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@ChaosEngine:
"The first 3 levels of sexual violence ALL involve no physical contact and are entirely verbal. "
100% fine with this. You can be a creepy sleazebag without touching someone and it's still not ok.

Perhaps you misunderstand. I also oppose verbal harassment and discrimination. I disagree with calling sexist and racist comments acts of violence. I agree with condemning them and acting to stop them.

Real world example, a Canadian student TA at Wilfred Laurier University played a short clip of a publicly broadcast debate over trans pronoun usage between 2 U of T professors in a class. She was brought into a meeting with 3 WLU staff who told her she was horribly wrong for doing so because playing that clip was "an act of violence" against any trans students in the room.

This abuse of language is manipulative and wrong.

I'm a man, and I'm not scared of being accused of sexual assault. None of my male friends are scared either.

With burden of proof I'm thinking beyond merely sexual assault. This already practice in forms in Canada. Ontario has an entire system of Social Justice Tribunals that run parallel to the criminal court system. It's been a gradual transformation of the civil court system, so civil and family courts are lumped in as tribunals now there. The specific one relevant in this case is the human rights tribunal. If the WLU faculty, or a student from the classroom, wanted to file a human rights complaint for the 'violence' they faced, the burden of proof would be a preponderance of the evidence rather than innocent until proven guilty. Which I can even understand in some cases, but lets not say that doesn't make people nervous about being falsely accused. That is not what scares people the most though in Ontario. The social justice tribunals have paid for legal representation for the accusers, and so the government foots the financial costs for the accuser. The accused however is on their own. The erosion of burden of proof and fear of financial damages from malicious or vengeful complaints is a very, very real thing in Canada. Accusations of sexual harassment being just one of many kinds of accusations that you can be damaged by while entirely innocent.

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@ChaosEngine

I fully agree with you that rape/sexual assault is a bigger problem (in magnitude and frequency) than false accusations. And that being an actual victim of sexual assault would be worse than being falsely accused of sexual assault, although it seems a bit pointless to debate the relative extent of how much these things could fuck up lives when they are both horrendous.

That being said, there's a reason that presumption of innocence and requiring proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt are the law of the land. And assuming that we follow through on those things (which I think we largely do), that's all well and good. BUT, that's all pretty strictly just in the legal realm.

False accusations of sexual assault don't need to get as far as the actual legal system to seriously fuck up a person's life. Employers, partners, friends ... these connections might choose to sever ties without requiring the same rigorous proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt that the legal system does.

As much as I personally tend to believe Ford as opposed to Kavanaugh, I think that given the span of time since the incident it is nigh on impossible to prove that her version of events is true beyond a reasonable doubt. On the other hand, the hearing put his current demeanor and partisan/biased attitude on blatant display in a way that seemed to me should be disqualifying with regards to the sort of standards we require for Supreme Court Justices. Apparently the GOP disagrees, and we can hold them to account for that at the ballot box.

That's rather cold comfort given that Justices serve for life. There'd be some constitutional crisis drama if Agent Orange gets removed from office as a result of some proof-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt of misdeeds. Robert Kennedy's quote about the ancient Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times" seems apropos. Things have been entirely too "interesting" for my taste for the past 2 years...

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