![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mjg59(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
(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:
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
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 coercionis 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.)
Re: My overall take on the discussion
Date: 2012-11-11 03:01 am (UTC)Re: My overall take on the discussion
Date: 2012-11-12 09:53 pm (UTC)I don't believe Ted would be totally insane or demented. The parts of his mail under discussion can be read in a way that's totally sensible, except for one inaccurate sentence about the technical workings of law, which he could have plausibly missed himself. That interpretation is a lot more plausible than your absurd suggestions.
Also, basing your character assassination attemps on claims about his view on law makes them even less believable. It's one thing to claim someone has questionable attitudes, but even more ridiculous to claim that someone non-ignorant would actually have the most absurd beliefs about practical law that you've attributed to him.
Re: My overall take on the discussion
Date: 2012-11-13 05:35 am (UTC)Ted wrote
The context here is the idea that Ted is disagreeing with a set of statistics. He is not arguing that the definition of rape used in itself is incorrect - he is arguing that some (perhaps many) of the cases classified as rape weren't actually rape because they were cases where both the victim and the attacker were drunk. He has used a thought experiment to attempt to demonstrate that cases where both parties are drunk to the point where they are unable to give informed consent could be classified in one of two ways - mutual rape or no rape at all. He then claims that the law says that there was no rape, and as such the statistics are faulty.
His claims are problematic for multiple reasons. The first is the straightforward misstatement of the law - a limited number of jurisdictions within the US require that the attacker either was aware or should have been aware that the victim is unable to consent. Ohio law was used in the study, and has no such condition. Ted is already misrepresenting facts in order to discredit figures he disagrees with.
The second is the association between the idea that the rapist has to know that the victim is unable to give consent and the idea that if the rapist is drunk, the rapist is unable to know that consent can't be granted. The scenario Ted's discussing is one where both parties are, according to him, "partially inebriated". They're still functional - Ted is just asserting that judgement is impaired to a point where someone may not be able to grant informed consent. Leaving aside the idea that partial inebriation is sufficient for that condition to arise (which is unlikely - it's typically used in scenarios where the victim is entirely unable to function), it's absurd to argue that mere partial inebriation is insufficient to know whether or not someone is able to provide consent.
The third is a pretty fucking fundamental problem. It's the idea that you have a scenario where two people are both drunk enough that they can't provide consent and yet simultaneously initiate sex with each other. That's the scenario required for Ted's putative outcome to arise. It's an absolute straw man. The logical outcomes of the scenario where you have two drunk people are that either no sex occurs at all, mutually consensual sex occurs or one of the parties initiates sex without consent. Ted's carefully constructed a straw man where an impossible scenario could have absurd consequences, and then saved us with a reading of the law that means we have to ignore the statistics he finds so offensive.
Anyway. Let's look at an actual example of such a law:
Note the lack of any kind of symmetry requirement. Going back to something you wrote earlier:
The distinction between Ted's claim and an actual example is the "should have known" present in the law and not present in Ted's claim. The rapist in your case should have known that they were no longer able to judge consent, and so the law would be unlikely to accept that as any kind of defence. But the same argument applies to the case that Ted describes! Either Ted believes that being drunk is sufficient to be unable to determine whether someone is able to provide consent, or he doesn't. He explicitly claims that he does.
I'm done here. You're trying to invent some distinction that means he only believes what he wrote in certain circumstances, but that distinction isn't backed by law or by anything Ted wrote. His claims are absurd, offensive and factually wrong, and arguing otherwise is ridiculous.
Re: My overall take on the discussion
Date: 2012-11-13 07:38 pm (UTC)As for the specifics, your "unable to give informed consent" is ambiguous; the relevant interpretation here is drunk enough to possibly qualify as "raped" in the classification OF THE STUDY, not the view of actual law. I think his comment about law was more of a side explanation, not the core of his argument (he's not saying that "as such" the statistics are faulty).
Your second objection fails because it does not distinguish between the assumptions of the study and the law. The question is whether the STUDY clearly refused to count events as rape with anything less than "entirely unable to function" standard. You can't blame Ted if he uses the study's assumptions when criticizing it.
Your third objection has a pretty basic logic error. You assume there would always be a side who obviously "initiated" sex. Two people have sex while drunk. Neither intended it before getting drunk, both regret it afterwards, and their memories of what exactly happened are likely hazy. Are you sure the study always correctly identified which side counts as "initiating" the sex, and did not count that side as "raped"?
"You're trying to invent some distinction that means he only believes what he wrote in certain circumstances"
Intentionally misleading rhetoric. I've said his statement was too general and inaccurate, and it's unlikely he would mean all the absurd consequences a literal interpretation would have in other contexts. Suppose you try to explain some feature of Linux, and make a remark in your explanation that could be interpreted to apply more generally. Now saying that "Matthew Garrett believes that Microsoft Windows does absurd thing X" would be an inaccurate description of what you said, and likely false, even if that would follow from a literal interpretation of your comments.
BTW I tried look up the study to check what exactly the phrasing of the question was; it seems that even the authors of the original Koss study later agreed that it really was flawed and produced inflated statistics.