One woman complained. USCF assigned her an escort. More women complained. USCF banned the guy.
This sounds completely reasonable, unless the first woman provided proof, you can't just ban someone because of an allegation. But they took steps to ensure her safety at future events.
What does Lichess want here? They say it's insufficient, but they never really say what should have been done.
Edit: to clarify, I'm talking about the incident with Timur
Your characterisation ignores the other case, of course, but on the one you're referring to note that there were two complaints prior to the multiple ones and the ban was a secret, partial ban.
It's very likely there would be no proof, but a competent investigation can talk to those involved and come to a conclusion. Patterns of behavior can be established over time. And there may have been say CCTV that an investigation could obtain that the woman herself couldn't immediately provide.
Both of the offenders here have multiple allegations against them -- escorting one woman doesn't protect other women (and presumably ends at the edge of the venue), and escorting all women isn't a scalable solution.
Timely, competent investigations of allegations and the removal of predators is the only way. But orgs are learning this stuff, and are staffed and run by humans. Where mistakes are made they should be owned up to.
For women to be able to enjoy chess without fear of assault, and for chess clubs to raise the bar on protecting the physical integrity of their members.
> they never really say what should have been done
It’s for the individual club to decide, but I think the answer is uncontroversial and obvious: find out if their member assaulted another member and kick them out of the club permanently.
> However, in our opinion, both US Chess and STLCC have failed to demonstrate an important aspect of accountability – a willingness to acknowledge and address past shortcomings. We do not think that reconciliation will be possible without this acknowledgement.
Im sure you've watched House M.D
Ban the people. Completely totally remove the people who are assaulting underage girls from any event and any association. Don't "provide an escort", wtf. Ban them.
There's much talk in media and on social media about accusations of pedophilia, but when there are multiple real predators being outed there is a surprising amount of people who come out to support treating them with white gloves. The fact it's taking lichess to disassociate with these organizations to attract attention to their lack of urgency and care for victims is deplorable.
Kick the harassers out.
PyCon has one thats pretty comprehensive: https://us.pycon.org/2023/about/code-of-conduct/
The US chess one seems out of date and frankly lacking anything to stop misbehavior outside of chess: [PDF] https://new.uschess.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/...
or the "safe play guidelines" which are a little better: https://new.uschess.org/us-chess-safe-play-guidelines
The thing I wonder after reading this is how many organizations struggle to deal with these types of situations. Employers, schools, universities, clubs all seem to now have to have a process to address these things. And yet they seem to fumble it regularly, in every direction. The results are all over the map, ignore the issue, too strict, knee jerk in about every way, sometimes every way...
It occurs to me that none of these organization naturally have a good mechanism for dealing with these things, nor do they necessarily have people qualified to do so (even Big US Universities for all their resources have demonstrated their own ability to do poorly in every way).
We all have ideas about how we think these groups should act after the fact, but how do you really get it right?
How does any organization decide "We're going to address these kinds of claims, investigate, and act appropriately?" Where do they even start?
- ban binding arbitration and all other extrajudicial legal proceedings
- strengthen whistleblower laws so that NDAs against people with whistleblower protection are non-enforceable
- train a subset of police to properly investigate sexual assault / harassment allegations
- provide a low cost alternative to civil court similar to small claims court for situations where there is a large asymmetry in the financial resources of the two sides of the proceeding.
Sure.
>strengthen whistleblower laws so that NDAs against people with whistleblower protection are non-enforceable
Ok.
>train a subset of police to properly investigate sexual assault / harassment allegations
Not really something the feds can handle except for the minority of cases that end up in federal jurisdiction. Most policing is local.
>provide a low cost alternative to civil court similar to small claims court for situations where there is a large asymmetry in the financial resources of the two sides of the proceeding.
I was going to point out that your first two point would increase the world load on our already overworked court system. But you noticed that. The only problem with this approach is there really isn't an existing framework, as far as I know, that would allow for this. You would want it to be held to the same standards as normal courts. In which case it will be just as slow and expensive. The law is complicated and therefore requires professionals. And professionals are expensive. I don't have a solution to this. But saying, we need simpler and cheaper courts sounds nice but doesn't really work if you still want things like innocent until proven guilty and beyond a reasonable doubt.
