Posted on 10/18/2017 6:14:31 AM PDT by Kaslin
"#MeToo" is the social media meme of the moment. In a 24-hour period, the phrase was tweeted nearly a half million times and posted on Facebook 12 million times. Spearheaded by actress Alyssa Milano in the wake of Hollyweird's Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal, women have flooded social media with their own long-buried accounts of being pestered, groped or assaulted by rapacious male predators in the workplace.
Count me out.
It's one thing to break down cultural stigmas constructively, but the #MeToo movement is collectivist virtue signaling of a very perilous sort. The New York Times heralded the phenomenon with multiple articles "to show how commonplace sexual assault and harassment are." The Washington Post credited #MeToo with making "the scale of sexual abuse go viral." And actress Emily Ratajkowski declared at a Marie Claire magazine's women's conference on Monday:
"The most important response to #metoo is 'I believe you.'"
No. I do not believe every woman who is now standing up to "share her story" or "tell her truth." I owe no blind allegiance to any other woman simply because we share the same pronoun. Assertions are not truths until they are established as facts and corroborated with evidence. Timing, context, motives and manner all matter.
Because I reserve the right to vet the claims of individual sexual assault complainants instead of championing them all knee-jerk and wholesale as "victims," I've been scolded as insensitive and inhumane.
"TIMING DOES NOT MATTER," a Twitter user named Meg Yarbrough fumed. "What matters is what is best for EACH INDIVIDUAL victim. You should be ashamed of yourself."
CNN anchor Jake Tapper informed me, "People coming forward should be applauded." But applauding people for "coming forward" is not a journalistic tenet. It's an advocacy tenet. Tapper responded that he was expressing the sentiment as a "human being not as a journalist." Last time I checked, humans have brains. The Weinstein scandal is not an excuse to turn them off and abdicate a basic responsibility to assess the credibility of accusers. It's an incontrovertible fact that not all accusers' claims are equal.
Some number of harrowing encounters described by Weinstein's accusers and the #MeToo hashtag activists no doubt occurred. But experience and scientific literature show us that a significant portion of these allegations will turn out to be half-truths, exaggerations or outright fabrications. That's not victim-blaming. It's reality-checking.
It is irresponsible for news outlets to extrapolate how "commonplace" sexual abuse is based on hashtag trends spread by celebrities, anonymous claimants and bots. The role of the press should be verification, not validation. Instead of interviewing activist actresses, reporters should be interviewing bona fide experts.
Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist and criminal profiler who heads the Forensic Criminology Institute, is author or co-author of 16 criminal justice books, including textbooks on rape investigation, crime reconstruction, behavioral evidence analysis and forensic victimology.
Turvey's most recent book, written with retired NYPD special victim squad detective John Savino and Mexico-based forensic psychologist Aurelio Coronado Mares, is "False Allegations: Investigative and Forensic Issues in Fraudulent Reports of Crime."
Based on their review of decades of scientific literature, Turvey and his colleagues explode the "2 percent myth" peddled by politicians, victims' advocates and journalists "claiming that the nationwide false report rape for rape and sexual assault is nonexistent." In fact, the statistic was traced to an unverified citation in a 1975 book by feminist author Susan Brownmiller.
"This figure is not only inaccurate," Turvey and his co-authors conclude, "but also it has no basis in reality."
Published research has documented false rape and sexual assault rates ranging from 8 percent to 41 percent. Savino notes that in his NYPD's Manhattan Special Victim Squad, "our false report rate was in the double digits during all of my years. Sometimes, it was as high as 40 percent." Turvey, Savino, and Mares make clear to students that based on the evidence -- as opposed to Facebook trends:
"False reports happen; they are recurrent; and there are laws in place to deal with them when they do. They are, for lack of a better word, common."
They are common because people lie for all sorts of reasons -- from the need for attention to the lure of profit, out of anger or revenge, to conceal crimes or illicit activity, or because of addictions or mental health issues. Unlike activists or advocates "steeped in bias, denial or self-interest," Turvey and his colleagues teach criminal investigators and students that true professionals "do not seek confirmation of beliefs or ideas: they seek eradication of false theories. All reports of crime must be investigated. Otherwise, they are merely unconfirmed allegations that the ignorant or lazy may pass along as truth."
