Thank you so much for writing this. I’m horrified to learn about these “red pill” stuff, and your experience overall. I also think your points on epistemic injustice are very important.
Losing female AI researchers is detrimental to the whole industry. Not only do I intend to stay and thrive, I plan to build strong female-friendly communities of AI and AI alignment researchers.
Thank you for this intention! I found this, in particular, very inspiring. Both of your proposals sound like great ideas.
Regarding possible follow-up posts, there’s something that I (a privileged white man) don’t understand well, and would be interested in getting some clarity on. What are the major differences between sexual abuse and other types of abuse?
Say, a boss that aggressively lowers the self-esteem of an employee, using status/rank to force people to do things they don’t agree with for fear of retaliation, or a repeated attack on a person’s personality due to professional disagreement. (These are some examples that I think may be prevalent in some corners of our community, but I’m sure I’m missing a lot).
It (naively) seems like the harms and the methods for dealing with such behaviors are comparable to those in sexual abuse.
Sexual abuse is using systemic power and vulnerabilities to exploit someone in a very intimate way. It’s different because it’s a different modality of abuse.
Sexual abuse (at least heteronormative sexual abuse) is also gendered violence, entwining with gender dynamics and sexism in a way that other types of abuse may not as obviously. You can see this in my case study, where my quest to break into a male-dominated field got entwined with the red pill ideology of the bad actors in it. Personally, I liked how the movie Do Revenge showed how gendered violence can play out differently from other forms of abuse, both due to its intimate nature and its relationship to broader gender/power dynamics.
Sexual abuse also less understood than other forms of violence. Our society has pretty agreed-upon norms that hitting someone is bad. But due to women only relatively recently entering the legal system, media, economy, and other positions of discourse and power, the epistemics around sexual violence are currently less agreed upon and clear (the hermeneutical injustice stuff applies here). As a result, survivors of sexual abuse face a myriad of painful second order effects, such as society-wide gaslighting, minimization, and dismissal, or being unable to have the language to communicate their experiences.
Lastly, I find sexual abuse to be distinctly disturbing in that it’s a perversion of something that’s supposed to be enjoyable, an act of trust, and a celebration of life.
Some possible similarities
There are a lot of similarities in prevention. When the female co-leader and I were dealing with the hacker house’s retaliation, we read a lot of anti-bullying curriculums for high schoolers and noticed similar patterns.
For example, the anti-bullying curriculums would convert bystanders into “upstanders,” or people who would call out and stop bullying behavior before it escalated. We noticed that many people of that community were not great at identifying sexual harassment in the first place, and would also not say anything if certain behaviors were escalating.
For instance, if at a hacker house party, a wealthy late-thirties startup founder seems to be running red pill scripts on a 17 year old Asian-American high schooler, who is new to the Bay Area and intimidated (i.e. he is touching her upper thigh and continuing to physically escalate, making digs at her boyfriend, and you can see panic flash in her eyes), the default bystander in this community would be very unlikely to intervene. But in upstander culture, the upstander would enter the situation and make sure that the 17-yr-old is comfortable, and that the man’s intentions were in good faith. If the man’s intentions were not in good faith, the upstander would find a way to diffuse the situation, like telling the 17-yr-old she is needed elsewhere, and then having a polite conversation with the man. So in that sense, preventing sexual harassment has a lot to learn from preventing abuse of other modalities.
There are, as you mention, other similarities between sexual abuse and general abuse. All abuse is a fundamental disrespect for another conscious being’s dignity and agency. Sometimes they get entwined—I think the movie Bombshell, which is about the sexual harassment climate at Fox News, does a great job of depicting how the general abuse you mention (“a boss that aggressively lowers the self-esteem of an employee, using status/rank to force people to do things they don’t agree with for fear of retaliation, or a repeated attack on a person’s personality due to professional disagreement”) entwines with sexual abuse.
I’d love to see better frameworks that contextualize sexual abuse with general abuse while preserving its distinctness.
There’s a lot more to say here, so I may follow-up again later!
In my view, the “wealthy late-thirties startup founder” in your hypothetical needs to be shown the door and asked not to return. The student is a minor and is under the age of consent in California. The founder’s behavior is strongly consistent with redpill ideology, and shows a demonstrated lack of appropriate boundaries surrounding minors. Either of those characteristics are, at a minimum, disqualifying for presence at a party where minors are present.
