My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

They expect that because rape carries enormous jail penalties, because it's got a clear legal definition and because as the extremely low successful prosecution rate shows, most juries are not actually willing to send a man to jail for a decade on the basis of claims like "He invited me to his room, I brought a bottle of wine, we had sex and for months we were still friends because I told everyone I agreed, but now I changed my mind". That is not rape, and if she was claiming it was, she'd be making a false allegation of rape, which would be very serious.

This pretty simple concept has been relentlessly attacked for decades now by a rather nasty form of feminist activist who isn't satisfied with the standard definition of rape and who have been trying to change it to something more like this: "Rape is whatever a woman says it is". But they want the jail penalties to remain. That's dystopian and no honest person can support it, but sadly, many years of aggressive activism have resulted in the legal system being steadily chipped away when it comes to men and accusations of rape. That's why in the UK just a few years ago it was discovered there had been a massive set of miscarriages of justice, where men had been falsely accused of rape and sent to prison when evidence the women was lying was withheld from the defense. It happened because the woman in charge of the CPS had the mentality of "the victim must always be believed", leading to a collapse in standards. Many innocent men were jailed and their lives were ruined. Now one MP is campaigning to change the law to ban the form of evidence that was used to get the men released.

Honestly, I went into this article with an open mind. There are plenty of nerdy guys at programming conferences who don't know how to handle women. But this essay leaves a very bitter taste. As other commenters observe, she appears to be defining sexual harassment as "it means whatever I want it to mean at any later time", which is not something that can ever be fair to men.

The main problem is that it wasn't all that long ago that a woman couldn't attend a conference, agree to stay at an Airbnb with an unrelated man to whom she wasn't married, etc.

We are in a lot of new territory and still trying to sort out a lot of questions that simply didn't come up a generation or two back.

These questions are all too often being sorted out the hard way: By having things go wrong and having people who are upset about what happened air their grievances because they don't know what else to do to try to sort their lives and get everything back on track.

A more commonly cited figure is 10%, which comes from the clearance rate of DNA testing kits. i.e. someone accuses a man of rape, there is DNA and it exonerates him. So this is an absolute lower bound because a lot of rape accusations are a bit like this article: "we had sex a bunch of times consensually, and then also when it wasn't". You can't disprove that with DNA evidence but it can still be a false accusation.

Back in the 90s when this stuff was less politicised there was a somewhat rigorous study that put the true figure at around 50% [1]. It gave pie charts of the reasons for the false accusations and other interesting bits of data. This figure causes people to freak out these days due to the "believe the victim" mentality you can see above, where there is a deliberate conflation between accusations of rape and actual rapes, so it gets attacked a lot, but modern scholarship hardly investigates the question of false reporting rates for rape unless the authors already decided their conclusion before doing the research (you can sometimes see admissions of this in the study's discussion sections). The 50% figure has some other support: when interviewed anonymously police workers, both male and female, tend to pick this figure when asked to estimate the false reporting rate.

The low prosecution success rate is usually painted these days as an obvious flaw of the justice system, but that's identity politics. When you drill into it in detail and ask OK, where do these prosecutions go, and why are they dropped, or why do they fail to win in court, the answer is: because a LOT of rape allegations are not only false but clearly false. For example, because the complainant goes to the police and admits they made it up, or because they are clearly high on drugs when making the accusation and rescind it when sober. Even if you engage in some mental gymnastics to assume rescinding an accusation is never valid, it doesn't matter. It's really hard to win in court when the "victim" themselves are claiming they're not really a victim at all.

[1] https://ia800209.us.archive.org/4/items/FalseRapeAllegations...