I do, for the record, believe that rape culture is real, and I don’t see that Aaron Bady has cause to accuse me of not. I will cop to thinking that the term “rape culture” itself has acquired some of that buzzwordy fuzziness that comes from the rise of left-wing-politics-as-popularity-contest. But I deeply believe that sexual offenses are prevalent, underreported, underprosecuted, and underpunished.
Bady made a couple of claims that I think are inaccurate and potentially dangerous, given the power of the American police state. The first is that there is little to fear from arguing idly about the presumed guilt of someone accused of a sex crime because of the line between the courts and public opinion. I argued, with real-world examples, that this misunderstands the nature of the actual criminal justice system, which is deeply and unambiguously political, and that this misunderstanding is dangerous in a society with a class- and race-based caste system. He’s free to disagree with my claim or my evidence, but he is not free to dictate what this means for my dedication to opposing sexual violence.
Bady’s post has another argument, and this is one that has become quite popular: that for any observer of a given accusation of a sexual assault, the only two options are that the accuser or the accused is lying.
The damnably difficult thing about all of this, of course, is that you can’t presume that both are innocent at the same time. One of them must be saying something that is not true. But “he said, she said” doesn’t resolve to “let’s start by assuming she’s lying,” except in a rape culture, and if you are presuming his innocence by presuming her mendacity, you are rape cultured. It works both ways, or should: if one of them has to be lying for the other to be telling the truth, then presuming the innocence of one produces a presumption of the other’s guilt.
Now maybe Bady really means for this claim to only apply to the specific case of Dylan Farrow and Woody Allen. Maybe. But certainly, that is not how his widely-celebrated post is being taken. On the contrary, this has become a de rigueur argument for the socializing left: you must claim, when there is a dispute between an accuser and the accused, that one side is lying, and so arguing even for the presumption of guilt of the accused party, or refusing to take a stand at all, has quickly been relegated to the status of de facto support for the accused. It’s zero sum: one side is lying or the other is.
This is a morally pleasant way to think about how the world works; it preserves the black-and-white moral philosophy that has become the basic presumption of the American left. It’s just untrue, demonstrably untrue, empirically untrue. Like I said: out of the first 250 Americans exonerated with DNA evidence, 89% were in jail for sex crimes, despite the fact that only 10% of the people in our prison population are there for such crimes. So the question that Bady and his many, many admirers have to ask themselves is, was the accuser of Darryl Hunt lying? The accuser of Ronald Cotton? The accuser of McKinley Cromedy? Is Bady willing to call Michele Mallin, the accuser whose testimony sent Timothy Cole to prison for the rest of his life, a liar? We have her own words on this subject: “I was positive. I really thought it was him.” So: was she a liar? Do we, as Bady insists, have to accuse Cole or Mallin?
No, I don’t think so. I don’t think any of these women, or the women who falsely accused dozens of other black men of rape, were lying. I think they were mistaken. I think they were facing a kind of trauma so awful I can’t even begin to imagine it. I think they were feeling an incredible and righteous desire to see their attacker prosecuted. And I think they were dealing with cops, cops under deadlines and scrutiny, cops who pushed particular black men in front of them, told them this was the guy, pressured them to make an ID. That’s another sad little fact about all this, that people who know the actual criminal justice system will tell you, that cops are often just as manipulative and aggressive with victims as they are with suspects. To read the words of someone like Bady, you wouldn’t think cops figured into these issues at all. I think these women were taken advantage of by a justice system that has every incentive to close cases but little pressure to close them correctly.
Of course, were one of the trials happening now, and I were to suggest that the victim was mistaken about the identity of her accuser, I would be immediately and virulently accused of being an apologist for rape, and my opinion taken as a straightforward manifestation of rape culture.