> It occurs to me that none of these organization naturally have a good mechanism for dealing with these things
Can there even be a good mechanism to deal with these things, when most often there isn't any evidence and it's a "he said she said" situation? That's a fundamental problem with these situations that's intrinsically hard to solve.
One reasonable course of action is to say "we'll see if evidence accumulates, and if there's multiple independent complaints then we'll assume it's true". Which is pretty much what they did here, and now they're facing flak for that, as being on the "ignoring the issue" side of the fence. Another is to say "zero tolerance, any complaint and you're out". And that has obvious problems of being weaponized, and would end up on the "too strict, knee jerk" side of things.
Men and women are both incredibly complex and varied, and organizations having to judges of characters and relationships with limited evidence is going to be inevitably fraught with peril.
From Universities to chess Leagues they are assembling what amounts to their own judges, juries, and prosecutors.
If someone is committing sexual assault why does their seem to be this avoidance of the existing legal system and a push into these opaque and what amounts to amateur alternative legal systems?
Suppose we say that the legal system needs to have 95% probability of guilt to render a guilty verdict, and its associated consequences such as imprisonment and/or restitution. A high threshold makes sense for such systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio).
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you have a person for whom you have 80% probability of their guilt. That, then, is not enough to render a guilty verdict; 20% is clearly "reasonable doubt".
80% probability of guilt, however, is absolutely enough for reasonable people to say "I don't want this person associated with my organization", or "I don't want this person presenting at my conference".
This, among many other reasons, is a very good reason for organizations to have their own standards which are independent of those of the legal system.
But civil cases have a far, far lower bar. 4/5 is acceptable, especially considering that sentencing can incorporate uncertainty.
Plenty of cases succeed in civil court where they would fail in criminal court.
I expect a "chess federation" to be good at.....federating chess.
Why do we expect a chess federation to be good at policing, investigating claims, collecting evidence, following precedent, passing judgments, and balancing collective and individual interests?
We have actual, legitimate justice systems that do this. Are they perfect? No. But why do you expect a bunch of chess nerds/experts to be any better at it?
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You're complaining that a plumber did a crap job fixing your car. I 100% believe you that they did a crappy job, but also maybe you should have hired someone else?
This is true, but also has excused discrimination in the past (e.g. white flight), and can very easily lead to the tarring and feathering of innocent people.
At the individual level, not associating with potentially dangerous people is fine and smart. When large swaths of people avoid the same potentially dangerous people, though, the "potentially" part really does merit a bit more weight.
And that is one of Lichess's biggest complaints....the sanctions were not publicized enough.
That's as may be, but the answer isn't to let every HOA and garden club run their own kangaroo courts.
If by existing social issues, you mean lack of evidence, statute of limitations, then sure.
For instance, I see zero evidence that anything occurred here. There may be evidence, but the point of the justice system is to publicly disclose it and debate it such that the public can make a determination. Once determined (by a jury) a punishment, agreed upon by the society is handed down.
The alternative is issuing unsubstantiated claims to the public. Then blacklisting and deplatforming the person do they cannot defend themselves. To be honest, that’s effectively what led to the US revolution — lack of due process, ability to redress grievances and representation.
It’s very unamerican, that said, many of these organizations that do this aren’t American so it is what it is.
Also, there are lots of things that are problematic but not crimes. "Sexual misconduct" could mean sexual harassment, which isn't a crime but shouldn't be allowed in organization.
Having said that I do agree with you (and thus my other comment) that these informal efforts by people who understandably are not qualified to deal with these things, are a mess too, and I'm not at all sure how they could possibly get it right often enough.
US Universities in their effort to make the path less difficult have demonstrated that just pressing your foot down on the balance of justice is not justice.
Yeah, it's a difficult path because of pesky things like evidentiary rules, burden of proof, and presumption of innocence. False accusations happen, especially in mega-competitive spaces like sports/chess competitions. I'm not sure why so many folks believe that destroying someone's livelihood, career, and reputation is ethically permissible based simply on a paragraph with zero transparency.
