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Do you see any of this as sexual harassment? I certainly don't. What's your birthday? That seems incredibly benign.
Im imagining him doing all three of those things together, in a tone that implies he wants to look at facebook pics of a much younger woman, and maybe buy her gifts for her birthday. I dont know, maybe its nothing, but it could be sexual harassment. I just feel like its hard to judge without being there. I dont know why you dont believe your wife about this case.
? I'm honestly perplexed. My wife thinks the man is totally innocent. Her point was that the woman is overreacting and she is questioning whether this type oversensitivity is possible if normal work is to progress
Ah, OK, I missed that. I thought your wife was agreeing with the other office women. In that case, yeah, that changes my interpretation a lot. Basically in this sort of murky situation I would just trust whichever witness I knew the best, so in this case your wife.
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Why would you imagine him doing those things in a maximally negative light without reason to believe he did them in a maximally negative light?
It's one thing to update one's understanding of a situation in light of new evidence, but it's another to introduce imagination as a reason for framing a situation as worse than it's even claimed to be. What, in the description, warrants a framing of 'shouwa-era style' sexual harassment? Is this (unlikely) intended to characterize shouwa-era style sexual harassment as tepid of what was actually claimed, or is this instead trying to characterize what was described with extremely pejorative framing to make it seem worse?
a large group of women all agreed that this was sexually harassment, which they witnessed first-hand, including his own wife. Do you think they're all just lying? I'm not "imagining him doing those things in a maximally negative light," I'm just trusting the eye-witnesses. Why do you feel compelled to fight for the innocense of some random guy you've never met?
Basic human decency seems compelling enough.
You say that a large group of women all agreed that this was sexual harassment... but what has actually been described is not sexual harassment absent evidence that has not been provided. Even you acknowledged the criticality of body language, tone and context... information that you do not have. If you do not have critical information to justify a judgement of guilt, particularly when that information could establish innocence, you should not presume guilt.
Whether this is a lie is irrelevant to what the facts at hand support. Whether this is all the facts that exist is irrelevant to what judgement you should make from the facts at hand. Whether this came from is a married woman or an unmarried woman or a group of women is irrelevant to the facts on hand. If you think the OP is lying about what the women provided, feel free to accuse them of not providing, and if you think the woman has not provided all the information she could, feel free to request, but either way would be an acknowledgement of the limitations of the information.
There are well established errors in logic and reasoning that derive from deferring to groups of people just because there is a group (bandwagoning), or basing trust off of the demographics of a group (prejudice), and particularly the gender of a group (sexism). This is even more true when dealing with the presentation of information to shape initial impressions, such as priming, the framing effect , anchoring bias, the women are wonderful effect, and so on.
Precisely because cultural and social norms and human psychology are so prone to failures of perception, these seem more than sufficient reason not to presume guilt solely on the basis of an accusation, let alone not invent context not claimed by the accusers to justify the accusation's grounding.
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