So do I think that rape is prevalent and too often goes unpunished, or do I think that rape is a crime that’s unusually susceptible to false accusation and conviction? Both, actually. There’s nothing remotely contradictory about believing both those things. It’s just hard. It’s just terribly painful to believe that both are true. I think we have an epidemic of rape and sexual offenses in our culture, and a bad habit of excusing them, and I think we have an incredibly aggressive police and prosecutorial system that enables racial and class inequalities. And I think the nature of sexual offenses means that the system will always be forced to rely on the testimony of individuals who are involved in these crimes, and that in a situation such as that, what will always matter is the relative power of those individuals in a deeply unequal society. That will not change, no matter how we might alter the law to make arrest and prosecution easier. In a caste system like the one we live under, it will never be the Woody Allens of the world who are at risk. It will always be the Timothy Coles.
I’ve been arguing this point for days, with self-righteous liberals who don’t quite accuse me of apologizing for rape, but who fill the air with their typical Manichean nonsense and create a cloud of social danger. They know what they’re doing. And it all comes back to the same fundamental failure to approach the world as it really exists, as a place where people disagree about matters of life or death with neither side lying, with both representing the position that they deeply and truly believe to be the truth. It’s a world that does not divide cleanly into the righteous and the wicked. Life would be much easier if it did. There would be no situations like Timothy Cole dying in prison without having yet been exonerated, or Michele Mallin having to live with the knowledge that her real attacker may be free. But we don’t live in that world, and so much the worse for us.
But Bady and people like him thrive in this imaginary moral space. It’s no wonder that the juvenile notion of a black-and-white moral universe is so popular with so many affluent liberals; they have spent their lives getting what they want, after all. But it hurts us, and hurts the causes they claim to fight for, when we misunderstand the nature of real moral progress. When anyone who says anything dumb about race is immediately labeled a white supremacist, we lose sight of the fact that it is the white moderate who represents the greatest danger. When someone who is insensitive about gender is called not a sexist but always a misogynist, we lose the ability to make distinctions between different gradations of offensive behavior. And when someone like me is accused of not believing in rape culture because I also recognize the reality of the carceral state, nothing of value happens for the actual, pressing issue of the terrible prevalence of sexual violence. It just makes people feel good to believe that they live in that kind of universe, and it advances Aaron Bady’s career and nascent internet celebrity. The question that remains is, who is still willing to do the work, in the moral universe we have instead of the one that we want?
Rape is a real devil of a crime to prosecute in most cases, even when you don’t have shaming and other prejudices at work against the victim. Like you, I don’t think Michele Mallin was lying – it’s just that eyewitness testimony is frequently unreliable and responsible for a high percentage of wrongful convictions.
I suppose the only “silver lining”, if you can call it that, is that stranger rape tends to be a small percentage of overall rapes. Most of the time, the victim (and sometimes others) do know who the rapist is – it’s just that it’s difficult to get them to come forward, particularly with shaming and other circumstances involved.
I think it’s hard to overstate the difficulty in decoupling our emotional response from a rational one. It’s a matter of scale: we can be pretty sure that there is a victim, that we know the perpetrator, and even that we are mired in some kind of rape culture, as fraught as that term might be. The hard part is achieving some kind of balance that lets us send an important signal – condemnation of the person who probably did wrong – without trashing our ideas of what justice should be. In this narrative we see lots of people expressing moral outrage on a small scale with precisely zero control over how it emerges at a social level. So we see that I empathize entirely with Bady’s argument that if we throw our hands up, we appear to de-legitimize Dylan’s claims (and possibly also her personhood). But I have to concede your (deBoer’s) point here, that it is inherently wrong to totally scramble the signal with noise and allow our moral outrage to color our stewardship of the justice system, or the mob justice, that frankly, might be useful sometimes. At least, it’s clear that we lack a coherent mechanism for expressing disgust without falling into the trap that Bady’s found. So, I appreciate that you’ve mounted an argument against Bady’s reductionist argument that anything other than total acquiescence enables a destructive culture. Maybe he’s right, but I think we still need some way to modulate the mob (because carceral state). But you’re right to be concerned about how we deploy our theories of the moral universe.
[I also see a problem with the way this argument has played out. You seem to think that Bady likes it when other people “see” his outrage. This might be true, but I think he’s using that to make a claim that he truly believes in: that female subjectivity is being dispensed with in the name of evidence at the social level, and that this is perverse. I can’t disagree with either side, but it’s disheartening that we’re stuck this way. That you can’t criticize Bady’s posture without him saying that this criticism delegitimizes his point, and a woman’s subjectivity. I’m suddenly afraid that I’m missing the point? Full disclosure: I’m an engineer, baffled.]
