this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Do you think OJ Simpson is innocent? Would you want your daughter or sister to marry him?
The are different standards for a reason. Society is perfectly capable of being aware that someone is a giant dickbag without there being enough evidence to justify using the power of the state to remove their freedom and incarcerate them. Those are two extraordinarily different things and you know it.
To suggest otherwise is to imply that the government is a perfect arbiter of dispute that we should all just blindly accept. Something tells me you wouldn't be so keen on that stance when it worked against your interests
The government performing arbitration is a power that society has vested in them. The solution to a flawed system is to fix the system, not vigilantism.
The lack of trust in the judiciary is a failure of government and a failure of society.
I don't believe OJ Simpson is innocent, even though not convicted in a court of law. Sorry, not sorry
Yeah, but the whole system is made by people who benefit from it's flaws, which means that it's near impossible to fix it without big societal changes. And while we are working on those (we are working on those, right?) we should remember that our current system is flawed.
It is absolutely a failure of society, yes.
Then why isn't there a revolt? Mass protests? Revolution?
The justice system is literally the foundation of the social contract in society. If it's flawed and corrupt, society as a whole falls apart. In fact, it should.
Why doesn't the working class, the bigger of the two classes, not simply eat the rich? There are reasons, tons of them. Mostly, the fact that the rich spend a lot of effort to prevent it, understandably.
The justice system isn't just, it never is. In fact I struggle to find any historical example of the justice system that would be good, it is at most good enough. But society still chugging along, enduring the unjust system, along with other unjust systems. Until it doesn't, which lead to the new society with the new, maybe slightly better system, which ultimately is as shit as the previous one.
That's kind of the corner stone of the human suffering, you know.
I think we need to recognise the moral panic of the situation too. People are out there looking to cancel others, others are out to use the moment for financial gain, and then there is the legitimate ones too. We dont know which they are and for the most part, the judicial system is only OK at separating them.
If you can smear someone and that's it their life is over, no matter the truth of it, then what justice is that?
What's the truth here.. not very many people know, clearly.
I think we could use a little more moral panic about the actual number of people who are actually raped every year and maybe worry a little less about your proposed miniscule hypothetical
Also, learn to read: https://people.com/tv/kevin-spacey-controversy-timeline/
To replay your own argument: something tells me you wouldn't be so keen on that if you were the one being accused of a crime you had not committed.
Hahahaha, that's hilarious. Because I'm actually at extraordinarily high risk of that happening. I'm a nurse. That happens all the time to nurses.
Thorough investigations are done. And no, I don't worry about it. You know why? Because I'm not a fucking rapist sexual predator and everyone who knows me knows that.
You gotta wonder about people who are sooooooooooooo worried about being "falsely" accused of rape that they think false accusations are worthy of jail time. What exactly are you doing out there in the world that this is a major concern in your life? That you think it's even possible for your whole life to be ruined over a baseless accusation?
Because this is simply not something I worry about at all.
Also, maybe actually take ten seconds to read about this person. This was not one accusation, it was dozens in multiple countries spanning decades: https://people.com/tv/kevin-spacey-controversy-timeline/
This is way too close to "if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide" logic.
Making terrible choices in friends, for one. Never been accused of SA, thank christ, but figured out too late that many people live in their own reality, and rewrite history once the friendship ends. Have also known people who have been in that situation, and even if no charges end up being pressed, it's still a gut-wrenching situation to be in.
The issue of how to handle SA accusations is such a nightmare that it's practically inevitable that we have both innocent people convicted, and guilty people acquitted at the same time. Most of the time we don't have the kind of oversight and institutional procedure you would enjoy if accused.
You're being deliberately obtuse and conflating completely different situations, and I think you're doing it on purpose to muddy the waters. An accusation after a breakup that cause a fight among friends is a very different situation from a report to the police. Even a report to the police often doesn't trigger an investigation. And God knows it rarely triggers an actual prosecution. These are simply not things that you need to worry about, if you're not running around the world raping people. If it causes you anxiety that severe, get therapy.
Because it's not the giant boogeyman that internet apologists like to pretend it is, with data:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21164210/
Compared to actual real sexual assault, which IS a huge problem:
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/sexualviolence/fastfact.html
Because I'm sorry, but losing a few friends is not a terrible enough consequence for me to get worked up about. Shit happens, friends get in fights and stop being friends over all sorts of dumb shit. I see zero reason why that would cause someone to go through their lives in mortal fear that they might be "falsely" accused of a sex crime.
