
Microsoft Intern’s Rape Claim Highlights Struggle to Combat Sex Discrimination - Doches
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-14/microsoft-intern-s-rape-claim-highlights-struggle-to-combat-sex-discrimination
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aero142
Most of these articles I have read in the past few years always leave me with
the same question. Why is there not more focus on the police investigation.
Why did they police decide not to press charges? If our police forces are
failing to press charges against rapists, shouldn't that be a big priority to
change? Aren't the police more accountable to the electorate than Microsoft's
internal HR policy. I feel like there are a lot of questions that aren't
brought up. Do people believe that the standard of evidence for Police is too
high but isn't politically possible to change? If the police standard of
evidence is too high, what should the standard of evidence be? What should the
standard of evidence be for Microsoft? If someone files a police complain but
that complaint is dismissed for lack of evidence, how exactly should Microsoft
evaluate that claim?

I just feel like many of these articles stop short of discussing obvious
questions, and it leaves me suspicious.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_Why is there not more focus on the police investigation. Why did they police
decide not to press charges? If our police forces are failing to press charges
against rapists, shouldn 't that be a big priority to change?_

I'm a woman. I have been raped. I also have two adult sons. So, here are some
issues as I see it:

First, if you lower the burden of proof for rape because it is rape, then you
open the door to men having their lives ruined because some woman wants their
job, is mad he won't leave his wife for her, or whatever. Women are human too.
We aren't all paragons of virtue simply for having been born with different
bits between our legs. So if you set a low standard for convicting a man of
rape, you open up a different huge can of worms.

Second, human sexual morality is all kinds of messy and complicated. Date rape
routinely involves alcohol, yet if you tell women "Play defensively and don't
drink and don't get so drunk that you can't drive home and need to crash at
some guy's place where he can rape your inebriated, unconscious body," now you
are _blaming the victim_. If we told someone "It's a rough neighborhood, so
lock your doors." that would be good advice, not victim blaming. But make it
about sex and try to give women practical advice, and suddenly you are
impinging on their right to do any damn thing they so please.

I mean, I have seen an article where someone was literally quoted as saying "A
woman should be able to walk naked down the street and be safe from rape." Is
it okay for men to wander the streets naked? Last I checked, the answer was
_no_. Why are we making up this ridiculous scenario?

Additionally, because in a court case you can't realistically lower the legal
evidentiary bar, going through a court trial after a sexual assault is quite
the ordeal. It isn't a sympathetic, hand-holding _oh, honey, you poor thing_
experience. You will essentially be treated like you are lying, because the
reality is that you could be.

Another thing that is incredibly hard to talk about at all is that we have
things like BDSM and cultural standards that men are supposed to initiate,
etc. So there is no bright line between a man pursuing a woman and a man
harassing a woman or pressuring her into sex, which could then come back to
bite him when she decides it constituted rape. I strongly suspect some men
genuinely are surprised at being called a rapist after the fact. To their
mind, it was consensual.

There are no simple, easy, straight forward cures for that last issue. I don't
know how we are going to fix it. Perhaps the outpouring of #MeToos and
multiple cases currently ongoing against powerful men will change the
standard, but not without a lot of blood in the water.

I read some of the articles where multiple women have accused a rich, powerful
of man of sexual assault and the man often denies it and swears it was
consensual. Given my experience of human sexuality, I suspect a lot of these
men firmly believe that -- because men are supposed to be the aggressors and
rich, powerful men can be oblivious to just how much pressure their wealth and
power can represent for a woman they are pursuing.

It's complicated and a desire for a nice simple solution in the name of
justice tends to just lead to other injustices, not actual solutions.

~~~
smallnamespace
> I'm a woman. I have been raped. I also have two adult sons.

Firstly, I want to thank you for publicly sharing your opinion and bringing
nuance to a complicated and difficult topic.

But secondly, how did we get to the point where we must first give out group
identity credentials in order to be taken seriously in a discussion? Shouldn't
the actual meat of what a person says hold greater weight than the group(s)
that a person identifies with?

I've been noticing this trend a lot lately -- articles in, say, The Atlantic
of the type of 'hold on, is this what feminism should be?' \-- but always
prefaced by the author first _identifying as a woman_ , perhaps to insulate
from criticism.

Please note that this is no way intended as a criticism of you. I find myself
doing the exact same thing (prefacing comments with snippets of my bio) -- it
just feels weird that 'progressivism' seems to have led to this, which doesn't
feel much like 'progress' at all.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_how did we get to the point where we must first give out group identity
credentials in order to be taken seriously in a discussion?_

I am not really aware of what you are describing.

HN is less "social" than most forums. There are no avatars and the profile is
completely free form and can be left completely blank. It is a very large
forum, so I cannot assume that everyone recognizes me. It also is
overwhelmingly male, so it is common for people to assume that anyone speaking
here is male.

I often qualify my remarks here on certain subjects for those reasons. Long
experience as a participant tells me that if I don't, someone will make a fool
of themselves by accusing me of being _a rapey bastard, as obviously only a
rapist man would ever say X_ (or something along those lines). And that is a
huge, pointless derail that I hate seeing.

