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My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

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Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#221

Post by ALittleLight »

lukasb wrote: post #180
chmod600 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

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.

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?

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#223

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

lukasb wrote: post #180
chmod600 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

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.

And yet you wouldn’t like to fall within those 2-8%.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#224

Post by jlebar »

JPKab wrote: post #27

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?…

> 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?

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#225

Post by Manuel_D »

andrewzah wrote: post #129
nicklecompte wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pe…

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 phenomen…

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.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#226

Post by void_mint »

chmod600 wrote: post #159
jfengel wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 othe…

"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?

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?

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#227

Post by ummonk »

JPKab wrote: post #27

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?…

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.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#229

Post by calylex »

yoavm wrote: post #37
adflux wrote: post #12

Does this type of content really fit on this platform?

Yes, hackers care about their communities.

Hackers care about 99% of what everyone else also cares about (you know them operating in the realm of humans.) What a ridiculous point.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#230

Post by belorn »

btilly wrote: post #124
JPKab wrote: post #27

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?…

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…

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.

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