Ah, thank you for saying that. I’ve been so numb to some Silicon Valley tech/rat bro subcultures for so long that my simulation of actually asking him to never return is to be met with dismissal/anger and comments I was being too conservative, so I toned repercussions down to “polite conversation.” Female community leaders can have a tough time in those environments. But yes, I agree with you.
Older and more experienced figures in Silicon Valley need to be protecting and guiding the young populations who come here with big dreams, not creeping on them. Unfortunately, Sergey Brin showing up at hacker house parties with undergrad women sets the tone, lol.
It’s definitely much easier—especially as someone who isn’t in California, or involved in the tech/rat subculture—for me to recognize and verbalize what should be done in a hypothetical situation than it is for someone to actually do something when the situation actually presents itself. I appreciate your post and what you’re doing to protect and guide people in this space.
Your reaction makes me think minors should not be allowed at these kind of hypothetical parties, at least until there are much stronger norms (and probably explicit safeguarding processes). It’s not that the hypothetical becomes somehow OK if you make the young person 18 instead of 17 . . . but the democratic process has decided that there is a big difference between minors and not-minors, and so my reaction is going to be particularly strong when safeguarding of minors is an issue.
“Lastly, I find sexual abuse to be distinctly disturbing in that it’s a perversion of something that’s supposed to be enjoyable, an act of trust, and a celebration of life.”
THIS. Like looking forward to eating your favorite dessert, and the moment you take a bite, it tastes like vomit.
I liked Lucretia’s initial response quite a bit. For a small bit of context about my personal identity and background, I’m a hetero cis man who has witnessed severe problems with sexual abuse in the rat/EA and also in other subcultures over the last 10 years, and has had many conversations with women on these issues.
The following are just my thoughts. Their length, the number of conjunctions, and the fact that I’m a hetero cis man makes me a little bit anxious about posting them, even though I think they are a carefully thought-out and constructive contribution. If the balance of opinion appears to be not just disagreement but a perception that this is counterproductive toward the project of seeking sexual justice in the rationalist/EA community, then I will delete it. So please be explicit (I will weight comments/PMs including reasons for your disagreement more heavily than karma in this decision).
Before I go on, I need to make one point extremely clear:
I will be talking about the idea of sexually “risky behavior” here. What this means specifically is flirtatious/sexual acts that have the potential to be perceived as consensual/desirable by both participants, but which lack explicit consent guardrails such as verbal declarations of consent, involve power imbalances, involve intoxication, or take place quickly enough that there are real risks of perceiving desire/consent when it’s not actually there.
When I talk about sexually “risky behavior,” I am not talking about a situation in which sexual abuse actually occurred. That’s not a risk—that is a disastrous, failed, violent outcome.
These are charged topics and I am not confident I’m doing an adequate job despite my best efforts, so I am happy to constructively respond to criticism of my language choices as well as the conceptual framework.
I’d start by jumping off this portion of Lucretia’s comment:
Our society has pretty agreed-upon norms that hitting someone is bad. But due to women only relatively recently entering the legal system, media, economy, and other positions of discourse and power, the epistemics around sexual violence are currently less agreed upon and clear (the hermeneutical injustice stuff applies here)...
Lastly, I find sexual abuse to be distinctly disturbing in that it’s a perversion of something that’s supposed to be enjoyable, an act of trust, and a celebration of life.
One of the challenge with many forms of sexual abuse (and harassment, which I’m here going to lump in with abuse), is that what makes an individual act of sexual abuse harmful is often much more contextual than what makes an individual act of non-sexual abuse harmful.
Consider some typical examples of non-sexual abuse:
Physical violence
Demeaning and disrespectful language
Neglect of a dependent
Stealing, financial coercion, or nonconsensual control of finances
Spreading negative false rumors to damage somebody’s reputation
All of these forms of non-sexual abuse typically involve “atomic” actions that are almost always intrinsically negative (i.e. they are not usually “enjoyable, an act of trust, and a celebration of life”). They are straightforwaredly brutal or cruel acts. The rare occasions on which some people might consider them acceptable typically require elaborate justifications (spanking children, fighting back against an abusive spouse, conservatorships, teasing, or inaccuracies in satirical biopics like Vice).