~~~
alexandercrohde
I think the parent poster was lamenting that as a man, he feels that it's
unfortunate he fears he can't express the points you so eloquently did,
because when somebody suggests his motive is sexist he can't so simply refute
it.

As far as I can tell you're both on the same side that you share the
experience that if one isn't (perceived) a member of the protected group they
are at risk for being subject of virtue-shaming or ad-hominem attack for
debating progressive ideals.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I still get accused of _victim blaming._ I get other ugly attacks. My gender
does not 100% give me a free pass to say whatever I want on the subject.

I would like to think that years of study and introspective contemplation have
helped me craft an evenhanded and well thought out position on certain
subjects.

My observation is that most people, regardless of which "side" they are on,
somewhat ham-handedly speak to only the concerns of their side. This very
often comes across as dismissive of the concerns of the other side, even when
that isn't intended.

So, if someone wants to speak to difficult subjects, I think good advice is to
consider how things impact all parties, not just their own side, and work at
considering details like context and how that makes your message look. If you
barge into a discussion of rape and all you say is (or sounds like) "what
about da menz!", well, yeah, that will go badly.

~~~
smallnamespace
Agreed, was not implying that being a woman makes one immune to criticism. I
do think there's a certain level of confusion at this point about who is
considered credible or allowed to speak about other groups, and sometimes this
policing ends up begging the question itself.

Like take the charge of _victim blaming_ \-- on the one hand, we can all
probably agree that victims deserve sympathy and a platform to air their
grievances as well as our thoughtful consideration.

Yet it seems that of we as a society offer unconditional trust to anyone who
claims to have been a victim, this will eventually encourage all sorts of
mischief. Not every person who 'seems' like a victim is in fact one, and not
everyone who has been victimized can or will lay public claim to that status.

In the limit, this confusion about who is allowed to say what about whom can
actually lead to the behavior you referenced above -- if men have internalized
the idea that men are only allowed to comment or judge men, but not other
groups, then the only possible response is for men to speak about their own
group interests.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_Like take the charge of victim blaming_

Sigh. This is perhaps a can of worms I shouldn't open. But here goes:

I was sexually abused as a child. So, in my youth, I very much had the mental
model that men are predators and women are prey. It took me a long, long time
to sort that out. I think that mental model is shared by quite a lot of
people, often without realizing it.

So, if you have internalized this idea that all sex involves a victim and that
the woman is probably the victim, well, that explains a lot of the dynamics of
discussion that we see, where people implicitly assume that if anything goes
wrong in a heterosexual encounter, clearly the man is the perp and the woman
is the victim.

I think a lot of people cannot imagine women as having any kind of real power.
And therein lies a real huge problem in these discussions, because if you
suggest anything women can do differently, you are bad, evil and wrong. Or if
you suggest women aren't all paragons of virtue and many would equally take
advantage if given the opportunity, this just doesn't sit well with a lot of
people.

Someone here mentioned intersectionality, a term I only know from an
incredibly toxic environment full of SJWs who claim to want a better world,
but mostly crapped all over me rather than being helpful with my problems and
also very much are fine with the _Lord of the Flies_ pecking order that is at
the root of a lot of social problems. They don't really want to be rid of it.
They just want to be at the top doing the shitting, rather than at the bottom
getting shat upon.

So if that is your approach, well, duh, the well off white males currently in
power aren't going to go along with your plans to make them the acceptable
social toilet that everyone gets to crap all over. And when they resist
becoming the new victim of our crappy social order, they get accused of all
kinds of evil for clinging to the privilege they currently have.

The problems we currently have cannot be resolved by seeking revenge at the
societal level. This is an incredibly hard thing to discuss, for a long list
of reasons. But the angry, vengeful approach that so many women take helps
entrench the problem. It doesn't resolve it.

I don't want revenge. I want constructive change that overall reduces how much
people get victimized.

I have been speaking about subjects like rape and women's issues and female
empowerment for a long time. It's just a hard, hard subject to have a good
discussion on.

I think this one is going incredibly well -- or was. Perhaps this comment will
be a thing I very much regret. But it is a thing we eventually need to discuss
in the world, and Hacker News has turned out to be the least worst place for
me to try to make constructive points on such subjects.

(crosses fingers, hits _reply_ )

~~~
vxNsr
I just did some profile snooping and I gotta say that your story is both
unique and uplifting and I appreciate your willingness to contribute.

