Comment by stale2002
7 years ago
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?
> HR departments will simply get it right all the time.
They weren't getting it right when they were letting harrassers off the hook.
It's not about truth or justice. It's about corporation trying to get rid of pesky humans doing human things. Harrassing, accusing. Until recently sweeping things under the rug was the best way to deal with it. Winds changed. Now it's cheaper to kick out men even if they possibly did nothing.
Woman reporting harrasment was a problem and was silenced or fired. Now man getting accused is the problem, gets aame treatment as women got earlier because now it's more efficient to get rid of him.
Perfect justice is never efficient.
Part of this is due to incentives. Police and elected officials have an incentive to appear tough on crime.
Theres no particular reason a priori, to assume that HR has the same incentives. In fact if anything, the current state of affairs may imply the opposite.
They do: risk of lawsuit. Risk of the PR hit of a Twitter mob descending on the company.
1 reply →
This seems to be an argument against investigating anything ever.
What I am saying is that if someone is genuinely harassing other people, then there will be lots of complaints.
If there is one complaint, then it will be easy to find a dozen of them.
And what I am saying is, a company should only punish someone if they find a dozen of them.
It is not he said she said. It is instead he said and a dozen people said otherwise.
This is what the investigation is for. I am saying that there is nothing wrong with a company punishing the outstandingly obvious cases, which is almost all cases, and then giving the benefit of the doubt to the rest of them.
IE, nobody should ever be punished for a single anonymous complaint. Instead that single anonymous complaint should be used to talk with other people, and to determine if there are instead a dozen of them.
Let the edge cases go unpunished, and target the obvious harrassers, which is almost all of them.
Let's give a similar example. Imagine someone was going into meetings and just yelling slurs at other employees. And they did this mutiple times. Do we need to police to be called to fire this guy? No. We don't.
Do we have to worry about false accusations of this guy yelling slurs at meetings? No. We don't. There will be a dozen people who will easily be able to verify that yes this guy did this thing, mutiple times, and there is no danger in firing him.
And you should also notice that this isn't necessarily even illegal, therefore it makes no sense to call the police.
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.