When people speak up publicly and share their experience, everyone can make their own judgement about how to respond. In the two cases I refer to in this post the community response was pretty obvious, and there was a lot of corroboration. I can think of other cases of someone speaking up where it was less clear, and people reacted in a range of ways from “I’m going to stop interacting with this person because they hurt someone” to “I’m going to keep an eye on this person and be extra alert for other potentially harmful behavior” to “I don’t think this report is credible and I’m going to ignore it”.
While this isn’t ideal in various ways, it does seem reasonably robust to false accusations.
As being publicly accused of rape or sexual assault carries severe penalties for the accused, how do you intend to deal with false accusations?
When people speak up publicly and share their experience, everyone can make their own judgement about how to respond. In the two cases I refer to in this post the community response was pretty obvious, and there was a lot of corroboration. I can think of other cases of someone speaking up where it was less clear, and people reacted in a range of ways from “I’m going to stop interacting with this person because they hurt someone” to “I’m going to keep an eye on this person and be extra alert for other potentially harmful behavior” to “I don’t think this report is credible and I’m going to ignore it”.
While this isn’t ideal in various ways, it does seem reasonably robust to false accusations.