Hypothetically, if you were falsely accused, wouldn't you want a fair trial?
And for good reason, the current legal system assumes innocent until proven guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt (for criminal cases). Civil cases have a lower burden of proof.
These protections are there for a reason. Everyone has likely been accused of things they didn’t do. We shouldn’t assume anyone’s word without a decent amount of certainty.
sexual “misconduct” is even more insidious, because most people making the accusations are doing so long-after the fact, often have outside motivation for making claims AND likely have too low of a burden for a civil or criminal case… In other words, feel free to make claims, but without proof it’s hard to justify ruining someone’s life.
To me, the “amateur legal system” you identity is closer to a more formalized version of what a friend group might do when they decide to ostracize someone due to boorish, misogynist or similar behavior. Since the chess association size exceeds the Dunbar number a lightweight process is needed to ensure proper function.
It doesn’t surprise me that organizations actively try to avoid it.
I lived with someone for several years who was in a legal dispute with their tenants. Once one lawsuit was over, the other part retributed. I never knew them when they were not either suing or getting sued.
It taught me this: don’t ever go to court if you can avoid it.
Yes, yes we do. The current legal system is inadequate to the task. It is costly, intimidating, strenuous to wield and aggressive in its penalties. Accountability and recompense can be more judiciously attained by interpersonal conflict-resolution practices at the lowest institutional level, ie at the leaf-nodes of the social hierarchy.
By asking us to rely on an unreliable legal system, you are asking us to accept victimization. If institutions return to "passing the buck" as they broadly were before, eg #MeToo, the buck will not stop. It will ricochet off the indifferent law.
This feels much more like one person making a decision about who he would and would not associate with.
I don't disagree that moral panics and mass hysteria are real but this does not seem to be a case of that.
Our existing systems are actually just plain bad at handling "intimate crime", for a whole host of reasons. AFAIK the US legal system was designed first to handle "the state versus a person", and second "contract enforcement". It's also designed "to be blind" (to very arguable success), and "slow but inevitable" ("gears of justice").
One of the main reasons it doesn't work to well in community management - Call it the "tip of the iceberg" effect. Where there's one problem, there's usually a whole bunch more, even if they're smaller. I removed someone from my community in exactly this kind of situation; they had a couple of explosive breakups, and once people started talking more and more came out (outside of the relationships).
After we'd (myself and another leader) talked to everyone we possibly could, two things became apparent: 1) He'd end up hurting someone else again if we kept him around, and 2) none of the "evidence gathering" steps were necessary. If someone is unable or unwilling to accept any causation of another's harm, then they can do nothing to prevent that harm from recurring. Which matters when it's clear that it keeps happening, and they're always involved.
So yeah - all of that and more means the legal system is poorly suited to handling what's basically a heavy-duty form of community moderation.
Increasingly, many legal disputes are handled through arbitration, which is literally this. There are a lot of motivations for avoiding the courts: arbitration is usually faster, cheaper, and can be more discreet. From my understanding, big entities really only take something to court when they want to rely on legal precedent or establish a new binding precedent.
There's also the fact that Lichess is probably happy to associate with people who have committed other kinds of crimes - are you suggesting they should blacklist everybody who has been convicted of a crime in the past? Or should they make a list of what crimes are/aren't ok? If we're making a list of which crimes are "actually" bad, then aren't we back at the same problem of Lichess having to decide what they're ok associating with?
Additionally Lichess isn't even based in the US, so which country's criminal laws is the owner supposed to use? It's not like any of these alleged crimes could be tried in France.
There's just no other solution to what you're presenting that is reasonable at more than a surface level.
Big organizations like universities, chess leagues, and workplaces are in a middle ground. Exile from such a group is a much bigger deal, as it can threaten someone's livelihood, future, or incur other fairly large opportunity costs. However, they can't throw someone in prison, so compared to the nation state they need less confidence to levy their punishments, and thus are expected to be less accepting of members getting away with inappropriate behavior.
