{"id":11605,"date":"2010-11-08T00:25:36","date_gmt":"2010-11-08T07:25:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=11605"},"modified":"2010-11-08T00:25:36","modified_gmt":"2010-11-08T07:25:36","slug":"blogging-about-a-sexual-assault-that-cant-be-proven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=11605","title":{"rendered":"Blogging About A Sexual Assault That Can't Be Proven"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Crossposted at TADA <\/a>and Alas<\/a>. Feminists only may comment on this post at “Alas<\/a>.” Non-feminists and feminists are both welcome to comment at TADA.]<\/em><\/p>\n

On her blog<\/a>, Noirin Shirley writes about an after-party at ApacheCon:<\/p>\n

And then I went to the loo, and as I was about to go in, Florian Leibert, who had been speaking in the Hadoop track, called me over, and asked if he could talk to me.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m on the board of Apache. I\u2019m responsible for our conferences. I work on community development and mentoring. If you\u2019re at an Apache event and you want help, information, encouragement, answers, I will always do my best to provide. So this wasn\u2019t an unusual request, and it wasn\u2019t one I expected to end the way it did.<\/p>\n

He brought me in to the snug, and sat up on a stool. He grabbed me, pulled me in to him, and kissed me. I tried to push him off, and told him I wasn\u2019t interested (I may have been less eloquent, but I don\u2019t think I was less clear). He responded by jamming his hand into my underwear and fumbling.<\/p>\n

I broke away, headed back to the group, and hid behind some of the bigger, burlier infra guys, while Bill sorted out all the people who\u2019d left stuff in my room, so that I could reasonably escape.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Other than Noirin Shirley and Florian Leibert themselves, there were apparently no witnesses to this incident, although Greg Stein<\/a> noticed Noirin looking noticeably shaken afterward, and she told him “creepy stuff happened.”<\/p>\n

Looking through the comments on her post, there are many supportive comments. But there are also many comments attacking her. For instance, this comment from “Chuck”:<\/p>\n

The guy who touched you is a jerk and an embarassment to the male sex.<\/p>\n

However, I have no sympathy for you. You dress provocatively and expect men to leave you alone. When a woman does that, it\u2019s exactly analogous to a man using his physical strength to overpower a woman. This is because just as women usually have no defense against a stronger male, men have no or little defense against their hormones when they see certain parts of the female body exposed in front of them. Dressing as you did is unfair; it puts undue burden on the men around you by taking advantage of their weak point. You\u2019re foolish and naive for expecting to escape the evening without incident.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She was wearing a short skirt with bike shorts underneath. You know, I’m a guy. I’ve seen women wearing short skirts — or less — approximately a zillion billion times<\/em> in my life. Somehow, I’ve managed to never stick my hands into any woman’s underwear if she didn’t want me to. And most men could say the same. Really not too much to ask.<\/em><\/p>\n

Another complaint — and one that I’m focusing on in this post — is that it’s wrong of Noirin to mention her alleged attacker’s name in a blog post, when he hasn’t been proven guilty in a court of law. (I just had a debate about this with Jeff Schader<\/a> on twitter.)<\/p>\n

Schader’s ((I’m calling him “Schader,” not “Jeff,” not because I want to be unfriendly, but to distinguish Jeff Schader from Jeff my co-blogger at Alas.)) point, as I understand it, is that Noirin Shirley might <\/em>be lying. We can’t know for sure. Until Leibert is proven guilty in a court of law, Schader says, it’s unfair for people to react as if Shirley is telling the truth (for instance, by saying “I’m sorry you went through this<\/a>” to Shirley). For all we know, Leibert is having his reputation unjustly destroyed by a malicious or deluded liar. In Schader’s view, it’s morally wrong — and perhaps should be forbidden<\/a> — for Shirley to include Leibert’s name when describing what she says happened to her.<\/p>\n

I don’t agree.<\/p>\n

Schader is certainly correct to say that Shirley might <\/em>be lying. False accusations happen. Then again, Shirley might <\/em>be telling the truth. Sexual assaults happen, too (and I’m pretty sure they happen more often).<\/p>\n

