Comment by stale2002
7 years ago
This worry is unfounded.
Harassment is rarely the case of a single incident. Instead, people who harass other usually have a long history of harassing lots of people.
An anonymous complaint could be used not to determine guilt, but instead to trigger an investigation.
And if the person is guilty, then the investigation will almost certainly have a very easy time finding somebody, likely many, who will go on record with their incident of harassment.
And if they are innocent? That investigation will come with an impact to the accused. A serious one.
If they are innocent then nothing will happen to them as the investigation won't find anything.
That's how it should work. If someone gets accused of something, there should be an investigation. And if they did something wrong it will be outstanding obvious. If they didn't, then they won't find anything.
It is ridiculous to complain about an investigation, which should be the entire goal. To investigate and figure out what happened.
> If someone gets accused of something, there should be an investigation. And if they did something wrong it will be outstanding obvious. If they didn't, then they won't find anything.
Reading this genuinely frightens me.
Our legal system, with due process and "beyond reasonable doubt" and all the rest, regularly convicts people who are later found to be innocent. And, of course, regularly acquits people who are later found to have been clearly guilty. Even in countries with fewer complaints of bias and bad faith than the US, miscarriages of justice are not exceptional.
And here's this reply, suggesting that HR departments will simply get it right all the time. We're talking about people not trained in investigating anything, operating with minimal oversight under rules that have probably never been scrutinized, who in almost every case will face biases and incentives that would recuse any judge and strike any juror.
Discovering the truth is genuinely hard. If someone did something wrong, it will be "outstanding obvious"? What guarantees us a world so convenient and just that no one ever harasses in private and leaves only "he said, she said"? If someone did nothing wrong, investigations will find nothing? How have we gotten free from DARVO and coordinated dishonesty and all the other things that produce wrongful convictions (quite often of victims, on their attacker's word) in actual courts?
The certainty that every investigation will react a decisive conclusion, that official decisions are automatically trustworthy, that people who are found innocent are never harmed by public knowledge that they've been investigated. It's a display of faith in authority (any authority) that I truly don't understand - are people extending this same sort of blind confidence when police forces, churches, and politicians investigate themselves?
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The problem here, in this naive view, is how you define an "investigation." The moment that "investigation" goes public around the topic of sexual harassment (or worse), the accused is done. That's the real world. I've seen it, several times over. That's important. You shouldn't have the power to significantly wreck someone's life by just making an accusation. There needs to be as much protection for the accused as there is for the accuser.
> If they are innocent then nothing will happen to them as the investigation won't find anything
This is just willfully ignorant. Look at Steven Galloway, or Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim at McGill. Investigation revealed that neither had credible claims of harassment against them. Both of them had irreparable damage done to their careers - the former pushed to the brink of suicide.