More than anything, I’m just trying to maintain my right to resist a particular vision of how our criminal justice system works, without having that resistance be taken as making a particular claim about the case in question or as an attempt to minimize these cases generally.
Agreed that this is a difficult right to retain. It seems like a big struggle over an implicit type of social capital here. If we have two types of justice, legal and social, then our perceived helplessness to create sound legal justice might trick us into thinking that the justice system isn’t political, that they aren’t coupled in any way. I agree that they are, but I still see no way to resolve Bady’s moral outrage with the justice system. We need to reckon with the fact that justice will never be one-to-one with morality, and then figure out how to condemn somebody without perverting the justice system.
Reading the excerpted comments above from Bady, after having read very similar remarks from other bloggers, leads me practically to despair. Are none of these otherwise educated people familiar with memory research? Here’s a good starter written for non-specialists:
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/remembering_dangerously
Here is the Wikipedia page of the author which has further references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus
And there is of course much more if one cares to look for it. Adding, this comment in no way takes a position on the objective truth of Dylan Farrow’s statements, but “one or the other is lying” is a profoundly, dangerously ignorant position.
My dim memory (ha) from my days in academic psychology is that to the extent that this line of work touched on child sex abuse, the place where it had the most to say pertained to “repressed memories” purportedly recovered in adulthood. This case, which pertains to an experience Dylan reportedly shared with her mother shortly after it happened, does not seem very analogous to me.
Beyond “recovered” or “repressed” memories, research shows that memory is extremely malleable, to the point that it’s trivial to observe that some portion of your (or my, or anyone’s) memory is constructed. It’s very discouraging to read bloggers advancing such simple-minded versions of human memory. And I’ll say again, observing this does not mean I deny the objective truth of Dylan Farrow’s story.
OK, sure, I’m with you to a point. But it seems to me that this proves too much; if we leave it at “memory is malleable,” without putting some bounds on when and how, we’d be left with difficulties believing any victim about anything. Are you sure that jacket was yours in the first place? Are you sure you didn’t give yourself that bruise? Without modifiers on that statement, we are led to absurdities.
I haven’t read this work directly (my exposure to it was via discussions with my research lab as an undergrad), so please do fill in the details if you have, but here is when I suspect memory is most malleable: when the incidents are distant and the key players not familiar. So I would expect “I was assaulted by this particular stranger in the police lineup” to be much less reliable than “I was assaulted by my father”; and “I was assaulted by my father thirty years ago” to be much less reliable than “I was assaulted by my father yesterday.” In the case of Dylan Farrow I am more persuaded because of the latter.
“we’d be left with difficulties believing any victim about anything.”
Every case is different. Nobody seriously doubts that Jerry Sandusky was guilty (except maybe Mrs. Sandusky). Some cases are destined to be very difficult. What I find completely bizarre is the notion that in a case where there is no particular information available to reach a conclusion it’s okay to say, “I’ll pick a side and choose to believe it.”
I can’t discourse off the top of my head about memory research as it’s been a few years since I read it. I believe Elizabeth Loftus was the go-to on this topic a few years ago so I suggest following some of the links I posted above.
Repeating, this doesn’t mean Farrow’s account isn’t objectively true, but when I see otherwise intelligent people waving away important research as if it doesn’t exist it makes me want to tear my hair out. Further, I find it an abdication of intellectual responsibility to simply choose a conclusion, absent adequate information, that is extremely consequential for the lives of the people involved.
I still find your viewpoint interesting. But the most important essay I have read on this case is this one: why young sexual assault victims tell incoherent stories
The reason I find this piece particularly important is that it drives home for me the logical conclusion of “we will never know what happened in that attic”: the nature of child sex abuse is that it largely does not leave evidence beyond the testimony of a child, which means it is not an accident that perpetrators stay at large for a very long time — to change that, we would have to make fundamental changes to how the justice system works and what constitutes evidence. We aren’t going to do that. From my perspective, that means that the law has nothing to offer victims of child sex abuse.