In escalating social interactions toward increased intimacy, participants frequently want some level of ambiguity or plausible deniability in order to avoid the embarassment and awkwardness of rejection. Communicating while preserving plausible deniability is a delicate art and also a generator of misunderstandings, as well as grotesque redpill-style distortions about how women think and feel about sex. It is this force that makes people want to flirt in conventional ways, rather than having the expectation that one can straightforwaredly ask about sexual interest and receive an honest, direct answer. Sexual abuse occurs in a context where plausible deniability is felt to be a crucial part of sexual negotiation, and where a common outcome of sexual negotiation are normal hurt feelings, embarassment, letdown, frustration and discomfort. This serves as camoflage for sexual abuse.
In contrast to non-sexual abuse, sexual abuse often (but not always) involves “atomic” actions where:
A substantial amount of context is required in order to understand why those individual acts were unequivocally harmful or inappropriate, or why the harms aren’t just normal negative feelings from a failed normal and healthy sexual negotiation, but are instead the result of sexual aggression or violence.
We may have to defer to the survivor(s) in order to learn that context, because adequate hard evidence does not exist.
In order to address these problems while minimizing new ones, we often rely on a few techniques:
Looking for a pattern of behavior by the alleged perpetrator.
Relying on sufficiently accurate stereotypes and patterns of behavior on a community level. For example, the proliferation of stories of women being sexually abused in EA/rationalist/AI-safety-adjacent Silicon Valley communities by high-status men lowers my threshold for believing an accusation against a high-status SV man in these communities, even if he has a previously unblemished reputation.
Installing community norms around what we regard as a low-risk vs. high-risk sexual interaction from a consent standpoint. For example, touching a woman a man has just met on the upper thigh within a minute of meeting her is a very high-risk form of sexual interaction.
Note that the challenge here is that some individuals will mutually want to engage in sexual activities regarded as high-risk by their communities, without the encumbrance of careful, explicit declarations of consent at each step along the way. Their ability to do so on a practical level will be impaired by the community’s perceptions of these activities as high-risk. This is a tradeoff the community as a whole makes, typically judging that the loss by adopting more conservative norms around sex is outweighted by the huge gains in terms of sexual safety. Furthermore, perceptions and the reality of large amounts of sexual abuse also makes sex more difficult, further tilting the norm toward greater conservatism.
Installing a norm that failure to avoid being accused of sexual abuse is sufficient grounds for punitive action by the community, though not necessarily by law enforcement, often with a lower threshold the more high-risk the sexual interaction was.
These techniques are controversial, both in theory and in practice, because they are vulnerable to adversarial exploitation—both by people bent on destroying reputations for personal gain and especially by perpetrators of sexual abuse bent on undermining investigations into their own abusive activities. There is a principled and an unprincipled critique, and it is easy to hide the unprincipled critique as a principled one.
The foregoing is not meant as an argument in favor of one approach or another to dealing with sexual abuse. Instead, it is intended as an answer to the question in the comment I’m responding to: what makes sexual abuse different from other forms of abuse? I believe an important defining difference is the problems I’ve articulated here. The result is that it feels qualitatatively very different to deal with sexual abuse than other forms of abuse.
I’m going to take a stab at a framework. This is the first time I’ve written this down, so consider this possibly prone to errors and in draft status.
Instead of lumping all types of sexual harassment/abuse together, we could view sexual abuse/harassment as structurally similar to first, second, and third degree homicide, with varying degrees of intent.
Type 1 sexual abuse/harassment may involve calculation and intent. Epstein, Weinstein, and Ratrick’s actions above in studying red pill scripts would fall under Type I. You can see that this behavior was premeditated.
Type 2 sexual abuse/harassment may be analogous to “crimes of passion,” such as a hypothetical guy becoming overtaken with desire and not checking in on the woman. But it is not a premeditated offense.
To be clear, both types are bad. I don’t think parts of Silicon Valley take either type seriously enough. Type 1 and Type 2 is also a spectrum, and repeat offenders may have a mix of both. However, perhaps the offenses should be treated differently.
I think people get squeamish when you try to lump adolescent boy who’s learning boundaries and who is clumsy with consent, but open to correction (Type 2), with someone like Epstein, who is a calculated offender (Type 1). This may also be one reason why the #MeToo movement got cancelled; there may have been a lumping of Type 2 with Type 1 offenders in a way that made some people think parts of the movement were “unreasonable.”
