Thank you to the few of you who don’t sound like this:
Also, these “guilty until proven innocent” comments don’t make any sense. Does the university process respect accusers? Yes, hopefully. Does the process try to account for implicit/systemic issues that make being an accuser a historically awful role? Yes, hopefully. But the “guilty until proven innocent” comments only makes sense if Ellison‘s suspension was ultimately determined without some kind of process to assess the situation. And if you want to say the process assumed his guilt from the beginning…how would you know that? You have no way of actually assessing the process, correct?
He’s not going to jail; his life isn’t over; Ellison is just losing privileges (yeah big privileges, but still, just privileges) thanks to a process that likely isn’t actively harmful and antagonistic towards accusers.
Do you all really want this to be a criminal process that makes this whole thing potentially harmful and antagonistic towards the accuser and puts incarceration on the line for the accused regardless of what this woman wants? Wild.
If you’re asking for a bulletproof guarantee of the accuseds’ guilt, in all cases, then you’ve decided that you are basically okay with a system that lets most victims fall by the wayside. Suck it up and be okay with, for the first time ever, a culture that doesn’t leave you wholly untrammeled (because that’s a priviledge that no one deserves).
It seems that a system that doesn’t let victims fall by the wayside would be a system that can afford to privilege the voice of accusers (ie acknowledging systemic stuff), and maybe that can’t be the criminal justice system. The process that potentially incarcerates someone is going to be different than the process that potentially strips someone of certain privileges. If I’m a victim I probably want the process that can afford to not be antagonistic towards me and won’t leave me feeling not believed.
If you call me sanctimonious or holier-than-thou then you’re not ready to be a part of this conversation.
(Also, I realize ‘accuser’ and ‘accused’ may be problematic language but for the purposes of this post I’m not really sure how else to word this.)