Slashdot Mirror
Behind the MOOC Harassment Charges That Stunned MIT
An anonymous reader writes: The complainant in a sexual harassment case has come forward and told her story about what happened when she was a student in a MOOC led by a rockstar professor. "It would take almost a year before Harbi, with the help of MIT’s investigators, said she came to understand that Lewin’s interest in her was not motivated by empathy, and that their first conversations included inappropriate language. Shortly after contacting her, Harbi said, Lewin quickly moved their friendship into uncomfortable territory, and she was pushed to participate in online sexual role-playing and send naked pictures and videos of herself."
But how exactly did he force them to do what they did *Over the internet*
If you read the full article, towards the end it talks about this particular woman having various emotion issues including abandonment. It would seem that the prof in question exploited theses weaknesses in order to groom the woman into sending the naked pics etc.
In addition the article talks about various victims being from cultures where speaking out is not the done thing.
So while no-one was physically compelled to send anything, it sure sounds as if they were psychologically compelled.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Now AC, post your full name, e-mail address, physical location, postal address, phone number, cell number, etc...
Then we'll see how much "words" hurts, right?
Until you can do that, YOUR words are meaningless.
Oh get over it. It's just words.
No, it is words from a person in authority whose job it was to help her, not take advantage of her.
It isn't criminal, hence the reason the guy is not in jail. But it is not acceptable behavior from someone representing the school and if the school knew about it, then they've abused the trust of the community.
slashdot = stagnated
you're all morons
She thought she was sending naked pictures and could maybe win some extra points when grade time came around but it turned out she was just sending naked pictures with no long game payout and that's harassment.
More like she was told she would not get good grades if she didn't and she really needed this. Fear can do weird things to people.
From the article, it was apparently an open course online, with no grades and no credit. (And she was in another country, so there was no personal contact, either.)
I've heard claims that one in four women will be raped at some point in their lives, and have yet to hear any sort of data-based rebuttal.
Look at the actual crime reporting figures, locally rape convictions stand at around 8 per 100,000. Now let's get crazy and say only one in twenty rapes and or sexual assault charges result in a conviction. Let's get even crazier and say one in twenty people who are raped even report the matter. That leaves us with 3200 per 100,000, or about one in thirty. Still almost an order of magnitude smaller than feminist figures and almost certainly still a gigantic exaggeration.
So where do they come up with these moral panic inducing mountains of statistical tripe?
To understand this we have to look at the methods they use to take these surveys. Look at the technical reports. You'll find lots of stuff like:
Drafting the questionnaire, it was important to avoid terms such as ‘rape’, ‘violence’ or ‘stalking’, because different women might have different preconceived ideas on the types of violence usually associated with these terms, and the types of perpetrators involved.
Terms such as rape are left out of questionnaires and it's left to the researchers (all of whom happen to be feminist trained) to decide whether or not rape took place. So if someone answered that they were verbally abused using a sexual slur or had sex while drunk, it's the researcher who decides if the women was sexually attacked.
And take a look at California's shiny new feminist inspired affirmative consent laws if you want to know whether having sex after a drink is rape or not.
This gets further distorted by the public mouthpieces, who translate these numbers into 25% of all women were raped. No, they weren't. That one in four women in modern western democracies, one in forty was raped is not a prospect that the rational mind can entertain.
This is a technique that was pioneered by Mary Koss, a feminist researcher who decided that the official unbiased government reports weren't giving her the answers she wanted, so she set up her own surveys in order to amend the statistics accordingly.
Post survey examination of the outcomes however revealed that around three quarters of the women she identified as having been raped did not consider themselves victims of rape, and almost half of them had sex with their supposed attackers after the event identified as a rape had occurred, and continued dating them.
So, having internalised that, now you'll have to start asking questions like "how did these flim flam artists manage to pull the wool over everyone's eyes for 40 years" and "why are people in power listening to them" and so on. These are good questions to ponder. While you're pondering them some light reading for you:
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/...