I think restorative justice fails when it is assumed that the offender is a Type 2 offender who is open to correction. But oftentimes, the offender is actually a Type 1 offender who is manipulating his community into thinking he is a Type 2 offender. Or, even if the crimes are not premeditated, they are serial, and the offender is not open to correction but pretends to be, which would make him Type 1.
So perhaps severity of consequences of sexual harassment/abuse should be modulated by: a) “How premeditated was the act?” and b) “Is this a repeated offense?,” which together could classify the offense into a Type 1 or Type 2 offense.
adolescent boy who’s learning boundaries and who is clumsy with consent, but open to correction (Type 2), with someone like Epstein, who is a calculated offender (Type 1)
Two other dimensions your example also illustrates:
Relative power and status: it’s not just that Epstein was intentional in his abuse, but also that he was older, richer, and much better connected.
Relative experience: Epstein had run his process on hundreds of women and girls, with the opportunity to learn from those experiences and adapt his methods.
I think these additional considerations are also doing a lot of work in why people see these two situations differently?
I think there may be a number of related constrcts in play here, such as the culpability of the offender, amenability of the offender to restorative justice techniques, and the appropriate consequences for the offense. Many factors (such as advance planning) will load on all three constructs, although perhaps with somewhat different weights. However, I can think of factors that might load much differently on the different constructs. So one suggestion for more detailed framework building would be to consider whether the factors affect specific constructs differently.
One awkward issue is that the menu of potential consequences will vary depending on the status of the offender. For instance, a civil lawsuit probably isn’t realistically available against a first-year grad student: it’s expensive, and the survivor won’t be able to collect money that the grad student doesn’t have. On the other hand, one could envision methods of reducing future risk without booting the offender from the community that are rather expensive . . . which would require the offender to have resources to pay (or would require the offender to be seen as high-impact enough for a donor to step up to pay to keep the person in the community).[1]
For instance, I submit that in most—probably all—cases in which the offender’s use of psychoactive substances materially contributed to the offense conduct, the offender needs to go substance-free for several years at least. One could monitor compliance with this commitment via hair testing, but it ain’t cheap.
The context-dependence of some sexual abuse is also why it can take some survivors awhile to process and articulate their experiences. The process can feel like picking jagged glass out of an organ.
I don’t have great answers yet, but appreciate the frameworks you’re developing.
Thank you so much for writing this. I’m horrified to learn about these “red pill” stuff, and your experience overall. I also think your points on epistemic injustice are very important.
Thank you for this intention! I found this, in particular, very inspiring. Both of your proposals sound like great ideas.
Regarding possible follow-up posts, there’s something that I (a privileged white man) don’t understand well, and would be interested in getting some clarity on. What are the major differences between sexual abuse and other types of abuse?
Say, a boss that aggressively lowers the self-esteem of an employee, using status/rank to force people to do things they don’t agree with for fear of retaliation, or a repeated attack on a person’s personality due to professional disagreement. (These are some examples that I think may be prevalent in some corners of our community, but I’m sure I’m missing a lot).
It (naively) seems like the harms and the methods for dealing with such behaviors are comparable to those in sexual abuse.
Thank you for the question!
There are both important differences and similarities between sexual abuse and other types of abuse. I’d be curious about other women’s opinions.
All abuse is shaping an attack, and some people are more vulnerable to different types of attacks than others. The power and control wheel may be helpful here in laying out some modalities: https://www.thehotline.org/identify-abuse/power-and-control/
Some possible differences
Sexual abuse is using systemic power and vulnerabilities to exploit someone in a very intimate way. It’s different because it’s a different modality of abuse.
Sexual abuse (at least heteronormative sexual abuse) is also gendered violence, entwining with gender dynamics and sexism in a way that other types of abuse may not as obviously. You can see this in my case study, where my quest to break into a male-dominated field got entwined with the red pill ideology of the bad actors in it. Personally, I liked how the movie Do Revenge showed how gendered violence can play out differently from other forms of abuse, both due to its intimate nature and its relationship to broader gender/power dynamics.
Sexual abuse also less understood than other forms of violence. Our society has pretty agreed-upon norms that hitting someone is bad. But due to women only relatively recently entering the legal system, media, economy, and other positions of discourse and power, the epistemics around sexual violence are currently less agreed upon and clear (the hermeneutical injustice stuff applies here). As a result, survivors of sexual abuse face a myriad of painful second order effects, such as society-wide gaslighting, minimization, and dismissal, or being unable to have the language to communicate their experiences.
