"At this moment when many people are realising the sheer scale of sexual harassment for the first time, some men have written about how these events have shaken them up and caused them to reflect.
Giles Coren, however, is concerned that putting “xx” kisses at the bottom of e-mails might lead to false allegations of sexual harassment – a tragedy that has befallen precisely no-one, nowhere. Yet I think Coren’s article demonstrates one reason why some men are distracted from the real problem of sexual harassment by the fear that a culture that increasingly listens to women will somehow get them into trouble.
Of course, a man may fear sexual harassment allegations because he sexually harasses people and a journalist in this position might use his platform to remind victims of his power, pre-emptively reducing any subsequent accusations in the public mind to “a few misplaced kisses”. Assuming Coren is innocent of this, he is doing a tremendous favour to abusers within his profession.
Reporting sexual harassment or violence (to the police, to employers, even telling friends) is immensely costly to victims. We fear being disbelieved and humiliated. We fear being believed and held responsible. We fear a sympathetic response that treats us as broken. We even fear causing harm to the heroes, friends, partners and family members who have hurt us. There’s rarely anything much to gain, except in sharing an experience and finding we are not alone.
I’ve argued all this with people who believe false-reporting is commonplace and they’ve responded, “But you credit such women with thinking logically!”
And I don’t – that’s my point. I do however credit the vast majority of people with not acting dramatically against their own interest and without possessing the extreme and sustained malice required to falsely accuse someone of sexual violence. The evidence suggests that sexual offences are falsely reported at about the same rate as other crime; so roughly speaking, for every invented rape the police heard about last year, two people pretended to have their bicycles stolen and another seven lied about burglaries. All of those are extraordinarily strange behaviours and while people do behave very strangely and innocent people are harmed, it happens so rarely the rest of us can afford to worry about more common problems. Such as sexual harassment, which almost every woman has experienced and most of us on multiple occasions.
Giles Coren must have read enough about Weinstein to understand that his crimes go beyond unattractive in possession of a libido. None of those #metoo stories last week involved being smiled at by an unsexy colleague. But I think Coren has tapped into a problem in our culture which allows men to be distracted by their personal self-image and to perpetuate myths about the ambiguity of sexual crimes.
The answer is and always has been to listen to women.
https://www.thefword.org.uk/2017/10/why-are-men-so-worried-about-false-allegations/
