mjg59 | Ted Ts'o is a rape apologist and why this matters

(This post contains some discussion of rape and sexual assault but does not go into any specifics)

There was a brief controversy at Linux.conf.au back in 2011. The final keynote speaker gave a compelling presentation on online privacy, including some slides containing sexualised imagery. This was against the terms of the conference policies, and resulted in an apology from the conference organisers and the speaker. The situation was unfortunate but well handled, and that should have been the end of it.

Afterwards, there was some pushback on the conference mailing list. Concerns were raised about the policy being overly restrictive and the potential for it to be used to stifle speech that influential groups disagreed with. I don't agree with these arguments, but discussion of why policies have been implemented is completely natural and provides an opportunity for a community to determine what its expected standards are.

And then Ted Ts'o effectively called rape victims liars[1]. At first I assumed that this was just some sort of horrific failure to understand the implications of what he was saying, so I emailed him to check. The reply I got drew a pretty clear distinction between the case of a drunk college student raping another drunk college student in their room and the case of knifepoint rape in a dark park. You know, the difference between accidental rape and rape rape. The difference between the one any of us might have done and the one that only bad people do. Legitimate rape and the "rape" that those feminists talk about. The distinction that lets rapists convince themselves that they didn't really rape anyone because they weren't holding a knife at the time.

Ted Ts'o argues that only a small percentage of rape really counts as what people think of as rape. Ted Ts'o is a rape apologist.

There's an ongoing scandal in the UK at the moment. A well known DJ, Jimmy Savile, died last year. He grew up in a working class family, but through hard work and natural talent was one of the most significant figures in promoting pop music in the UK in the 50s and 60s, and worked in various parts of the BBC for the best part of 30 years. He spent significant amounts of time raising money for charity, and it's estimated that he raised over £40 million for various causes. Since his death, around 300 people have accused him of sexually abusing them. The BBC is desperately trying to explain why it cancelled an expose shortly before it aired. Multiple people who worked there at the time claim that everyone knew he was involved in indecent activities, but saying anything would risk both their career and the charities that depended on his fundraising. Nobody said anything, and he was allegedly free to continue his abuse.

Ted Ts'o is a significant figure in the Linux kernel community. He has expressed abhorrent beliefs that damage that community. Condemnation was limited to a mailing list with limited readership, meaning, effectively, that nobody said anything. Last week the Ada Initiative published a blog post pointing out the damage that did, and I realised that my effective silence was not only helping to alienate 50% of the population from involving themselves with Linux, it was also implicitly supporting my community leadership. I was giving the impression that I was basically fine with our community leaders telling people that it wasn't really rape if you were both drunk enough. I was increasing the chances of members of our community being sexually assaulted. Silence is endorsement. Saying nothing is not ok.

In the absence of an apology and explanation from Ted, I'll be interacting with him to the bare minimum that I'm compelled to as a result of my job. I won't be attending any Linux Foundation events he's involved in organising. If I'm running any events, I won't be inviting him. At a time when we're finally making progress in making our community more open and supportive, we don't need leaders who undermine that work. Support organisations who encourage that progress, not the people who help drag us back.

Footnotes

[1]The original archive has vanished. I've put up a copy of the relevant thread here. Throughout, Ted states that he's actually arguing against the idea that women need to be frightened of sexual assault, and not against the definition of rape. Except saying things like This one does a pretty good job of taking apart the Koss / Ms. Magazine study, which is the source for the "1 in 4" number. For example, it points out that over half of those cases were ones where undergraduates were plied with alcohol, and did not otherwise involve using physical force or other forms of coercion is difficult to read in any way other than "Half of the people you're counting as having been raped haven't really been raped", and favourably referring to an article that asserts that the rate of false rape reports is probably close to 50% is pretty strong support for the idea that many rape victims are liars.

(Update 2012/10/30: Adam Williamson suggests in this comment that this mail is a better example of Ted's behaviour - there's some explicit victim blaming and a lot of "Is that rape" questioning with the obvious implication that the answer should be "no". Ted Ts'o is a victim blaming rape apologist.)

