is something of a
| philosophical issue to debate about whether you can think
| you consented and later determine you didn't. It's also
| strange to me that it takes months and consultation with a
| therapist to determine if you did or did not consent.
| namenotrequired wrote:
| > It's also strange to me that it takes months and
| consultation with a therapist to determine if you did or
| did not consent.
|
| It would have been strange to me.
|
| But I was recently victim of emotional abuse by someone I
| admired and trusted. And it is not strange to me anymore.
|
| Abusers are sophisticated. Trust is a complex thing.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| Have you ever been in an abusive relationship? Or seen
| one firsthand? People can be made to believe all sorts of
| things that aren't true by charismatic or powerful
| people. It may take them some time to realize they are
| being tricked or abused.
|
| You absolutely can be told you consented, and trust that
| person's word, and realize later that no, actually you
| had not. It's just convenient for the abuser for you to
| believe you had.
| Humdeee wrote:
| This article reads like she did not say no as much as she
| did not say yes, which leaves the reader in a muddled,
| grey area and unsure of how to interpret anything. Is she
| consenting, or more specifically, is she explicitly
| claiming to not consent? It's a very awkward article,
| leaving readers with more questions than answers at the
| end, which is never what you want your readers to feel
| when garnering support.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| Consent is unambiguous and enthusiastic yes. The default
| assumption is that no consent is given. Not saying yes is
| the same as saying no.
| [deleted]
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Maybe that's true and some Rasputin-like figure could
| manipulate you into believing you thought things that you
| didn't, but that doesn't seem to be what is alleged here.
| She wasn't living in this guy's cult, he helped her
| professionally and with conferences, and she agreed to
| share a room with him on a trip. That strikes me as less
| mind-control and more just a situation that people get
| into sometimes.
|
| She is and was an adult woman. Can I not expect her to
| know, in the typical case, whether she does or does not
| consent to sex? And I'm not talking about "He got me
| drunk and then forced sex when I couldn't consent" -
| obviously that would be rape, but it seems like you
| should realize that when you sober up, not months or
| years later.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| She was left panicked and crying. That's not generally a
| sign that there was unambiguous consent.
|
| And it doesn't take a Rasputin-like figure to be an
| abuser. Plenty of people are taken advantage of and
| taught to believe things they later realize were abusive,
| even in relatively short situations. Pretty held all the
| power here -- he controlled where she was staying, he
| helped her get to the conference, she was intoxicated,
| she believe he was her mentor, she believe he had the
| ability to get her industry connections, etc.
|
| Coercing someone into sex that they later realize wasn't
| consensual (once they are free from that person's
| influence) doesn't mean she was lying in the moment or is
| somehow "discovering" something now.
|
| > Can I not expect her to know, in the typical case,
| whether she does or does not consent to sex?
|
| Adult humans (because I think this can happen to men
| too), can absolutely be caught off guard and be "unsure"
| about whether they are consenting to sex. Not everyone is
| wired the same, and not everyone is able to make a quick
| snap judgement. Not everyone is fully able to say no when
| pressured.
|
| Furthermore, grappling with the question, "Was I just
| raped/sexually abused?" is really, really challenging.
| What does that do to your identity? Are you forever a
| victim? Are you going to have to out yourself and someone
| else? Will you forever be the target of the public's
| pity? Are you going to have that stigma attached to you
| when you want to enter relationships in the future?
| That's a LOT to put on someone, and many, many victims
| choose to try and believe that things were consensual,
| because it seems easier that facing the realization they
| were abused.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| She says that she remembers panicking and crying. I agree
| that those are both clear signs of non-consensual sex.
| Why does it take months and therapy for her to decode
| those clear signals? If Jon noticed her crying and
| panicking we would expect him to interpret that as a
| clear "I do not consent" signal.