The issue of how to handle sexual assault accusations is not complicated. I told you, we handle them all the time in the medical field. You default to protecting the accuser, you do a thorough investigation, if the investigation turns up no evidence, you move on.
A "he said, she said" situation that never gets formally investigated, but causes the breakup of some friendships is not as terrible as being actually raped. It's just not.
Don't accuse me of being obtuse and conflating different situations when you just attacked a massive strawman. I'm not talking about rumours, more like someone showing up to a party at your place, acting weird from the moment she showed up, locking herself in the toilet, self-harming, then wasting weeks of your life and doing a number on your sanity after going to the police, claiming she was raped. This isn't a hypothetical.
You repeat some variation of this about 3 times in your reply. This is called relative privation. Two things can be problems at the same time, and it doesn't need to be a competition over which one we're allowed to care about.
Speaking of conflation... most people don't have the luxury of a professional environment with oversight and procedures for handling these situations. You live in a fantasy land if you think this is how actual human relationships play out, or if this is how they're investigated.
People, for a whole host of reasons, can be and very much are in different situations than you. Some have very little defense against such allegations, and so it should not be very difficult to understand that they could have their lives destroyed in an instant by false accusations.
For instance, if they engage in non-normalized sexual relations (for their area or country, obviously), be that interracial, same sex, BDSM, etc., particularly if they are not "out". It's very easy to go from "he tied me up and we had a great time", to "that guy did me wrong somehow so now I'm going to press charges and claim he tied me up against my will and raped me". If you don't think this happens you're living in a dream land.
You're living in a dream land if you think going to the police with nothing more than "yes I went over to his house consensually and it turned bad from there" is likely to result in a legal prosecution.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but this has actually happened. The case I know of, personally, involved a bar owner. He was exonerated after a few years being dragged through the mud, but he ended up having to shut down his bar and move out of town to be left alone. This stuff happens.
Do I have a better alternative? No, it's a complex issue and we definitely don't want to victim blame, but we also don't want to destroy people's lives over just allegations. It's a delicate balance. I think one thing we could do, at very least, is to actually stand by the innocent until proven guilty ideal and not publish the identity of the accused until a verdict comes out. This is the way it is in most of Europe and a "perp walk" happening like it does in the US would free highly illegal.
I've given a lot of thought to this issue in the past and I think it all boils down to one indisputable fact:
"You just believe her" is completely at odds with "innocent until proven guilty."
"We should believe women" is a laudable phrase, and it makes us feel good to say it, but men are victims as well, especially trans men. "We should believe victims" would be better, but it is a begging-the-question fallacy, it assumes the victimhood is true. The people who made that not possible are specifically the people who have made false allegations in the past.
It is far, far more common for women who allege to be completely ignored, ridiculed, dragged through the mud should they choose to pursue charges. That's a simple fact of the world. RAPE IS A BIGGER PROBLEM THAN FALSE RAPE ACCUSATIONS.
https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system
https://www.womenshealthmag.com/sex-and-love/a18799799/sexaul-assault-reporting/
I'm not denying what you're saying, I'm saying both are a problem and advocating for not throwing out the baby with the bath water. There must be a way to adjust our system to account for both cases, no? Or would that be objectionable to you somehow?
I think I'll point you to another comment I made in this thread to explain how I feel:
https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/253499/-/comment/1173345
I don't have a kbin account so that link is broken for me. Long live the fediverse. sigh Feel your feelings, whatever.
You have zero empathy. I feel bad for your patients.
I also express little sympathy for people who worry more about the side effects of the Covid vaccine than they do about the negative effects of actual Covid. Because one of those things is an actual serious problem, and the other is a boogeyman used for political purposes.
Supported by data. You know, kind of like the difference between false accusations of rape and ACTUAL RAPE.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21164210/
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/sexualviolence/fastfact.html
So yes, I am more concerned about actual rape. The thing that happens to orders of magnitude more people.
The people who have made false allegations in the past are exactly the reason we can't just believe every victim that comes forward without proof. They are why we can't have nice things. It's not about the odds and ratios either, the state putting a completely innocent person in jail is a travesty of the system. The travesties of what we do to each other are the realities of living on a planet with other humans, we are terrible to one another regularly. We must do the absolute best we can to support victims of sexual assault...untested rape kits are a fucking abomination for instance and I'd be fine with tar and feathers for whoever let that happen. But we still must stop short of allowing even one innocent person to be put in jail.
I recommend watching "The People vs OJ Simpson" on this. It doesn't really get into guilty vs not guilty, but just showcases just how complicated things got in that case.
As soon as they started arguing over the hair samples I started understanding how complicated that case was.