Rape is a devastating crime. So is lying about it. Ignorant advocates and lazy journalists can be as dangerous as derelict detectives and prosecutors driven by political agendas instead of facts.
When #MeToo bandwagons form in the midst of a panic, innocent people get run over.
Excellent.
Needed to be written.
False claims/charges 8% to 41%. Almost always in the double digits... Wow.
When you join an industry (Hollyweird) that trades in flesh, your own or someone else’s, this is what you get.
The women were seeking to maximize their sexual market value and sexual appeal and make money off of it. They were selling sex.
Sounds a bit like whoring to me.
Reminds me of the big name journalist (Brokaw? Jennings? Rather?) who was asked if they would inform a US army patrol of an imminent ambush if the journalist saw something that the soldiers did not.
I believe the response was: "No. I'm a journalist. I'm there to report what happens, not to get involved." I guess journalists are human beings when they want to be.
Milano started the metoo tag about Hollywood. Now it’s being used to make it taking place everywhere and making Hollywood seem no worse than the local convience store.
Tapper forgets about the people who "come forward" with hate speech accusations, only to find out later that they keyed their own car or painted the swastika themselves.
If one wants to laud another for "coming forward," then do so for the person who comes forward immediately, not the person who waits a decade or two for someone else to be first.
-PJ
I’m not optimistic, but I would hope that our culture would see a turning point. We are a sex-obsessed culture and many industries are indeed selling sex. It is whoring.
We don’t need to go the route of the burkha, but I would think women would wake up and realize that maximizing their sexual market value (and I think about 80% of women have been successfully trained to do this) is not a good choice. They should pull back and be more conservative. Better for them. Better for the culture. Better for men too, I think.
Nobody wants to admit to being the ugly duckling that Harvey didn’t want to hit on.
Lena Dunham's been uncharacteristically quiet.
Modesty is a virtue, the opposite of impropriety.
I agree with her, but for a different reason.
The problem is less the act, which happens at all times and in all places, than the *industry*, that has become a “nest of vipers”, banding together to promulgate and defend such abuse.
Many people want a career in entertainment. But to get such a career, as a young person, they now must run a gauntlet of perverts, deviants, and other villains. If they refuse to submit to the fiends, they are blocked, blackballed, and denied a fair chance to succeed.
So now it is likely the network of monsters that is trying to dilute their individual and collective guilt, by hiding behind the idea that “everybody does it.”
No. Just no.
What is needed is that these child victims, and former child victims, need a *prosecutor*. That is, do not make any accusation in public, but in private. And you must name names. Again in private. By someone who will then pursue criminal sanctions, or if they are not possible, civil sanctions by all the victims; made possible because when victims name the same molesters, it makes for a persuasive case.
So imagine if instead of just naming a single ‘big name’ criminal, this prosecutor could release the names of a dozen such perverts at once, likewise naming their co-conspirators, supporters, and accessories.
It would ravage the entertainment industry. But since the days of Fatty Arbuckle, this has been something that needs to be done.
Where was the Hollywood crowd when Bubba was using the “nuts and sluts” defense against his accusers?
This will spiral out of control very soon. False accusations. Axes to grind. Sensationalism. Raw meat for the TMZ crowd. Lawyers like Gloria Alfed and her ilk self promoting themselves and mugging for the cameras. All the while the real victims claims will be trivialised.
This will end much like the Child Day Care molestation hysteria of the 80’s. Good people will suffer at the hands of hucksters, liars, cheats, and lawyers and paid professional witnesses.
Lena Dunham’s been uncharacteristically quiet.
Even the lowly Weinstein had his standards.
Lining up to crawl under his desk...
I have a close family member who was falsely accused. A girl had gotten pregnant with a boy she wasn’t supposed to be seeing, so she accused this other kid of rape. Police questioned him, concluded the girl was lying and let him go, but it could have gone other ways. Very ugly business.
If they refuse to submit to the fiends, they are blocked, blackballed, and denied a fair chance to succeed.
One more thing on that subject, Hollyweird is the local industry. It has been protected by the LAPD for many years.
“...lazy journalists...”
Now you’re just being redundant, Michelle.
Nothing wrong with that and I agree with what you said. Especially the last part.
They’re Distracting from the Real story , Obama/Hillary/Putin and all the Bribes
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