|
| The power Pretty holds here is pretty minor. He's helping
| her get into conferences and mentoring her. He
| "controlled where she was staying" in the sense that he
| made the reservation for their AirBnB. He's not
| confiscating her passport, she isn't destitute. She
| could've gotten another hotel, hostel, AirBnB. To be
| clear, I am not saying "She didn't get another room and
| so deserves to be raped" but I am saying that his "power"
| in this regard is pretty minor - just because someone is
| paying for your room that shouldn't make it impossible
| for you to say "No" to them.
|
| A big part of why it is morally and legally wrong to have
| sex with children is that children aren't mature enough
| to make decisions about sex. Children cannot consent. You
| seem to be suggesting that a similar standard applies to
| this adult woman - she can't know if she consented to a
| sexual encounter or not. To me, that implies you are
| suggesting it should be illegal to have sex with this
| woman - after all, she apparently can't tell if she
| consented or not.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| > Why does it take months and therapy for her to decode
| those clear signals?
|
| Because brains aren't just bundles of logical
| interpreters that fully understand what they are
| experiencing all the time. There are many, many reasons
| why we may rationalize some behavior in the moment. Why
| do victims of cons sometimes defend the con artists for
| significant periods of time after they leave? Why do
| humans hold out hope for lost loved ones, when the
| evidence is clear they've passed away?
|
| Emotionally charged topics take a long time for our minds
| to process sometimes. Sometimes we need help from others
| to put our thoughts in order or to gain perspective.
| Maybe she never asked herself, "Why was I crying?" until
| a therapist said, "Why were you crying?" We're all wired
| different, and we have to allow for some flexibility in
| how were perceive and react to events -- especially
| traumatic events.
|
| > To me, that implies you are suggesting it should be
| illegal to have sex with this woman - after all, she
| apparently can't tell if she consented or not.
|
| Come on, that's a clear strawman. I'm happy to disagree
| with you about this and discuss it, but that whole
| paragraph feels needlessly out of line.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I think the paragraph that you identify as a strawman is
| actually the core of our disagreement. I don't intend it
| as a strawman of your idea but as an illustration of why
| I struggle to accept the idea that you can retroactively
| change whether or not you consented - or, phrased in a
| way you might be more likely to agree with, whether or
| not you can reevaluate your consent decisions after the
| fact.
|
| If she doesn't know whether she genuinely consents to sex
| or not, then how is it morally acceptable to have sex
| with her? You might be raping her. If she can reevaluate
| consent decisions in the future, that implies they are
| not certain in the present. It seems straightforward to
| say that if you are uncertain about whether someone
| consents to sex you shouldn't have sex with them.
|
| If this is a strawman I genuinely don't see it. I think
| it is the logical consequence of accepting mutable
| consent and it is part of why I don't accept that - or at
| least why I hesitate to accept mutable consent.
| cmsj wrote:
| I think you underestimate how skilled abusers can be at
| emotional manipulation.
| jnwatson wrote:
| The same argument can be made the other direction. It is
| quite common for someone to be convinced after the fact
| it was nonconsensual when it was indeed consensual.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| I'm sure it happens, I strongly doubt it's "quite
| common". Especially relative to the incidence of it
| happening the other way (where an victim escapes and
| abuser and realizes they were being abused.)
| aphextron wrote:
| >You absolutely can be told you consented, and trust that
| person's word, and realize later that no, actually you
| had not. It's just convenient for the abuser for you to
| believe you had.
|
| There has to be a line drawn somewhere when you start
| talking about hardcore felony level criminal accusations
| though. Should anyone who's ever had an (at the time)
| consensual intimate encounter then have cart blanche to
| hold accusations of rape over you for the rest of your
| life?
|
| I mean just picture this guy's POV for a moment. You
| think you had a consensual relationship with someone, who
| then continued having friendly relations with you for
| months afterwards. Then out of nowhere you're being
| called a rapist on the internet. I get that the guy is a
| total creep. But it's absolutely terrifying to think that
| being in a crappy relationship can land you in prison
| now.