In theory, it seems to me, when there is demand that cannot be met in legal ways, extralegal means will start to appear. I agree with you that there is crosstalk between the formal and informal justice system. But in this case I suspect that the important direction is the one opposite to the one you’ve identified — that the existing justice system itself strongly incentivizes whisper campaigns (Cf. “our local rapist“). I grant you that these informal warning systems are almost guaranteed to be contaminated with many other fears, fears based in race and gender identity, fears of otherness I would not endorse. This is a pity, but if I am right and this does exist in some communities, I do not think any amount of well-meant handwringing will change it. In the interest of preventing that which can be neither adequately deterred nor punished, I suspect communities have little other choice. I am very curious whether anyone has gathered data on informal justice/prevention efforts in child sex abuse, though I’m not sure how one would begin. Perhaps there is some cultural anthropologist doing covert research in the Church to find out whether the laity tend to know which priests their children should avoid. That seems like an obvious place to start.
Surely, there’s a world of difference between “my father sexually assaulted me” and “I am extremely sure I have correctly picked the stranger who sexually assaulted me out of this police line-up.” And (setting aside cases of “recovered” memories), it is surely the case that in the former situation the accuser is either right, or lying. While in the latter, it is perfectly possible that the accuser is making an honest mistake (not about whether they were sexually assaulted, but whether they have correctly identified the perpetrator.)
So then let’s focus on what I am saying rather than focusing on what I’m not saying.
“it is surely the case that in the former situation the accuser is either right, or lying.”
No, that is not surely the case. Oy.
You make several really important points about the nature of black-and-while moral worldviews, and the social sorting mechanisms that they engender. However, there are a couple points that I think bear further consideration.
-First, as several people have noted, a mis-identified attacker is only really a possibility in stranger assault, which is a pretty low percentage of sexual assaults.
-Second, if we live in a racial caste system where the application of justice is meted out powerfully against black men, this is a recommendation for taking a deep breath when the accused is a black man (and not when he’s extremely rich and powerful and well-liked).
-Third, part of the reason that sexual assaults go underreported is because survivors fear the skepticism of the public. So if you are dedicated to a “court of public opinion” skepticism towards all accusations that might empower the carceral state, this will likely be an outcome. As a proponent of non-black-and-white moral theory, this is a tradeoff and a contradiction I think you might consider facing head on
I think I read a comment by Freddie a few months ago (at Buzzfeed or some other site he comments at; someone wrote an article wondering how we can increase convictions for sexual crimes) that looked at this “tradeoff” the opposite way: loosen standards to make it easier to convict for sexual crimes, and inevitably it will swallow up more wrongfully accused people, especially from the underclass. We already have plenty of those, as Freddie has cited. More than 220 men wrongfully convicted is not “pretty low.”
I don’t accept your implication that we’ll avenge more sexual crimes if only the public discarded its skepticism. In fact, I think this whole discussion of the last week can’t escape how prejudice and certainty without evidence are vices, not virtues. They pervert justice, not enhance it. That’s why it’s essential that our imperfect system not make itself even worse by discarding legal procedures and due process for the accused, even when it “feels” right. As for the social realm, Freddie has persuasively warned how rushes to judgment and idle speculation by the public have a negative impact on the justice system, as in the Central Park Five case.
Again, the Central Park Five case is instructive, but it is instructive about racism in our justice system and “stranger assault,” which is as a percentage is much less significant in terms of the landscape of sexual assault in the US. If the problem is racism in our criminal justice system, then I don’t see how this gets applied to Woody Allen, who is white, rich, famous, well-like, and will have more than adequate legal representation.
And you didn’t really respond to the dynamic I pointed out: I didn’t say anything about “loosening standards” to convict more sexual criminals. I pointed out the very real (social, not legal) effect that the fear of public skepticism has on the reporting of sexual assaults in the first place. In other words, this type of court-of-public-opinion skepticism is a major reason why more sexual assaults (generally not stranger assaults) are reported in the first place. I’m not talking about any change in the legal system. If Freddie thinks that the court of public opinion matters in the official legal system, than it must follow that it matters even more in the pre-legal world. Again, I think Freddie has many good points in this piece, just needs to deal with the full ramifications.
