Comment by js2
4 years ago
Yes, of course she should have contacted law enforcement, but she was in a foreign country, intimated and young. And law enforcement still fails women:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/how-po...
In an ideal world, the criminal justice system works. In the real world, it's a patchwork system that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/09/17...
So this is why we see women continue to post these stories. Her story is backed up by other women.
I believe her.
Meta: I don't know how to make the justice system work better in a case like this. The presumption of innocence is critical and I don't want a system easily abused by false accusers, but it's also clear that predators can take advantage of the presumption of innocence. Even if she had gone to police at the time, ultimately she would have to convince them it wasn't consensual.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/11/how-cops-respond-to...
Edit 2: found this paper from 2012 written by a police organization that talks about the complexities of dealing with sexual assault in the criminal justice system:
https://www.policeforum.org/assets/docs/Critical_Issues_Seri...
A quote from the conclusion: Rape is the most underreported of crime, because rape victims find it so difficult under the best of circumstances to report it to the police. But it’s made worse when victims say they were interrogated by the police as though they were criminals. Or they are disbelieved and threatened with lie detector tests, or essentially are blamed for the conduct of perpetrators.
Reading the paper, false accusations are barely discussed. The paper spends a lot more time talking about police not believing victims ("unfounding").
She should have agency to have her complaint heard, not an obligation to deal with police. Aside, she has claimed that he took advantage of her and that he harassed her - not that he assaulted her.
In the United States, sexual assault includes coercion:
Sexual assault covers a wide range of unwanted behaviors—up to but not including penetration—that are attempted or completed against a victim's will or when a victim cannot consent because of age, disability, or the influence of alcohol or drugs. Sexual assault may involve actual or threatened physical force, use of weapons, coercion, intimidation, or pressure and may include: ...
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/overview-rape-and-sexual...
Sexual coercion is unwanted sexual activity that happens when you are pressured, tricked, threatened, or forced in a nonphysical way. Coercion can make you think you owe sex to someone. It might be from someone who has power over you, like a teacher, landlord, or a boss. No person is ever required to have sex with someone else.
https://www.womenshealth.gov/relationships-and-safety/other-...
Your second link puts forth some very dubious examples of coercion. In reality, laws vary by state. While some of the examples it lists (such as threatening physical violence) unambiguously invalidate consent, others almost certainly do not (such as ending a relationship if there is no sex). This is a more in-depth review of non-physical coercion: https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/25544/4-...
It was also, disgustingly, probably not legally rape in Germany at that time. (Or only recently so.)
It's not that I don't believe her. It's just such a slippery slope.
This is vigilantism -- the same as if you went out and shot a guy who stole your wallet.
We don't trust victims of crimes to dole out punishments. Justice is tempered by due process, checks and balances, proportional response, all that.
So I believe her, but I don't think the world is a better place when people use this approach to conflict resolution. I'd much rather see her go to court and get a conviction.
This is just revenge.
> This is vigilantism -- the same as if you went out and shot a guy who stole your wallet.
Nobody has shot John Pretty.
I don't understand how "justice" says that Yifan has to lie or pretend that she hasn't gone through a traumatic experience. Writing a blog post is not equivalent to shooting someone. Someone truthfully and honestly describing their own life experience is not violence.
And if nothing else, surely she has the right to warn other women and let them make their own decisions about how to calibrate their risk around John.
> I don't think the world is a better place when people use this approach to conflict resolution.
I'm not always thrilled with public shaming, but to argue that people shouldn't be able to speak about their experiences, or that people shouldn't be able to choose who they associate with, or that people shouldn't be able to warn each other about abusers -- that is also a very slippery slope. Especially in a world where the vast majority of rape cases are never reported or prosecuted.
It's just such an extreme position to say that people even just talking about abusers is "revenge". It's like arguing that because courts sometimes convict innocent people that we should abolish all laws. There is a middle ground between attacking someone for a poorly phrased 10-year-old tweet, and arguing that people shouldn't be talking about personal experiences they've had with sexual harassment/rape.
If you think ostracizing someone and removing him from positions of influence is equivalent to shooting him, I don’t know what to say to you.
> Justice is tempered by due process, checks and balances, proportional response, all that.
That's the ideal, but in the real world justice is pretty lacking.
What other action would you suggest she take, right now? What authorities should she go to? Does she need to get on a plane back to Germany and file a police report three years after the fact? Another commenter noted that this specific thing might not even have been illegal in Germany when it happened (but is now).
Even if there is no legal remedy, is this the sort of thing that we want to continue to happen in our technical communities? If not (and I seriously hope not), then what do we do to neutralize these sorts of people?
So what's the alternative? She just shuts up, gets no closure, and we allow a serial manipulator and probably rapist to keep trolling the Scala community for new, vulnerable victims?
It seems that this may be the only consequence of raping someone in many cases.