Tag: articles on articles

The Humane Among the Persecutors

I don’t normally write content warnings, though perhaps I should.1 Consider this the warning: Sexual controversy ahead. Here be dragons – these are politically uncharted waters, this is going way outside the Overton Window. If you are not up to processing this, turn back for now!

Imagine, if you will, a Nazi of some humanity. (Bear with me.)

She believes that there is a problem with the Jews in Europe. But she (quietly) disagrees with the methods that Hitler is employing. Instead of extermination, she favours deporting the Jews to a new homeland. Or perhaps she may even think there is a way to keep the Jews in Europe without endangering Germans – after seizing their accounts and assets, they could be allowed to live under strict controls and surveillance, especially certain individual Jews that don’t act on the Jewish imperative to corrupt Germany – for example, the ones who didn’t condone the boycott of German goods.

She disagrees with the laws against providing basic aid to Jews because it tries to force everyone to expose all Jews to extermination. She also notes that this and other elements of the crackdown make Jews more desperate and may cause retaliation or rebellion.

While this Nazi is much kinder than a Final Solution Nazi, you might think that her moral understanding leaves a little bit to be desired. She’s still labouring under the impression that there’s something wrong with being Jewish2, and so everything she proposes while holding this belief is suspect. But hopefully she’ll change.


Home movie from Vienna, occupied Austria, likely just after Kristallnacht in 1938. (Wikipedia)

Now imagine a psychologist of the 1960s of some humanity.

He believes that there is a problem with homosexuals. But he (quietly) disagrees with the methods that the state is employing. Instead of imprisonment, perhaps homosexuals can be treated. Ammonia-aversion therapy seems promising. And thanks to advances in diagnostic imaging, we might someday be able to identify homosexuals before they act on their urges. We could also employ chastity devices and even chemical castration. Homosexuality is a terrible affliction, yes, but we should show some humanity and treat the homosexuals, not imprison them, especially not the ones that refrain from committing the crime of sodomy.

This psychologist is arguably kinder than many of the politicians of the time, but again his moral understanding leaves a little bit to be desired. He’s still labouring under the impression that there’s something wrong with being homosexual, and so everything he proposes while holding this belief is suspect. But hopefully he’ll change.

US sodomy laws

US sodomy laws by the year they were repealed or struck down, from before 1970 (lightest yellow) to 2003 (darkest brown) (Wikipedia)

This is about where I’m at with the following Cracked article. Not that they think there’s a problem with being Jewish or homosexual. But there’s this third thing.

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  1. Scott Anderson, Slate Star Codex – “The Wonderful Thing About Triggers”

    A very long time ago, I did ‘rate’ articles, but I think I was kind of cargo-culting the norms of TV and film. I also rated my site with RSACi, which doesn’t seem to even exist anymore. ↩

  2. Let’s leave aside infant circumcision for now. ↩

Justice for all

We need to be on guard against topical exceptions in matters of justice. If the justice system is to be fair, it would seem that a determinedly even-handed treatment of evidence and the law is required even in the most explosive cases. Debating whether and to what extent to deprive someone of their fundamental freedoms should be kept at arm’s length from our momentary emotions and politics.

I’m writing this in response1 to Lezlie Lowe’s article in the Chronicle Herald, “Language murky around sex assaults”:

“Someone is sexually assaulted. Someone is charged. The violence becomes news and a journalist must piece through her research to write a story. But that reporter, says Helen Lanthier, must attend to a whole lot more than just the so-called facts.

“‘I know there needs to be objectivity,’ says Lanthier, of Lunenburg’s Second Story Women’s Centre, ‘but what I would like to see is a discussion about the role of a reporter in the broader scheme.’2

“Lanthier is co-co-ordinator of Be The Peace. The advocacy project ends in March and Lanthier, and hundreds of community collaborators on Nova Scotia’s South Shore, are seeing the fruits of this concerted three-year effort to address violence against women.

“One change? Before Be The Peace, South Shore survivors had to travel to Halifax to connect with a sexual assault nurse examiner. Now there are 11 trained on the South Shore who collect specialized evidence after an assault.

“Notice, there, I didn’t say, after a woman alleges she’s been assaulted?

“‘Alleged’ and ‘alleges’ are overused words in reporting on sexual violence, Lanthier says. ‘It affects the survivor’s credibility. It might imply that she’s lying.’

“In fact, there are no more false claims of sexual assault than any other crime. (Surprised? Then you’re probably buying into a common stereotype that women are manipulative and accuse wildly.)3

“Pay attention to news writing, Lanthier says, and you’ll notice the word ‘alleged’ blanketing sexual assault stories, especially in verb form — ‘Mary alleges’ — that casts doubt not only on the crime, but the survivor herself.

