^ Al Franken was in a photo @momofthreeboys - you know that.
Because on social media women get way worse abuse than men, often ugly gendered abuse. This has been well studied by now.
The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/12/the-dark-side-of-guardian-comments
Pacific Standard: https://psmag.com/social-justice/women-arent-welcome-internet-72170
Do your male clients commonly get rape threats and death threats, @hanna? Is that a normal experience for them? It is for sexual assault accusers. Rape accusers and sexual harassment accusers routinely get such threats.
http://deadline.com/2017/12/hollywood-sexual-misconduct-victims-backlash-rose-mcgowan-video-1202230795/
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2017/10/31/peyton-mannings-accuser-speaks-out-about-alleged-sexual-harassment-case.html
https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/fay-al-benhassain/leading-islamic-scholar-denies-rape-charges-accuser-gets-death
https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/winston-accuser-says-she-received-death-threats-parent-info-released/
Oh yes the fake photo I remember it well.
Our neighbor. Cardinal Famg/// I won’t say his name because there was one half hearted to accuse but he stilll lost his job. But no, I won’t give out his name. I am not giving pr or credence to the accuser. In high school…just read the names of the group of 10 who named names and who they called out. And please remember that I could post ame too. I may have been hardwired differently. I made sure that I wasn’t pregnant, saw a therapist and went back to living my life.
@bevhills, it is wrong for folks to lose their jobs based on an accusation and no right to defend or proof. It is also wrong to assume that if some folks can and do go on with their lives after an assault others can and should too and not have any cause to complain.
An employer who fires based on an unsubstantiated accusation could end up having to defend s wrongful termination lawsuit, depending on the circumstances. It can be costly and time consuming to all parties.
Reactions to trauma vary tremendously. I am not the norm. I know one woman on the other side… I do think that there will be lots of lawsuits or quiet settlements.
This is good point but I don’t see that happening here. It is precisely those men in power who are doing the firing or applying the pressure for these men to resign. We have seen much of the fallout in Hollywood, media and in D.C. where men have a firm grip on power and women have little. Apparently these men are looking at these situations and making a determination that they rise to the level of being acted upon.
This movement would have ended pretty quickly if the reports had fallen on deaf ears as in the past. There would be no upside to making the report – it would have been business as usual. The real change in my view is that there are people with power now willing to act upon these reports. Whether they are doing so in accordance with their company policies or employment contracts is something that I assume would be addressed if they were challenged in court.
In general, it’s trivial to fire an at-will employee in the private sector based on an unsubstantiated accusation.
“Do your male clients commonly get rape threats and death threats, @hanna? Is that a normal experience for them?”
The ones who are named publicly? Or even quasi-publicly (aka everybody knows around their school)? Yes, vicious threats are very common. So are follow-up contacts to the schools and employers they attend/join later. When this happens to women, we rightly call it stalking.
I collaborate with most of the top lawyers who practice in this area. Lots of accused students with good claims (in the opinion of their lawyers) do not sue unless they can do so anonymously. That’s because for so many students, having your name in the public record in association with this issue is such a catastrophe that winning isn’t worth it.
“on social media women get way worse abuse than men, often ugly gendered abuse.”
Yes, that’s true of men on social media IN GENERAL – but the data don’t say anything about men who have been publicly accused of sexual assault. We’re talking about those individuals. In general, men are taller than women, but there are some men under 5 feet tall, and the experience of men in general doesn’t tell you anything about what it’s like to be that man.
@hanna, do you also have good relationships with the lawyers who handle the accuser’s side? I’d be interested to know what all the lawyers say about whether accused or accusers are equally vilified, or whether accused, or accusers, are worse treated.
I find it interesting that we hear about female accusers getting rape and death threats, but I have not heard about that in connection with the male accusers. Not hearing about threats does not mean the threats have not been happening, of course.
Seeking justice should make us more sensitive to justice for the accused not less and we need to stop equating accusation with presumed guilt. Who gets vilified more in media shouldn’t even be a question. Until there is verifiable guilt there should be no vilification of either side. If we can’t get there we’re going to be spinning our wheels for decades. Part of the problem is absolutely an unfettered social media where is it OK to vilify people and say horrible things. Journalists tend to be a tad more restrained and loosely bound by the historical need to fact-check but again because of this unleashed time, even with editorials and op-ed pieces the lines have become very blurred. People are labeled victims and accused are presumed guilty long before anyone checks any facts or takes a close look. As much as the babe article bothers me if it has done any good it’s caused our society to take a closer look at a single claim and also a closer look at how responsibilities for a sexual relationship occur between both sexes. That’s a good thing.
I think the people who knew should be on trial. However, I’m not sure that I believe in shutting down the Texas training facility - just staff it with new people.
They knew. Going down
I don’t disagree but I think to make a value judgement about MSU you have to go all the way back to the beginning. Too many people have jumped on the bandwagon of take 'em all down at the uni just in the past two weeks who haven’t followed the entire story since it unfolded. The point of culpability for MSU will be did MSU do what it legally was required to do at the time there was awareness and did the people who originally heard the reports do what they were legally required to do at that time. Believe me my blood bleeds blue, but if MSU did what they were legally required to do and if the individuals accused did what they were legallly supposed to do there is no case against MSU and the culpability lies on the person who is already going to spend the rest of his life in jail. The legalities of what colleges are required to do have been shifting sands for now over a decade and reports of Nassar’s abuse were first made before he was affiliated with the university. Here’s a really good timeline for those that haven’t followed since the early news reports. A long past acquaintance is one of the accused so I probably won’t comment too much on this story.
http://interactives.indystar.com/news/standing/OutofBalance/NassarTimeline/LSJ.html
This seems to encapsulate the difference between my view and yours, @momofthreeboys. Decency requires that we go beyond the legal minimum.
