Halfway through reading this article I had myself really wishing posts like these would just publicly out the perpetrator instead of referring to them anonymously - unfortunately as I finished the article I realized that she hadn't done so because the perpetrator was never found out.
For the cases where there is no question who the perpetrator is - I wonder if it would be beneficial to encourage more public shaming? Part of me knows that if these people are lead to believe their actions are left without consequence they will continue in their wrongdoing. When a blog post tells a story of someone being assaulted, a lot of good people will come to their support but I would be genuinely surprised if a creep is convinced not to be a creep by reading a story in the third person about another anonymous creep.
If we call these people out and kick them out of the community, like when a spouse kicks out a cheating partner, we have more room for responsible, respectable community members.
On the other hand, public shaming at any level _seems_ childish to me, but I can't point out why. Additionally, if someone makes false claims, they can do serious damage very easily. There is probably no easy answer here.
I once criticized Sarah on twitter while agreeing with Robert Hoekman when he wrote a blog post about another person in the UX speaking circuit who did not have a huge amount of work behind them to back up the fact that they are up in front of people, teaching them.
I since regretted my comments on Sarah's success. I believe I apologized on twitter (after being called out). I was embarrassed, but have not contacted her since, I just see her on rosters for speaking at various conferences.
Now, when I read this post of hers my heart sank. Not only because it is utterly sickening someone could do this to another person, but that at one stage I was unkind to her online.
What if she suspected me because of my remarks 2 years ago? What if she called my name out as a suspect. My web development career and reputation would be shattered. Now what if someone decides to play detective and look through twitter history and sees my comments and accuse me publicly. Ruined.
Its not that public shaming is childish, its that that such accusations have huge ramifications if false. It's "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"[0]
This does not mean I hope the person/people involved are not held accountable, it just needs to be handled outside a public internet witch hunt.
Thanks, you helped clarify what I was looking to leave as an open question:
How do we hold individuals accountable without encouraging a witch hunt?
The larger developer community is open and unmoderated and as a result we have no organizational "justice system" to fall back on in order to correct behavior (not that I am proposing this).
It takes great care to attempt to apply knowledge from one domain to another domain. Humans are great at seeing patterns and making analogies, but no matter how many times you say "technology is evolving," that won't make it adhere to the Hardy-Weinberg principle[0]. Attempts to actually implement these analogies tend to be problematic[1].
The US justice system, on the federal and state level, has a wide array of checks against it that (nominally) protect people from state abuse. This is necessary because of the vast power imbalance between a nation-state and a private individual. In this case, it's probably far better to have a 10:1 false negative:false positive ratio. The more false positives, the more potential for abuse.
Conventions and the hacker community do not have the power of nation-states. There's no reason to apply the same very stringent and very necessary restrictions that we apply on nation-states to DefCon. DefCon cannot hurt you the same way the US government can.
So, who is this better for? Certainly not the women attacked: they're left with few options, little sympathy, and copious amounts of victim blaming and denial (as the current top comment indicates). It's far better for the abusers -- especially when the potential for system abuse is far less, because conventions and other hacker/tech events are not nation-states.
If we're going to solve this (or any) problem, we need to look past platitudes and into quantified, measured thought towards a solution. This might very well be naming and shaming likely perpetrators, especially when the evidence is more convincing than a few twitter posts two years ago. We might get more false positives, but we have to contrast this with the current status quo of simply denying any justice to the people actually being harassed for their gender. Personally, I think the cost-benefit is overwhelmingly in favor of excluding more maybe/maybe-not abusive men from our communities, if it results in half the human population being allowed to add their talent to the collective pool.
I believe that the people who act like this almost always act out in other ways: tell sexist jokes, make light of rape culture, all that stuff.
One way we can make a difference is to refuse to tolerate that kind of thing in our own circles of acquaintances, because otherwise those individuals will take our silence as implicit affirmation of their worldview. Sometimes it's hard to be "that guy", but if you're not prepared to do it, then you're one of the people that's enabling this kind of behaviour. By not speaking out you're telling these people that what they believe is OK: silence is complicity, like it or not.
We shouldn't allow disfunctional individuals to participate in our communities, but I think at the point where you photoshop nudes to damage someone's reputation, a therapist would be more appropriate than a lynch mob. I think that's why it seems childish to you, you know that shaming wouldn't make anyone change, it would just satiate our thirst for revenge.
For the cases where there is no question who the perpetrator is - I wonder if it would be beneficial to encourage more public shaming? Part of me knows that if these people are lead to believe their actions are left without consequence they will continue in their wrongdoing. When a blog post tells a story of someone being assaulted, a lot of good people will come to their support but I would be genuinely surprised if a creep is convinced not to be a creep by reading a story in the third person about another anonymous creep.
If we call these people out and kick them out of the community, like when a spouse kicks out a cheating partner, we have more room for responsible, respectable community members.
On the other hand, public shaming at any level _seems_ childish to me, but I can't point out why. Additionally, if someone makes false claims, they can do serious damage very easily. There is probably no easy answer here.