“Due process and the presumption of innocence is important, Lanthier says, but too often ‘what you’re left with is, “Oh my God, none of this is true.”‘”

“Alleged” and “accused” must be used in reporting all undecided criminal cases, including sexual violence. If a reporter accepts innocent until proven guilty, a fundamental tenet of our legal system, their use of these words should be ubiquitous and should not affect a reportee’s credibility. How could they, if they’re used evenly across all types of cases?

Of course, perhaps they are not used evenly in all cases and this merits closer examination. (Numbers would be helpful – for a start, you could run or cite concordances on a body of media reports covering different types of crimes. I’ll leave that as a graduate thesis exercise for the reporter so she can support her own claim.) If we applied extra linguistic precautions to sexual assault cases that we don’t use anywhere else, that would indeed be unfair to true survivors. We must treat all types of cases fairly and not isolate our demands for fairness to this one domain.

I would also like to see numbers about the probability of false accusations for sexual assault relative to other domains, though reliable statistical work would be extremely challenging for both inborn and extrinsic reasons. However, even if this claim has strong support, it’s a red herring because each case must be judged on its individual merits. Imagine a change to the justice system where, since 75% of accused of crime Z were found guilty anyway, we simply convict everyone accused of crime Z since there’s a 75% chance we’ll be right.

Innocent until proven guilty necessarily means alleged until proven survivor. We need not go to extremes to speak of how they might be lying. We can offer assistance and support to the alleged without having to make a verdict. This is hard work: It’s much easier to deal in absolutes and strict categories. But when we think that way, a lot of important principles get thrown under the bus.

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  1. I also sent a brief-by-my-standards five-paragraph e-mail to the paper ↩

  2. Scott Alexander taught me we should be loathe to throw out what someone has to say just because they say something like, “I’m not an X / I know Y, but…” ↩

  3. My note: As wrong as it is to think this of all women, enough women do accuse falsely and very deliberately that it is a serious problem, not in the least because people who are innocent have their lives as trashed as the guilty.

    Paul Lutus, arachnoid.com – “A New Sex Crime” ↩

Mandatory Victimhood: In light of female teacher transgressors, let’s examine our assumptions

Given the extreme consequences we mete out to sexual transgressors1, we must more than ever before reflect on how we know that our outlawed sexualities are innately harmful – that is, damaging by their nature alone, excepting their violent, life-destroying extrinsic consequences. A few main points I would like people to consider:

  • The exacerbating effects of the secrecy and isolation necessary in age-disparate relationships merits analysis.
  • Psychology has before failed to test assumptions based on social norms. (e.g., homosexuality)
  • Mandating the status of victim on people who don’t want it is inhumane.
  • Insisting that someone is hurt in an invisible way and might not even know it should be regarded skeptically. It is a claim that is difficult to falsify2 and is therefore pseudoscientific.
  • Sacrosanctity isn’t necessarily correctness.3

Today I’m going to comb through a report4 on female teacher sexual transgressors.

xkcd: Voting Machines

Randall Munroe, xkcd: Voting Machines

The November 3rd, 2014 edition of Maclean’s promises on its cover “SEX OFFENDERS NO ONE SUSPECTS: FEMALE TEACHERS.”5 Turn to page 44 and you will find a report by Anne Kingston that assumes the prejudices of our sex-supressing culture and does nothing to question the abominably evil reality that you must be a victim merely because the true believers in the legal system and their pseudoscientific enablers in the bowels of psychology6 say you must be. Okay, maybe I’m a bit cynical, but hear me out. (Or read the vastly shorter letter I wrote to Maclean’s.)

Now, before I get into this:

  • I acknowledge that there are cases of despicable manipulation and monopolization that merit a response that may need to include prosecution.
  • I also acknowledge that anyone who feels that they have been abused must have gone through severe stress and torment, although it might be at the hands of society and the legal system and not wholly or even necessarily reflecting the nature of the stigmatized activity.
  • I’m not suggesting that the silence around coercive, stultifying abuse isn’t worse than the silence around consensual7 activity.8
  • And, as I’ll say again in a second, for a teacher to bring the world crashing down on herself and a student and everyone else in the vicinity, is plain nuts.

Large categorical taboos mean that everything gets painted with the same broad brush, and Maclean’s is, consciously or unconsciously, content to maintain our categorical thinking merely by using the term “sex offender”, as it covers everything from consensual sex that happens to be against the law to kids being whipped within an inch of their lives for the sake of producing pornography for violentophiles9.

