Comment by JohnBooty

    In other words, people believe that "taking it seriously" 
    will automatically reduce the frequency of a bad thing. 
    But in fact it doesn't--it might well do the opposite

Well, there are plenty of countries that take murder extremely seriously and have vanishingly low murder rates (Japan comes to mind) so I'm not sure we can really say that taking it too seriously is counterproductive to the goal of reducing murder.

I agree, though, that America proves that taking it seriously certainly isn't enough to prevent it.

(It's also worth noting that per capita violent crime in America has plummeted since the 90s, with no major changes in the way we handle such things...)

    But "taking seriously" particular manifestations of 
    this general issue, like murder or sexual harassment

I definitely agree that you can take something like sexual harassment seriously in extremely harmful and counterproductive ways.

For example: focusing on overly rigid standards of speech to the point where nobody wants to say anything at all, a focus on overly harsh punishment instead of education/remediation, etc.

I will also share that I, personally, have seen the devastation that a provably false #metoo accusation can wreak.

Still, I strongly object to the idea that the efforts of organizations to address the "social justice" causes lumped into the category of "wokeness" are automatically bad. I don't think that's a useful discussion. It is a thing to discuss one policy at a time.