[xdmr]

> Our community has persistent and pervasive problems of a particular sort which we are not allowed to talk about: sexual harassment and assault. Men who assault, harass, and even rape women in our spaces, are protected.

This is completely alien to my personal experience. Does this match anyone else's personal experience? Have I just avoided all the objectionable events by sheer luck?

If this statement is true, I would have expected to have observed at least some harassment or mild assault by now, but I haven't. I can't think of an instance. I mean, one time I saw some guy grab some girl's ass, but it turned out she was his wife.

> I attended a hacker event this year – HiP Berlin – where I discovered that some of the organizers had cooperated to make it possible for multiple known rapists to participate, working together to find a way to circumvent the event’s code of conduct – a document that they were tasked with enforcing.

This is just kind of strange. It's not clear what he means by "circumvent" the code of conduct. Is he saying that they were rapists in the opinions of the organizers? And that if they were rapists in the opinions of the organizers then they should have barred them from the event, but they didn't?

I would assume that the most likely situation is that something happened which Drew thinks means the people in question are "known rapists" but the event organizers did not. And not knowing the facts, we can't really say which of them is right.

I mean, unless I'm supposed to just believe that Drew is right because he's speaking up about a difficult topic or something like that. At the risk of potentially silencing marginalized people with extraordinary standards of evidence: no, I won't just believe him.

[dpkirchner]

> This is completely alien to my personal experience. Does this match anyone else's personal experience? Have I just avoided all the objectionable events by sheer luck?

I've seen this a lot, folks protecting and defending men (in particular) that assault women. They do it under the guise of "innocent until proven guilty," as though we are operating as agents in courts of law. That's what Drew is describing in the post, in different words. You may have been lucky enough to avoid seeing this but it definitely happens.

[mfru]

I can second that.

In my experience these phrases are used often:

- "No he wouldn't do that"

- "Are you sure that this is true?"

- "I mean, how could he know that it was too much?"

- "Maybe it was kinda overstepping, but he apologized!"

- "I mean she isn't such a pious girl either." (kind of literally translated from my language, so maybe it sounds strange in English)