Kingston’s thesis is simply that “the treatment of female teachers who sexually exploit male students reflects legal and cultural double standards.” It’s borne out – females get probation and time served while males go to the crowbar saloon. But I worry that the way we’ll fix the double standard is by making non-normative females and their lovers as miserable as the non-normative males and their lovers.

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  1. Not to mention sex workers! Thank the FSM for sex workers and their advocates on Twitter. Here’s @SugarKovalczyk: “Some of y’all should reexamine your beliefs in a historic & global sense while recognizing how late 20th century hysteria has shaped you so far.” I also recommend this essay by Mistress Matisse on the “End Demand” Campaign. Quote: “End Demand activists are quick to say ‘prostitution is not a victimless crime.’ Not while they’re around, it won’t be.” ↩

  2. Meaning that it’s hard to compare the idea to reality – this comparing is the perspiratory part of science. Paul Lutus’ essay “Building Science” begins by explaining falsifiability. ↩

  3. As David Dunning writes in Pacific Standard: “Some of our most stubborn misbeliefs arise not from primitive childlike intuitions or careless category errors, but from the very values and philosophies that define who we are as individuals. Each of us possesses certain foundational beliefs—narratives about the self, ideas about the social order—that essentially cannot be violated: To contradict them would call into question our very self-worth. As such, these views demand fealty from other opinions. And any information that we glean from the world is amended, distorted, diminished, or forgotten in order to make sure that these sacrosanct beliefs remain whole and unharmed.” – from “We Are All Confident Idiots”

    For an extended take on this in the context of American politics:
    Jonathan Haidt – “Why So Many Americans Don’t Want Social Justice and Don’t Trust Scientists” (2013 Boyarsky Lecture in Law, Medicine & Ethics, Duke University)  ↩

  4. Anne Kingston, Maclean’s – “Female teachers: The sex offenders no one suspects” ↩

  5. They all-cap every headline on their cover. ↩

  6. Paul Lutus, Arachnoid.com – “Is Psychology a Science?” ↩

  7. “Consent” is a legally-blinkered term, not a humanistic one. It suggests that you’re agreeing to something that is against your interest by default. It belongs in draconian places like employment law – you consent to have no privacy, you consent to being able to be fired at will.

    But this is the term we have, so I assert that consent that is not legally recognized can yet be consent on the principle of mutual self-determination (infinitely more important, provided you’re not getting together to plan a shooting spree), but I’d rather just avoid the word, not to mention the simplistic arguments that follow that rest directly on the socio-legal recognition of consent rather than addressing the actual nature of our sexuality. (“I won’t debate this with you because you refuse to recognize that an n-year old can’t consent.”)

    I also reject the idea that sexuality is as necessarily fraught as getting a mortgage. Oh, sure, it frequently ends up being a great big mess, but I think most of the problems with it are extrinsic – the dictates of our nature perpetually clash with the established social order, one that forces us to live in ignorance.

    As a thought experiment, imagine if the sexual standard for consent applied in other areas. Let’s say food. You could argue that children shouldn’t be fed because they don’t understand exactly what is happening and what they’re agreeing to do. Consent is impossible. Being fed without consent is abuse.

    I think even most pedophiles would be against coercion, but as long as people define a sufficiently high bar for legal consent in this single area, it’ll never be cleared, and we’ll have more food for the prison-psychiatric-industrial complex.

    As a pragmatic friend says to me, “It is ultimately silly to come up with black and white rules about who can and cannot consent that are based on thresholds whose precise positions are arbitrary. But then, black and white rules are efficient for managing large populations.” Well, there’s a certain dehumanization in insisting that a large population be wholly united on all things and wholly managed the same way. For a counter-vision, read Scott Alexander’s “Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism”.

    I’ve been an ass about word choices before, and I probably will be again. I know I despise being told what words I can and can’t use. Our words reflect our identity. Rather than circulate lists of words, we should probably just reflect more often on the words we use – how we steer with our choices and are in turn steered by the choices of others.

    Lezlie Lowe, Chronicle-Herald – “Defusing the landmines of language”
     ↩

  8. I think the silence is related, embedded in the same morass of sex-negative shame. But same silence or not, I think the silence is corrosive to the better angels of both interests. Think of this as you would a commentary about the danger of Islamophobia the day after 9/11. ↩

  9. Of course, if you like looking at young people without their clothes on, you’re every single bit as depraved as the people who beat and torture children and who may or may not record it. Because reasons. ↩