Thanks for the thoughts.
For other crimes it makes perfect sense to ask questions about behavior and what came before. If someone breaks into your house, you’ll definitely be asked if you know the person, if they’ve been in your house before, if they have a key, if they’ve lived there, if the door was locked, and a lot of other questions.
Those circumstances are important in determining what happened and can be mitigating in both a legal and moral sense.
I guess part of what prompted this was there seem to be more cases where it appears everyone was ok with a certain level of behavior that could be considered harassment, and then something changed. Sometimes that’s escalation in the behavior and sometimes it’s something else. A relationship ends, things get nasty, a pattern forms, etc.
At that point, whatever consent was given is withdrawn and the entirety of the behavior is being considered harassment. That doesn’t seem quite right, but I don’t have a clear solution either.
I know the “norm” for too long was that the victims character would immediately be questioned. The thinking was that it was obviously their fault they were harassed in some way, because that stuff doesn’t happen to people who live right and follow the rules. Or something like that. I’m glad we’re away from that.
But I think we’re seeing cases right now where the opposite is true. That the assumption is it doesn’t matter what came before, or the circumstances, the victim is in the right. That doesn’t seem quite right either.
Granted, most of this those observations aren’t in a legal sense, but more in a “media and public opinion” sense, but I was curious how others thought about it.