(Update 2012/11/05: It's been suggested that I haven't been sufficiently clear about which of Ted's statements justify my claims. So, here we go.

In this mail, Ted links to and endorses this article. He explicitly links to it because of its treatment of rape statistics. Quoting directly from that article:
the rate of false reports is at least 9 percent and probably closer to 50 percent
Ted explicitly endorses an article that claims that a significant percentage of reported rapes are false. The study that generated that figure is held in poor regard by other researchers in the field - Australian police figures indicate that 2.1% of rape accusations were classified as false. Ted asserts that he was trying to argue against poor use of statistics, so it's a fair assumption that he agrees with the alternative statistics that he's citing. Ted believes that many rape victims are making false accusations. Ted believes that many rape victims are liars.

Again in this mail, Ted argues against a claimed figure that 1 in 4 women have been sexually assaulted. One of his arguments is that Also found in the Koss study, although not widely reported, was the statistic that of the women whom she classified as being raped (although 73% refused to self-classify the event as rape), 46% of them had subsequent sex with the reported assailant. Ted disagrees with a statistic because some rape victims subsequently have sex with the reported assailant. This means that Ted believes that this indicates that they were not really raped. Ted is a rape apologist.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From: (Anonymous)

So maybe he believes that if people drink to the point where they can't take care of themselves, they bear at least some responsibility if they then get their money stolen, get raped, get beat up, or get killed. Is that really such an impossible to accept or understand view, even if you don't agree with it? In contexts other than rape, there are plenty of examples where people have similar views about the victim of a crime having some responsibility; if you think this is so horribly wrong, I think you'd need to condemn a large portion of the population. And even if you still think it is always horribly wrong, this still wouldn't justify calling it being a "rape apologist" unless someone claims this applies to rape ONLY, and not generally being a target of crime while incapacitated due to your own actions.

If he'd said that it's OK for a sober person to rape someone who's passed out, or that it wouldn't be rape at all, then I'd understand why it would be considered offensive and wrong. But as far as I can see he did NOT say that; he'd clearly consider that rape and a crime, and I don't see him saying that it'd make the actions of the rapist any less condemnable either. What he did say, I may not agree with myself, but I think most people have at least some views I'd condemn more strongly than that.

From: (Anonymous)

"Is that really such an impossible to accept or understand view, even if you don't agree with it?"

Really, yeah. I don't agree with you that it's a commonly held view with regard to anything except rape. Take the mugging example I just posted above; when someone gets mugged in a dark alley do we blame the victim? Does the attacker's lawyer spend lots of time in courts asking probing questions about whether the victim liked walking down dark alleys, walked down dark alleys because they liked the thrill of it, and so on? When someone gets murdered do we start asking questions about the victim's lifestyle and whether they did something that made them more likely to get murdered?

Usually no. The only cases I can think of are when the person who was the victim of a crime was also a criminal - classic example being gang members getting shot - or, sadly, when prostitutes get killed (this is often seen as less 'bad' than murder of, I dunno, the homecoming queen). Which is part of the same problem as blaming rape victims.

Rape has a much bigger problem with victim blame. Just about every time rape comes up, someone has to question the victim. Did they go to bars they shouldn't have gone to? Did they like a drink? Did they wear short skirts? It's just about unique. What happened when Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused? Everyone started investigating the victim.

I think there's a _huge_ difference between the practical issue of avoiding being a victim of crime - which is pretty uncontroversial and something we all do - and assigning blame or responsibility to the victims of crime. They are completely different things. Are you maybe statistically slightly less likely to get raped if you never go out drinking? Possibly (I don't know, but for the sake of argument, let's say yes). Okay. But that doesn't mean that if you go out drinking and get raped that it is your fault or your responsibility or you are to blame. That's a very different thing and a hugely problematic thing for anyone to say.

