Comment by dbg31415
4 years ago
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.