Lastly, I find sexual abuse to be distinctly disturbing in that it’s a perversion of something that’s supposed to be enjoyable, an act of trust, and a celebration of life.
Some possible similarities
There are a lot of similarities in prevention. When the female co-leader and I were dealing with the hacker house’s retaliation, we read a lot of anti-bullying curriculums for high schoolers and noticed similar patterns.
For example, the anti-bullying curriculums would convert bystanders into “upstanders,” or people who would call out and stop bullying behavior before it escalated. We noticed that many people of that community were not great at identifying sexual harassment in the first place, and would also not say anything if certain behaviors were escalating.
For instance, if at a hacker house party, a wealthy late-thirties startup founder seems to be running red pill scripts on a 17 year old Asian-American high schooler, who is new to the Bay Area and intimidated (i.e. he is touching her upper thigh and continuing to physically escalate, making digs at her boyfriend, and you can see panic flash in her eyes), the default bystander in this community would be very unlikely to intervene. But in upstander culture, the upstander would enter the situation and make sure that the 17-yr-old is comfortable, and that the man’s intentions were in good faith. If the man’s intentions were not in good faith, the upstander would find a way to diffuse the situation, like telling the 17-yr-old she is needed elsewhere, and then having a polite conversation with the man. So in that sense, preventing sexual harassment has a lot to learn from preventing abuse of other modalities.
There are, as you mention, other similarities between sexual abuse and general abuse. All abuse is a fundamental disrespect for another conscious being’s dignity and agency. Sometimes they get entwined—I think the movie Bombshell, which is about the sexual harassment climate at Fox News, does a great job of depicting how the general abuse you mention (“a boss that aggressively lowers the self-esteem of an employee, using status/rank to force people to do things they don’t agree with for fear of retaliation, or a repeated attack on a person’s personality due to professional disagreement”) entwines with sexual abuse.
I’d love to see better frameworks that contextualize sexual abuse with general abuse while preserving its distinctness.
There’s a lot more to say here, so I may follow-up again later!
In my view, the “wealthy late-thirties startup founder” in your hypothetical needs to be shown the door and asked not to return. The student is a minor and is under the age of consent in California. The founder’s behavior is strongly consistent with redpill ideology, and shows a demonstrated lack of appropriate boundaries surrounding minors. Either of those characteristics are, at a minimum, disqualifying for presence at a party where minors are present.
Ah, thank you for saying that. I’ve been so numb to some Silicon Valley tech/rat bro subcultures for so long that my simulation of actually asking him to never return is to be met with dismissal/anger and comments I was being too conservative, so I toned repercussions down to “polite conversation.” Female community leaders can have a tough time in those environments. But yes, I agree with you.
Older and more experienced figures in Silicon Valley need to be protecting and guiding the young populations who come here with big dreams, not creeping on them. Unfortunately, Sergey Brin showing up at hacker house parties with undergrad women sets the tone, lol.
It’s definitely much easier—especially as someone who isn’t in California, or involved in the tech/rat subculture—for me to recognize and verbalize what should be done in a hypothetical situation than it is for someone to actually do something when the situation actually presents itself. I appreciate your post and what you’re doing to protect and guide people in this space.
Your reaction makes me think minors should not be allowed at these kind of hypothetical parties, at least until there are much stronger norms (and probably explicit safeguarding processes). It’s not that the hypothetical becomes somehow OK if you make the young person 18 instead of 17 . . . but the democratic process has decided that there is a big difference between minors and not-minors, and so my reaction is going to be particularly strong when safeguarding of minors is an issue.
“Lastly, I find sexual abuse to be distinctly disturbing in that it’s a perversion of something that’s supposed to be enjoyable, an act of trust, and a celebration of life.”
THIS. Like looking forward to eating your favorite dessert, and the moment you take a bite, it tastes like vomit.
I liked Lucretia’s initial response quite a bit. For a small bit of context about my personal identity and background, I’m a hetero cis man who has witnessed severe problems with sexual abuse in the rat/EA and also in other subcultures over the last 10 years, and has had many conversations with women on these issues.