It’s unjust for Shirley to use Leibert’s name if she’s making the thing up. But — and this is a point that Schader, bizarrely, shows no concern for — if she’s telling the truth, it’s unfair to expect Shirley to protect the reputation of her assailant by not naming him. It’s her life, and — assuming she’s telling the truth — it would be a dreadful imposition on her freedom of speech to demand that she censor herself on her own blog.<\/p>\n

And saying “she should take it to the courts” is no answer. It’s very unlikely that any prosecutor would take this case, because it would be nearly impossible to prove; but lack of evidence isn’t proof that Shirley’s lying. ((Although going into this is beyond the scope of this post, I should note that there are legitimate reasons some victims of assault prefer not to go to the police.))<\/p>\n

No matter which position we take, we’re potentially being unfair to someone. If Leibert is innocent, then it’s unfair for Shirley to mention his name on her blog. If Leibert is guilty, then it’s unfair to demand that Shirley censor herself to protect Leibert’s reputation. What Schader (and others who take his position) never explain is, why do they consider possible unfairness to Leibert so much more important and pressing than possible unfairness to Shirley? Why is unfairness to Leibert an enormous concern, but unfairness to Shirley no concern at all<\/a>?<\/p>\n

On her blog, Shirley wrote:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the first time something like this has happened to me, at all. It\u2019s not the first time it\u2019s happened to me at a tech conference. But it is the first time I\u2019ve spoken out about it in this way, because I\u2019m tired of the sense that some idiot can ruin my day and never have to answer for it. I\u2019m tired of the fear. I\u2019m tired of people who think I should wear something different. I\u2019m tired of people who think I should avoid having a beer in case my vigilance lapses for a moment. I\u2019m tired of people who say that guys can\u2019t read me right and I have to read them, and avoid giving the wrong impression.<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t give the wrong impression, and it\u2019s simply not true that guys can\u2019t read me right. I don\u2019t want to be assaulted, and the vast majority of guys read that just fine. It is not my job to avoid getting assaulted. It is everyone else\u2019s job to avoid assaulting me. Dozens of guys succeeded at that job, across the week. In the pub, in the stairwell, on the MARTA, in my bedroom.<\/p>\n

One guy failed, and it\u2019s his fault.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I believe Shirley. But Schader is right, that’s just my opinion, I don’t know for sure.<\/p>\n

But I do know this: A terrible injustice happens every time someone is accused of committing a sexual assault. Sometimes it’s a true accusation, sometimes it’s a false accusation, but either way someone is suffering unjustly.<\/p>\n

But what are the results of a rule (either moral or legal) such as Schader suggests — a rule saying that, unless there’s a “guilty” verdict in a courtroom, alleged assailants must never be named?<\/p>\n

If such a rule existed, it would make things even more unfair for those who really are sexually assaulted.<\/p>\n

That doesn’t make sense to me. We should try to help those who are falsely accused — but not at the price of making things worse for those who are sexually assaulted. That’s not making things genuinely fairer; it’s just saying that it’s okay to punish the sexually assaulted to help the falsely accused. It’s saying, in effect, that people who are falsely accused matter more <\/em>than people who are sexually assaulted.<\/p>\n

We can’t get rid of the unfairness inherent in these cases. But we can choose not to shift that burden entirely onto one party. Taking freedom of speech away from all people who are sexually assaulted is not an acceptable or fair way of helping the falsely accused.<\/p>\n

One last point. Tellingly, I’ve never seen anyone say that men <\/em>who say they’ve been falsely accused should shut up about it until they can prove the false accusation in a court of law. Why not? If women are expected to shut up to protect the reputations of men who assault them, shouldn’t men be likewise expected to shut up to protect the reputations of women who falsely accuse them?<\/p>\n

UPDATE: Jeff Schader replies in comments at TADA<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Crossposted at TADA and Alas. Feminists only may comment on this post at “Alas.” Non-feminists and feminists are both welcome to comment at TADA.] On her blog, Noirin Shirley writes about an after-party at ApacheCon: And then I went to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[135,96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crossposted-on-tada","category-rape-intimate-violence-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11605\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}