- The Australian
- SaveJANET ALBRECHTSEN
Jogging past four older blokes on their early morning walk this week, I smiled when I heard one tell his friends “she gave me a terrific massage!” He raised his arm with a little jig to motion just how terrific it was. Some things probably can’t be said any more, not after the expose of Harvey Weinstein’s alleged history of sexual harassment, including sleazy requests that actresses massage him. Then again, it’s precisely now that some things need to be said about the wicked legacy of the Weinstein scandal.
Given the constant flow of allegations, with more last weekend about Weinstein’s sexual depredations, it’s easy to assume that he’s guilty. Yet there is something deeply unsettling about this trial by social media. The now infamous Hollywood producer may be guilty of being a repeat offender of horrible sexual crimes. Even so, when guilt is the criterion for turning an old-fashioned lynch mob into a roving online alternative justice system, we take a big step away from the rule of law.
This is not a defence of Weinstein or other alleged perpetrators of sex crimes against women. This is a defence of testing claims of criminal conduct in a legal system premised on the rule of law. And it’s a defence of basic fairness beyond the legal system, so that claims of all kinds are treated as allegations, not the final word.
The upshot of Weinstein’s trial by social media is a series of equally disturbing sequels. There are now more online trials before people have paused to properly consider the dangers of lynch mobs.
The #MeToo campaign started within days of the Weinstein expose, inviting women to add their own stories. Then came an altogether different beast, a Google.doc list with women in the US adding men’s names to a roll of sexual predators.
In Australia too, journalist Tracey Spicer has popped up, stating her intention to “name and shame” men who are “serial predators” in their workplaces. Using Twitter, she has asked women to contact her. “We’re actually looking at prosecutions as well as exposing these people,” Spicer said.
The glaring flaw in Spicer’s predictable campaign is that she conflates a police investigation and a courtroom with her name-and-shame media campaign. The latter lacks the legitimacy of the former. A name-and-shame campaign encourages women and their supporters to become online prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner of men who cannot possibly defend themselves in a forum of collective outrage.
And an inherently emotional forum can easily misfire against innocent men and the broader cause of punishing real acts of sexual depredation.
As certain as we may be of someone’s guilt, our justice system is premised on the presumption of innocence. Weinstein’s denials of wrongdoing, for example, may sound far-fetched, but only a courtroom can properly test the evidence.
That’s why legal systems within liberal democracies are committed to the rule of law. Law is order. And reason, not emotion, is the best way to determine someone’s guilt or innocence.
It is a hideous conceit of modernity to imagine that technology is always an improvement on the world of our forebears. Yet that’s the claim by #MeToo supporters who say the internet age has better equipped people to deal with issues of sexual harassment.
Trial by Twitter is no substitute for the rule of law, a concept explained by Aristotle more than 2000 years ago. The pre-social media Greek philosopher understood that rule by man “adds an element of the beast, for desire is a wild beast, and passion perverts … the best of men. The law is reason unaffected by desire.”
A lynch mob is still a lynch mob, no matter how fine its intentions, and regardless of whether the lynching takes place online or on the streets. It’s still pack-hunting outside the legal system, akin to tyrannical regimes where people are declared guilty of a crime after a sham trial, or no trial at all.
The social media trial of Weinstein may prove itself deeply flawed in another way, too. If Weinstein walks free from a courtroom trial because the online and media lynching has made a fair trial impossible, that won’t be a failure of the legal system. That will be the fault of those arrogant enough to think their extrajudicial prosecution and guilty verdict is a legitimate warm-up act to a real trial.
Indeed, the #MeToo campaign suffers more misguided conceit when its supporters laud its social media presence for democratising feminism.
Here’s the common flaw of modern feminists: gather as a collective, speak as one and assume that a moral righteousness emerges from the volume and uniformity of its voice. Social media hasn’t democratised feminism but it has found a new way to disperse an old conceit more widely and loudly: that a women-led campaign necessarily speaks for the sum total of women’s experiences.
Contrary to Clementine Ford’s claims, not all women have stayed silent about sexual harassment because of deep cultural conditioning that causes women to feel shame or self-doubt. Maybe lots of women, women like me, haven’t joined the #MeToo online sharing campaign because we have nothing to say. Not because nothing happened but because we put oafish male behaviour in the same category as women behaving rudely. It happens. It’s even common in a world made up of imperfect people. But no damage was done then, no shame, no self-doubt. And my gender doesn’t warrant me now converting boorish behaviour into sexual harassment for a #MeToo campaign.
That’s not to devalue the pain clearly felt by many women who have been sexually harassed or sexually assaulted. It’s just a note to the #MeToo crowd that not all women have the same reactions, and presuming to speak for all women is a demeaning paternalism that women should surely resist.
The related defect is how the #MeToo campaign is colonising dubious terrain. It’s true that in a furiously competitive marketplace of outrage, you need lots of loud voices coalescing around a common cause, but inviting women to share trivial slights along with the most serious assaults undermines the credibility of an important cause.
Last week, the ABC’s 7.30 program chose to feature in its #MeToo story an actress who said that “99 per cent of the women in this room have been harassed, sexually harassed or assaulted and raped or whatever. It’s literally that prevalent.”
The ABC’s seven-minute salute to the #MeToo campaign failed to ask the most basic questions about the cost of lumping together sexual harassment with rape and “whatever” into the #MeToo basket.
The #MeToo crusade repeats the mistakes of the dodgy report released in August by the Australian Human Rights Commission that defined down the meaning of sexual harassment to include staring or leering, a suggestive comment or joke, or an intrusive question about your private life.
Just as it is dishonest to pretend a hashtag can distil one voice from the gamut of women’s experiences, distorting language is no win for women either.
When we weaken the censuring power of words, we lose the ability to identify the worst sexual predators. It’s entirely possible that these social media trials kicked off by the Weinstein scandal will prove to be an own goal for women.
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