The reason I think you have to draw a really clear bright line here and say that the responsibility and blame for crime lay entirely at the feet of the criminal is that if you don't draw it there, where do you draw it? This is another place where there's a continuum, which runs all the way from blaming a victim who's passed out drunk through blaming a victim who wears miniskirts all the way through to the Victorians covering up table legs to avoid inflaming the male passions to requiring women to cover their entire bodies in restrictive clothing because otherwise men won't be able to restrain themselves from raping them. They are _all ultimately a result of the same line of thought_: women are capable of arousing irresistible passions in men, and it is the responsibility of women to avoid tempting men to rape them. I'm sure you'd say that's absurd, but if you don't draw the line at a point where the rapist is entirely responsible for their own actions, where _do_ you draw the line? How do you differentiate between the rapist who rapes a passed-out drunk, where perhaps you think the victim bears some of the responsibility, and the rapist who rapes a woman who wasn't wearing a veil and claims the sight of her face roused irresistible urges? On what basis do you make that distinction?

I think the only reasonable position is that a person who makes a free choice to have sex with another person against their will is responsible for that choice. The circumstances of the person they rape are entirely besides the point. Doesn't matter if they're wearing a miniskirt, in the wrong part of town, drunk, or all three. It is not their responsibility.

"But as far as I can see he did NOT say that; he'd clearly consider that rape and a crime, and I don't see him saying that it'd make the actions of the rapist any less condemnable either"

Well. I have been reducing the quotations down to a single one that's really objectionable, but if you read the whole mail. He posits a whole series of hypothetical scenarios with the question 'Is it rape?'. Which is clearly questioning the definition.

From: (Anonymous)

He posited a series of scenarios which questioned the boundary of what should be considered rape. He then said "regardless of whether Alice is guilty of raping Bob" ... "should Bob be faulted for putting him into a situation where he was so drunk". In my view that "regardless" quite clearly shows he did not think that just being drunk would imply it wasn't rape. So he's saying that perhaps Bob should be faulted EVEN IF Alice is clearly a criminal rapist, not that Alice's actions would always be justified if Bob is drunk.

Considering the above, I think your "How do you differentiate" question and court references are at least partly off the mark. As far as I can see, nobody has suggested that a rapist should not be convicted just because the victim was drunk; saying that you may bear some responsiblity for becoming the victim of a crime if you intentionally incapacitate yourself does not imply accepting the actions of the criminal.

From: (Anonymous)

It rather does, though. If the victim is partly responsible for the crime it follows inevitably that the perpetrator is less responsible. In this equation there is only a limited amount of guilt/responsibility to go around. I don't see how you can maintain that in Hypothetical Scenario X the victim is partly responsible while in Hypothetical Scenario Y the victim is not partly responsible, but the rapist is _equally_ responsible in both cases. That does not seem to add up. As soon as you assign any blame or responsibility to the victim, you are taking it away from the rapist. That's actually pretty much _why_ it's specifically a huge problem to assign blame/responsibility as opposed to discussing the purely practical question of situations in which crime is more or less likely to occur.

From: (Anonymous)

I don't think the total amount of blame has to be constant. Consider cases where someone is injured without the involvement of anyone else. People still assign varying amounts of blame, from "he was an idiot; his own fault" to "unpredictable and very hard to avoid accident; not really his fault".

From: (Anonymous)

Those would be different cases, though. Think how your example could possibly apply to ours, the criminal offence of rape: it only works if varying amounts of blame can be assigned to varying kinds of rape. Which is exactly the problem we started with. I don't think in the case of a serious and fairly clearly defined criminal offence you can start monkeying around with assigning different amounts of blame to different parties in different cases.

From:

hexmode [launchpad.net]

> Take the mugging example I just posted above; when someone gets
> mugged in a dark alley do we blame the victim?

I was held up at night. And, yes, I was told that I was partly to blame. I was told that I should have known better than to be making a withdrawal from that ATM on foot (it was a drive up) at 9 o'clock at night in the city of New Orleans.

So, yes, the victim was blamed. Oh, and because he was't caught, the thief was never held responsible.

Which I say only to provide a counter example. I think this entire discussion is being side tracked by focusing on the blame issue, or the issue of rape statistics.

The point was that overly sexualized content in a technical presentation isn't productive or appropriate. This whole "Ted T'so is a rape appologist" discussion is taking the focus away from what should a discussion about what is appropriate content for presentations