The following are just my thoughts. Their length, the number of conjunctions, and the fact that I’m a hetero cis man makes me a little bit anxious about posting them, even though I think they are a carefully thought-out and constructive contribution. If the balance of opinion appears to be not just disagreement but a perception that this is counterproductive toward the project of seeking sexual justice in the rationalist/EA community, then I will delete it. So please be explicit (I will weight comments/PMs including reasons for your disagreement more heavily than karma in this decision).
Before I go on, I need to make one point extremely clear:
I will be talking about the idea of sexually “risky behavior” here. What this means specifically is flirtatious/sexual acts that have the potential to be perceived as consensual/desirable by both participants, but which lack explicit consent guardrails such as verbal declarations of consent, involve power imbalances, involve intoxication, or take place quickly enough that there are real risks of perceiving desire/consent when it’s not actually there.
When I talk about sexually “risky behavior,” I am not talking about a situation in which sexual abuse actually occurred. That’s not a risk—that is a disastrous, failed, violent outcome.
These are charged topics and I am not confident I’m doing an adequate job despite my best efforts, so I am happy to constructively respond to criticism of my language choices as well as the conceptual framework.
I’d start by jumping off this portion of Lucretia’s comment:
One of the challenge with many forms of sexual abuse (and harassment, which I’m here going to lump in with abuse), is that what makes an individual act of sexual abuse harmful is often much more contextual than what makes an individual act of non-sexual abuse harmful.
Consider some typical examples of non-sexual abuse:
Physical violence
Demeaning and disrespectful language
Neglect of a dependent
Stealing, financial coercion, or nonconsensual control of finances
Spreading negative false rumors to damage somebody’s reputation
All of these forms of non-sexual abuse typically involve “atomic” actions that are almost always intrinsically negative (i.e. they are not usually “enjoyable, an act of trust, and a celebration of life”). They are straightforwaredly brutal or cruel acts. The rare occasions on which some people might consider them acceptable typically require elaborate justifications (spanking children, fighting back against an abusive spouse, conservatorships, teasing, or inaccuracies in satirical biopics like Vice).
In escalating social interactions toward increased intimacy, participants frequently want some level of ambiguity or plausible deniability in order to avoid the embarassment and awkwardness of rejection. Communicating while preserving plausible deniability is a delicate art and also a generator of misunderstandings, as well as grotesque redpill-style distortions about how women think and feel about sex. It is this force that makes people want to flirt in conventional ways, rather than having the expectation that one can straightforwaredly ask about sexual interest and receive an honest, direct answer. Sexual abuse occurs in a context where plausible deniability is felt to be a crucial part of sexual negotiation, and where a common outcome of sexual negotiation are normal hurt feelings, embarassment, letdown, frustration and discomfort. This serves as camoflage for sexual abuse.
In contrast to non-sexual abuse, sexual abuse often (but not always) involves “atomic” actions where:
A substantial amount of context is required in order to understand why those individual acts were unequivocally harmful or inappropriate, or why the harms aren’t just normal negative feelings from a failed normal and healthy sexual negotiation, but are instead the result of sexual aggression or violence.
We may have to defer to the survivor(s) in order to learn that context, because adequate hard evidence does not exist.
In order to address these problems while minimizing new ones, we often rely on a few techniques:
Looking for a pattern of behavior by the alleged perpetrator.
Relying on sufficiently accurate stereotypes and patterns of behavior on a community level. For example, the proliferation of stories of women being sexually abused in EA/rationalist/AI-safety-adjacent Silicon Valley communities by high-status men lowers my threshold for believing an accusation against a high-status SV man in these communities, even if he has a previously unblemished reputation.
Installing community norms around what we regard as a low-risk vs. high-risk sexual interaction from a consent standpoint. For example, touching a woman a man has just met on the upper thigh within a minute of meeting her is a very high-risk form of sexual interaction.
Note that the challenge here is that some individuals will mutually want to engage in sexual activities regarded as high-risk by their communities, without the encumbrance of careful, explicit declarations of consent at each step along the way. Their ability to do so on a practical level will be impaired by the community’s perceptions of these activities as high-risk. This is a tradeoff the community as a whole makes, typically judging that the loss by adopting more conservative norms around sex is outweighted by the huge gains in terms of sexual safety. Furthermore, perceptions and the reality of large amounts of sexual abuse also makes sex more difficult, further tilting the norm toward greater conservatism.
