Standing Up in the Moment

Recently I've run across a couple admonishments on Facebook that women who are being harassed or otherwise believe they might be in danger need to remember that there's a lot they can do to stand up for themselves, usually attached to a number of recommendations about what to do in that situation.

The weird thing for me is that I'm largely in agreement with that sort of project. Not everyone knows or has practiced how to respond in stressful or disturbing situations, and brainstorming or practicing responses ahead of time is a great way to help people who may be less comfortable standing up for themselves become more willing to do so. And having more people willing and able to do that is a major step forward in our efforts as a society to solve these problems.

But there is a major problem, and that is that the posts I've seen are telling people that this is something they have to do, or that they're in the wrong if they don't. To be blunt, that sort of blame directed at people for not taking those actions or for not standing up for themselves in the moment is exactly the sort of reason why anyone ever had to worry about victim blaming.

The problem is that there are still plenty of good reasons for people not to take the risk. There are some creepers who are just looking for a victim and will back off in the face of resistance... but there are some who grow more belligerent when they're confronted. There are plenty of store employees and police officers who will take the side of someone standing up for themselves... but there are still plenty who will regard them as the problem for complaining or fighting back. Even if we can know for certain that things will turn out all right in the end, that's not going to make the short term consequences any less significant... or survivable, for some people.

If someone comes to me and says they don't know what to do or want to try to be more assertive, I'm completely in support of that. But if they come to me to complain that something happened and they felt their best choice out of the bad options presented was to disengage as quickly as possible and without making a fuss, I'm not going to blame them for that. And if I don't know whether they're asking for advice or looking for sympathy, I'm going to ask if they actually need advice before I assume that they must not have known what to do.

I definitely am not going to withhold my sympathy until they've satisfied me that they did everything they could have to stand up for themselves - because even if I could tell for certain that they were too cowardly to stand up for themselves, that wouldn't make them any less deserving of sympathy.

Responding to an Accusation

I'd put the responses I've seen to the accusation that Judge Kavanaugh attempted to rape someone in high school into one of three categories:

1. It was more than 30 years ago; who cares?

2. There's no way to be certain whether this is even true or not; therefore we should ignore it.

3. What a convenient time for these allegations! This is obviously fake.

I don't find any of them convincing. It's interesting, in fact, how neatly this captures many of the problems the #MeToo movement has been trying to highlight.

The first is probably the one I have the most sympathy with, since I can readily see how someone would change over the decades into someone who would never do such things again, if not actually help and support victims. The problem, though, is that I don't give all that much credit to someone that changes that way because they're lucky. If the person in question can talk about how they've changed and what caused it, then I'd be much more inclined to extend forgiveness... but even then I don't believe it's required for anyone else to do the same.

Basically, redemption is not something one can claim simply because it's been long enough since they last did something wrong.

The second is an extremely common error as far as dealing with these allegations are concerned: the idea that something that is not legally actionable cannot be dealt with at all. There are limits to what can be done outside of our legal system, and that's as it should be; we've set things up so that (in theory, at least) the most severe punishments we hand out only get used when a high standard is met. However, that doesn't mean I'm going to look at a case where we're only barely more than 50% certain the accusation is true in the same way as a case where we're 90% certain it's true.

Basically, we should be willing to take some actions to support and defend victims and interfere with accused people, depending on how credible the accusations are.

Then the third is just flat-out ridiculous. The fact that many people who absolutely insist on not destroying other people's reputations without very good evidence are willing to throw around accusations of malicious false reports without any better evidence than a possible motive is amusing and kind of depressing. Believing that we can't prove the accusations true is one thing, but that doesn't necessarily imply that making them in the first place was a crime.