------
cm2187
I don't understand what is Microsoft's role here. This is a complaint between
employees about a potential crime that happened outside of Microsoft's walls,
outside of business hours, and between employees that have no position of
hierarchy over one another. This seems to me as a simple police matter. I
don't think employers should become an out-of-court justice system as long as
they are not involved directly. All they can do is to separate the employees
in a way that neither is negatively impacted until the legal proceedings are
settled which from what I can tell from the article is what they did.

The other thing about tech companies is that it would be interesting to
compare their statistics of sexual harassment to other industries. Putting at
the front page some stories about sexual harassment don't mean anything.
Microsoft has 125,000 employees, google 75,000, apple 125,000, etc. At this
scale, and unless they have a special hiring technique that enables to spot
criminal behavior that I am not aware of, they are bound to hire some future
criminals: rapists, thieves, stalkers, etc. It's just statistically impossible
for it not to happen. Is there any evidence that there is more sexual
harassment in the tech industry than other industries?

~~~
slang800
Presumably the crime couldn't be proved to the standard that the justice
system requires, so getting Microsoft to implement a punishment based on her
allegations and public opinion is the next best thing.

~~~
leereeves
Getting someone punished for unproven allegations based on pressure from
people whose only knowledge of the case comes from a news article isn't a good
thing.

------
spraak
> In the meantime, she was required to keep working alongside the man. When
> she discussed getting a restraining order with Microsoft, HR told her if she
> wanted one, she’d need to change teams, her lawyer wrote. She liked the work
> and her boss, so she stayed put for the rest of the summer.

It really sounds crazy, but I can understand it. I was sexually assaulted by
my boss (and I am a male and so was my boss) and couldn't understand my wife's
anger when I said I'd still be working for him. Luckily I came to understand
how poor a decision that would have been and I quit.

~~~
EpicBlackCrayon
That part of the article fucking boggles my mind.

~~~
Steeeve
That is bizarre. An HR rep's job is to minimize the company's liabilities, not
expand them.

I understand not shifting employee job functions based on an unproven
accusation. If there's a restraining order in place, it's not her problem.
It's his. He's restrained. He has to go to his HR rep and say "I can't legally
work next to this person, what happens?"

That's only one side of the story, though.

~~~
shmed
The article clearly says that HR offered to switch her to another team, but
she didn't want to because she liked her current team and her current boss.
Other than this it would require switching the guy to another team, but then
they probably wouldn't force someone to quit their team without first doing an
investigation (or letting the police force finish their investigation), which
is what they did.

------
Gatsky
So many of these stories start with 'Coworkers went out for a few drinks...'
It is clear that there are persons that behave in a predatory manner when a
soon-to-be victim becomes drunk, and social norms even legetimize this
behaviour in some ways.

It doesn't say if the victim here was drunk, but some level of intoxication
seems likely given the nature of the crime. This doesn't excuse anything.

I wonder how many of these crimes would be prevented if steps were taken to
limit excessive drinking. I don't know how this would actually be implemented,
or if companies or universities already do have a policy about alcohol and
social events.

------
rmason
I've counseled many younger people, HR is not there to help you - their
primary mission is to help the company at all times. The same thing goes with
college campus police.

She should have called the nearest city's police. If there was proof of a rape
from her hospital visit they probably would have charged the guy.

On a side note it absolutely flabbergasts me that Microsoft offered a job to
the alleged rapist! Surely it can't be that hard for them to find good
employees.

~~~
kelukelugames
At my last job, the HR rep considered suing the company for discrimination. So
HR isn't even there to help HR.

Microsoft lost a case a few years ago when a female manager made up allegation
to get a male employee fired. One of the employees she tried to convince to
lie testified. That case may have influenced their decision to extend an
offer.

On second thought, more likely that companies just don't care about a single
allegation.

------
g09980
(Deleted)

~~~
froindt
When you stop it there it's awkward.

>, the male intern sexually assaulted her

When you finish the thought from the author, it's less clunky. Its saying "her
lawyer wrote that during the night the male intern sexually assaulted her".

