4 ms·

Do the eyewitness accounts of your female peers and friends not count as evidence?

• read_if_gay_ 8y ago
  Eyewitness evidence is the least reliable kind of evidence there is.
  • majos 8y ago
    Yeah, for determining which of six strangers in a lineup is the one who mugged you in a dark alley. IDing someone who harassed you at work seems easier.
  • dragonwriter 8y ago
    Most other evidence is necessarily less reliable than eyewitness evidence since it relies on eyewitness evidence to attest for it's provenance.
• hueving 8y ago
  No, if it's one person leveling an accusation and there is no corroborating evidence (either physical or more witnesses), it's not enough. Otherwise it would be within anyone's power to have people fired or put away for rape without evidence.
  • pjc50 8y ago
    > either physical or more witnesses This makes rape un-prosecutable.
    • prepend 8y ago
      There’s substantial corroborating evidence for rape. It can be traumatic, but read through some trials of convicted rapists and review the evidence presented.
  • truculent 8y ago
    I mean I'm not saying give ultimate judicial authority to any accuser. Just that we should be able to respect our peers' opinions as being worth something more than "not at all". Granted, I should have perhaps made that clearer rather than slipping into rhetoric.
  • dragonwriter 8y ago
    > No, if it's one person leveling an accusation and there is no corroborating evidence (either physical or more witnesses), it's not enough. Whether it is sufficient evidence is a different question than whether it is evidence. It's certainly difficult for nothing other than a victim's testimony contradicted by the accused with no other direct evidence to meet the criminal standard for proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but it's equally certainly less difficult for it to meet the civil standard of preponderance of the evidence that would be applicable in court for sexual harassment claims, and for lots of other human actions, action based on evidence with a lower threshold than preponderance of the evidence for any single offense may be reasonable.
• fuzzybeard 8y ago
  That's how we got the Salem witch trials and why mere accusations aren't usually enough.
  • truculent 8y ago
    I'm not saying it's the only evidence required but just that it counts > 0. I don't think that should be particularly controversial. Particularly when you get many people saying the same thing independently, in a social context rather different to that of Salem in 1693.
  • ryanmercer 8y ago
    >That's how we got the Salem witch trials and why mere accusations aren't usually enough. That's how plenty of hard-working, innocent, Americans got blackballed and had their careers ruined by McCarthyism. The House Committee on Un-American Activities resulted in many things, but the Hollywood Blacklist alone was something like 150 names of almost entirely innocent people. Those people couldn't get work because someone accused each of them of being communists, often with zero evidence.
    • dragonwriter 8y ago
      > Those people couldn't get work Wasn't it revealed that most on the list continued to work in Hollywood under pseudonyms? I mean, certainly denying work was the intent of the list, but...