All of this comes to head with the issue of sexual harassment and assault. It's a very hard category of crime to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt", because often the only witnesses are the victim/accuser and the perpetrator/accused. If an organization takes a stance of only kicking someone out when they are convicted in a court of law, they are stating that they are willing to accept some level of misconduct, which is greater than most would like.
Within the family, it may not be there in writing, but Mom and Dad run the show. The rules are the ones they set for the household. The neighborhood has its norms, unspoken or baked into ordinances. The congregation has its rules, the corner store has a boss that says what goes...
If you have an organization, and it has even the slightest hint of formal governance, you have rules (laws) and a legal system. In this case, yes, chess organizations must deal appropriately with problems of sexual misconduct, including following the laws of the land. In the situations cited in the article, in particular, even if there were now criminal charges leveled, the legal system of the chess federations should have ensured that one member could not gain a position to continue preying on other members. They should do this regardless of what other supervening laws exist. Those other laws will come into play, but there does need to be governance of acceptable behavior within their sphere of concern.
Well, from a practical stand point not every instance of inappropriate behavior is illegal, and not every instance of illegal behavior is prosecutable. If you want standards for behavior in your group you probably have expectations of time to resolve and level of evidence than the legal system is not going to meet.
From a more philosophical perspective it would make sense for groups to form and enforce norms - the law sets a minimum expectation of behavior after all and has very different goals/principles. A legal system might err on the side of leniency/underspecifying in order to preserve liberty, and have requirements around process and evidence in order to put constraints on the authority to put a person into a cell for the rest of their life. Rules around who can attend a tournament don't have the same scope or impact and are probably not improved by including the assumptions of the legal system.
From a pedantic standpoint they are not at all creating another legal system because they have precisely zero authority, they are enforcing social norms through freedom of association. That you might see similarities probably isn't surprising given the need to investigate claims and take action, especially given the increased desire around transparency and hence published standards.
Side note; I feel your core observation but I personally wonder how much is something new vs a function that has broadly existed in organizations that is becoming visible due to expectations around transparency and action.
At base, because the legal system:
- takes too long to be a useful preventative measure
- frequently involves re-traumatizing the victims, including via requiring public testimony of incredibly personal information
- often results in acquittal, frequently because victims choose not to submit themselves to trial
The goals of the legal system are essentially at odds with those of civic organizations. The legal system is designed to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, a solid standard to use before e.g. incarcerating a person.
However, this standard is not necessarily stringent enough to vet people who supervise minors. More to the point, no private group of people is compelled to allow any individual to associate with them.
That's not a legal system, and the reason for it is (or, at least, includes) that the organizations themselves have duties that are enforceable through the actual legal system, and they would rather not fail those duties in a costly way. And those duties often include duties to both potential victims and accused, so determining the facts in order to take the correct actions to uphold those duties requires some method of resolving disputes.
> Society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it, that is, who have deserved equally well absolutely. This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens, should be made in the utmost degree to converge.
Alternative language for what you're saying: Should we force people to allow everyone access to them/their company/their spaces? If not, how do we determine what groups are and aren't protected?
Tangential: Why would banning criminals be fine for you, and what crimes warrant exclusion? Should tax cheats be excluded from chess orgs? What about someone with a DUI?
Banning criminals is a popular rhetorical construction used by those who do not have felony records, in order to scaremonger others into supporting an argument that promotes existing biases and status quos; in this case, in favor of the “sexual misconduct is disregarded” bias.
The needs of a small organization are different from an entire state. Transgressions can be disruptive or destructive to organization-scale relationships without rising to criminality.
And the the traditional feminist answer of "why can't the legal system address sexual assault" is "it wasn't meant to." A famous quote on this is that from a woman's perspective rape isn't illegal it's regulated. The definitions of it and the standards to be met for deciding it has taken place were decided by men, to enforce against other men. The way women feel about their interactions with men has not traditionally been a prioritized factor in the legal system.
"Regulated" in the sense that the average prison term for [edit: federal cases of, see reply for closest approximation I could find for non-federal average sentence] sexual abuse is 17 years?
their average sentence was 211 months - https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