Installing a norm that failure to avoid being accused of sexual abuse is sufficient grounds for punitive action by the community, though not necessarily by law enforcement, often with a lower threshold the more high-risk the sexual interaction was.
These techniques are controversial, both in theory and in practice, because they are vulnerable to adversarial exploitation—both by people bent on destroying reputations for personal gain and especially by perpetrators of sexual abuse bent on undermining investigations into their own abusive activities. There is a principled and an unprincipled critique, and it is easy to hide the unprincipled critique as a principled one.
The foregoing is not meant as an argument in favor of one approach or another to dealing with sexual abuse. Instead, it is intended as an answer to the question in the comment I’m responding to: what makes sexual abuse different from other forms of abuse? I believe an important defining difference is the problems I’ve articulated here. The result is that it feels qualitatatively very different to deal with sexual abuse than other forms of abuse.
Update:
I’m going to take a stab at a framework. This is the first time I’ve written this down, so consider this possibly prone to errors and in draft status.
Instead of lumping all types of sexual harassment/abuse together, we could view sexual abuse/harassment as structurally similar to first, second, and third degree homicide, with varying degrees of intent.
Type 1 sexual abuse/harassment may involve calculation and intent. Epstein, Weinstein, and Ratrick’s actions above in studying red pill scripts would fall under Type I. You can see that this behavior was premeditated.
Type 2 sexual abuse/harassment may be analogous to “crimes of passion,” such as a hypothetical guy becoming overtaken with desire and not checking in on the woman. But it is not a premeditated offense.
To be clear, both types are bad. I don’t think parts of Silicon Valley take either type seriously enough. Type 1 and Type 2 is also a spectrum, and repeat offenders may have a mix of both. However, perhaps the offenses should be treated differently.
I think people get squeamish when you try to lump adolescent boy who’s learning boundaries and who is clumsy with consent, but open to correction (Type 2), with someone like Epstein, who is a calculated offender (Type 1). This may also be one reason why the #MeToo movement got cancelled; there may have been a lumping of Type 2 with Type 1 offenders in a way that made some people think parts of the movement were “unreasonable.”
I think restorative justice fails when it is assumed that the offender is a Type 2 offender who is open to correction. But oftentimes, the offender is actually a Type 1 offender who is manipulating his community into thinking he is a Type 2 offender. Or, even if the crimes are not premeditated, they are serial, and the offender is not open to correction but pretends to be, which would make him Type 1.
So perhaps severity of consequences of sexual harassment/abuse should be modulated by: a) “How premeditated was the act?” and b) “Is this a repeated offense?,” which together could classify the offense into a Type 1 or Type 2 offense.
Two other dimensions your example also illustrates:
Relative power and status: it’s not just that Epstein was intentional in his abuse, but also that he was older, richer, and much better connected.
Relative experience: Epstein had run his process on hundreds of women and girls, with the opportunity to learn from those experiences and adapt his methods.
I think these additional considerations are also doing a lot of work in why people see these two situations differently?
I think there may be a number of related constrcts in play here, such as the culpability of the offender, amenability of the offender to restorative justice techniques, and the appropriate consequences for the offense. Many factors (such as advance planning) will load on all three constructs, although perhaps with somewhat different weights. However, I can think of factors that might load much differently on the different constructs. So one suggestion for more detailed framework building would be to consider whether the factors affect specific constructs differently.
One awkward issue is that the menu of potential consequences will vary depending on the status of the offender. For instance, a civil lawsuit probably isn’t realistically available against a first-year grad student: it’s expensive, and the survivor won’t be able to collect money that the grad student doesn’t have. On the other hand, one could envision methods of reducing future risk without booting the offender from the community that are rather expensive . . . which would require the offender to have resources to pay (or would require the offender to be seen as high-impact enough for a donor to step up to pay to keep the person in the community).[1]
For instance, I submit that in most—probably all—cases in which the offender’s use of psychoactive substances materially contributed to the offense conduct, the offender needs to go substance-free for several years at least. One could monitor compliance with this commitment via hair testing, but it ain’t cheap.
This is a great answer, thank you.
The context-dependence of some sexual abuse is also why it can take some survivors awhile to process and articulate their experiences. The process can feel like picking jagged glass out of an organ.
I don’t have great answers yet, but appreciate the frameworks you’re developing.