| tmotwu wrote:
| Perhaps why she did not explicitly call out rape in her
| message. However, it's a very realistic abuse and
| harassment claim, that in itself is already extremely
| problematic.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| To be clear, that guy held several positions of power
| over her. Even in the most absolutely charitable reading,
| which is that this is a bad relationship (a reading I
| strongly disagree with) -- if you hold significant power
| over someone, you shouldn't be entering into casual
| sexual relationships.
|
| If you want to pursue that relationship, it can be done,
| but not carelessly. This isn't a situation where a one
| night stand went awkwardly, there are several additional
| factors here.
| the-dude wrote:
| That is not what she says there. She says she felt
| uncomfortable and taken advantage of.
| boblax wrote:
| She is definitely the kind of woman where a man shouldn't
| be making such advances. Let her be the acting party. She
| would have been telling another story if she were on top
| and had taken the initiative.
|
| One of the simplest ways for a man to avoid the problems
| of consent where he suspects there may be is to be the
| one from whom consent is needed.
|
| That is the absolute safest other than leaving. If you as
| a man attempt to get consent that may not be something
| you're able to obtain. She might be intoxicated and
| unable to consent. You might not know that. However
| what's safe is to let anyone initiate sex with you while
| you remain passive and let them have sex with you.
|
| If you leave then I would strongly advise to say it is
| because you are feeling sick and think it's something you
| ate. Go to the toilet first and say you have the runs.
| That will cushion her pride and make her just glad you
| left. No chance of something mean-spirited.
| klyrs wrote:
| She was unable to resist his advances, for various
| reasons listed. While it doesn't sound like she beat him
| off with a stick, it does sounds like she shut down,
| dissociated, and didn't say "no." Consent isn't presumed;
| consent is not the lack of a "no", consent is the
| presence of free, ongoing, and enthusiastic yes. Even if
| she reluctantly agreed, it consent wasn't freely given in
| light of the power imbalance and intoxication. Even if
| she reluctantly agreed, that isn't enthusiastic consent.
| Even if she wanted sex, but he refused to use the
| protection she wanted him to use, that's not ongoing
| consent. But she clearly didn't want sex with this dude;
| not like that
| Pfhreak wrote:
| Being taken advantage of _while intoxicated_ and while
| there was a significant power imbalance between the two.
| She was not in a position to give consent there -- being
| intoxicated, being in a place that was being rented
| Pretty (and she could risk being out on the street if she
| refused), having no money and luggage on hand, being the
| mentee of Pretty (or believing she could be), etc.
|
| She ended up crying and panicking. That generally isn't
| the outcome of a consensual relationship.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| It definitely sounds like he abused his position and did
| a horrible thing, but the thing he did is not rape
| (assuming OP story is 100% accurate description of
| events).
|
| If 2 people are intoxicated and have sex, do they both
| rape each other? If one person holds more power than the
| other, while both are intoxicated, is it just a one-way
| rape? Or is it still a two-way rape, where one person
| just "rapes a bit more" and the other person "rapes a bit
| less"? What if the person who had power ends up
| regretting sex afterwards and cries, does it "turn the
| tables" and cause the rapist to suddenly become the
| victim of rape, after the fact?
|
| Yes, she was drunk. Yes, she later regretted having sex.
| These things alone do not mean that rape was committed.
| As far as I can tell, she is not referring to the events
| as "rape", so maybe you shouldn't either.
| rayhu007 wrote:
| It is terrible abuse and disgusting. Keep no silence, sue the
| predator and send him to where he deserve to be.
| typon wrote:
| You'd think this type of behaviour wouldn't happen anymore, given
| the whole MeToo movement and people constantly complaining about
| getting cancelled.
| throway98752343 wrote:
| That's what makes me wonder if this kind of abuser can't help
| but do these things. But on the other hand, maybe anyone would,
| if conditions were right.
|
| These public callouts which occupy the area between keeping
| silent and taking legal action are like antibodies marking a
| potentially dangerous cell.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| It's time these women came forward and reported the person to the
| police. As with #metoo, justice does indeed gets handed out, it
| just takes time. The only thing I'm sad about is the considerable
| amount of pain and suffering these women have to endure. Hugs
| all.
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