No, the Central Park Five case is also instructive in a more general way about how prejudice and unrigorous speculation by the public can pressure the justice system in a bad way.
I wonder if you and I are defining “public skepticism” the same way. My previous post treats it as the alternative to prejudice (literally pre-judging) and certainty without evidence. Not only is it a basic element of the justice system, but it’s also a quality we’re wise to apply in daily life. You bemoan it as something responsible for women not reporting sexual crimes.
X says to a friend, “Yeah, I heard about that case. Terrible if it’s true, but I really can’t be sure what happened.” Are you suggesting this is somehow responsible for underreported sexual crimes? I don’t see the connection.
What exactly are you proposing in lieu of X’s attitude?
In lieu of:
“Terrible if it’s true, but I really can’t be sure what happened”
would be:
“Terrible if it’s true, and though I really can’t be sure what happened, it seems much more likely that it’s true than that it isn’t.”
PS. … Freddie, why do the time stamps on your blog’s comments seem to be running on London time?! Did the Purdue science dept. unleash a time warp?
As always, the answer is “Freddie’s incompetence.”
I couldn’t agree more with almost everything you said in the article. It is all in the article’s title “the juvenile theory of the moral universe”. Why it is that the left wing is committed to a Manichean dualism is utterly beyond me . . . though I suspect that it has, in Bady’s case, to do with the seduction of being a Twitter celebrity. Simplistic narratives with “heroes” and “villains” give Twitter mobs something to rally around – so that they feel they are being politically active – when, in fact, they are acting like a mindless herd . . . Those who – given privacy to elaborate their ideas – might not succumb to the disease of dualistic thinking – start to hear the grunts of approval by the crowd and suddenly rational thought processes go out the window.
Interestingly, Bady made a disingenuous point about the “vox populi” in his most recent post that no one seems to have taken him to task for. The question is not whether ordinary people are competent to judge. As the Telegraph article (which eviscerated Bady’s article) points out, we empower juries all the time to make serious decisions. Most people regard this as a credible process of deep integrity – the cornerstone of democracy . . . The question is whether Twitter is a format that facilitates rational thought. Bady gives the example of Trayvon Martin – but, that is a terrible example. We ‘know’ that Zimmerman murdered Martin. Under ‘any’ scenario except the most unlikely, Zimmerman used excessive force. The case had none of the moral ambiguity of the Dylan accusation.
A much more relevant example is the one given by Dahlia Lithwick in her article – of Justin Bieber. If “Twitter Justice” had prevailed, Bieber would have been kicked out of America. There was a profoundly vindictive petition with 250,000 signatures requesting that Bieber be removed from the country! When Bady applies his form of the “preemptive war” with his “coalition of the Tweeting” – and then, like Bush, denies that it has any real-life consequences, one wonders what universe he lives in. No, that petition is probably ‘not’ going to result in Bieber’s deportation – but, if it had gotten 2 million signatures rather than 250,000 – what would have been the consequence? The notion that irresponsible speech acts are innocuous is daft – and controverted by a couple hundred years of legal precedent.
Again, I think that deBoer wins this debate hands down. Thank God we still have people who are mature thinkers – able to stand up to bullies like Bady.
“And I think they were dealing with cops, cops under deadlines and scrutiny, cops who pushed particular black men in front of them, told them this was the guy, pressured them to make an ID.”
Not to mention the research that indicates that many of the standard techniques, such as simultaneous lineups, tend to encourage false identification of suspects even without police manipulation. (Sequential lineups are the better practice, but I don’t know how often they are used).
I wish this post had been more explicit about differentiating between false accusation and false conviction based on a mistaken identification. It seems primarily concerned with victims who were raped and genuinely thought they were identifying the perpetrator, but to me the term “false accusation” reads as shorthand for characterizing the victim as someone who had consensual sex but later accuses their partner of rape or who fabricates a story of rape from whole cloth.
There’s also the fact that, even in cases where it is very clear that some sort of assault took place, the presence of Internet activism is often harmful to real justice, as happened with Steubenville:
http://m.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/05/130805fa_fact_levy