The legal exposure of MSU and the people who worked there is limited to whether they did what they were legally required to do. But the culpability potentially extends further: Did they protect the girls under their care? If taking a narrow legalistic view of supervision, turning their heads away from suspicious behavior and pooh-poohing allegations led to dozens of girls being molested, the people who turned away are culpable. Just like they were at Penn State. Decent people would blame them and should blame them.
If I was walking down the street on a cold night and saw a toddler apparently alone, I could legally walk away. If I did, I couldn’t be arrested; I did what I was legally required to do, nothing. But I would still be culpable if that child got hurt because I left her alone, and decent people would condemn me.
I am greatly troubled about the legalistic interpretation of culpability that has been used too often to excuse people in positions of responsibility. ITA with Cardinal Fang about what decency requires.
The first news story I read this morning was about the Pope’s remarks on calumny. I had such a visceral reaction to his words. People in positions of power, whether clergy or not, should be held responsible when they shield predators, molesters and other such scum. That the current pope should appear to want to silence victims is abhorrent to me. His statement could have a chilling effect on any progress toward justice for so many.
No I don’t agree that it is necessary to go beyond the legal minimum. That’s why we have rules around what is legal and not and when you talk about civil lawsuits there is plenty of wiggle room. Any dollars that come from settlements are taxpayers and any dollars that might come from individuals could be life changing for those families and their children and their children’s children…that is never anything to be decided by the court of social media especially when the guilty party has been found guilt and sentenced to life beyond bars. As I think about it I think back to what was inmy employee handbook from the 80s and 90s to now. You worked by the rules you had when you had the rules so no, I will never “condemn” someone or some institution for failing to be omnicient or for not doing what might be today’s standards. If that were the case we should be condemning the parents who heard their daughters stories and did not go to the police. Rape and assault were very much against the law in the 80s and 90s. I think "shield’ is a very, very loose word and has connotations that rarely belong in these conversations.
@momofthreeboys won’t be persuaded by this, but for the rest of you, I recommend this Vox article on [url ="<a href="I’m a sexual consent educator. Here’s what’s missing in the Aziz Ansari conversation. - Vox</a>] consent and refusal in sexual situations. The writer talks about how we issue refusals in ordinary conversation.
It turns out that in normal social interactions, for both men and women, a blunt refusal is socially disfavored and thought of as rude. If you ask a friend to dinner, and the friend accepts, they’ll bluntly say “Yes.” But if the friend does not want to accept, they’ll rarely just say “No.” Rather, they’ll use conversational pauses, inhales, hedges and explanations to convey the information. Blunt refusals are hard, and women in particular but also men are socialized against giving them.
But in normal social situations people need to understand what’s going on. We can’t have a social system that doesn’t let people refuse offers, after all. And so it turns out that “soft” refusals are perfectly clear. Most people understand them with no difficulty. I don’t need to hear the word “No” to understand that my friend isn’t coming to dinner next Tuesday. I know what “Well… I’d like to…” means. The author writes, “Social science has also clearly demonstrated that men (and women!) are perfectly capable of understanding social cues, even ones where someone is saying ‘no’ without using that actual word.”
The writer says that men are being disingenuous when they claim that they don’t understand women’s soft refusals in sexual situations. The men understand perfectly well, she says. They are just socialized not to pay attention, and to push past what they know to be refusals.
There’s a lot more in the article. Read the whole thing and click the link on the social science research.
Women are also strongly socialized to soften their words when they want to say something unpleasant. Being “nice” is a premium quality in women, and it can be hard to get far without it (in spite of the fact that men who aren’t “nice” don’t suffer the same penalty). I’m sure that plays into this. Maybe millennial women can break this cycle.
Nope not me. I have no trouble saying no ever, if that’s what I mean. I have more trouble with passive people who hem and haw or say yes than betch about it days later (comes from when all my kids were in K-12 and people would constantly ask me to “do stuff” even though I worked 60 hour weeks and traveled many days out of the month or bail out at the last minute and I said no alot. No is a very simple word. The sooner people learn to say no when they mean no I predict the happier they will be. I’ve had too many conversations with women friends who just sigh and say “I wish I would have said no because now I have to yada, yada, yada.” The other benefit of learning to say no, is that when you say “yes” people that know you understand you are all in…you aren’t going to bail on them, or not pull your weight. I have to say “no” to people in every job I’ve ever had and I’ve had to learn to say No plus why which the asker is entitled to hear. I also know people at work (mostly women) who can never get that word out of their mouth and then they feel put upon. I’ve said “no” at work before and if “no” can’t be the answer then you have to work on what needs to change or happen or turn the “no” into a yes if it’s something imperative. It’s very simple. Yes is simple. No is simple. Everybody knows what those two words mean. Men included. My mother could never say no and I always got an earful with her wondering why on earth she said yes. Where does that come from anyway? What the heck is a “soft refusal” anyway? Sounds to me like “no but I’ll do it anyway” which isn’t a “no” it’s a “no but”.