Those whose instincts tell them to side with the accused, rather than at least considering the prospect of
taking accusations against them seriously, often express a fear of needlessly tarnishing someone’s
reputation. For a man, it’s too big a thing to lose, too much of a risk to their mental and professional
wellbeing. Nevermind worrying about the victim’s trauma and the well-documented effects of what
surviving an ordeal like sexual harassment does to a person.
I’ve long suspected that blindly believing men who have been accused of harassing women is a sure sign of
rancid misogyny – some unexamined, bubbling-under-the-surface mistrust of anything women say or do,
even if the evidence gives no real reason to reject their statements.
But exactly what drives some men to take up for anyone charged with the accusation of having sexually
harassed, abused or assaulted a person, isn’t quite as straightforward as you’d assume.
In fact, a recent study from Exeter, Bath and Queensland universities has explained that rather than having
an inherent lack of empathy, men who take sides with other men accused of sexual harassment tend to do so
because they have an abundance of it – but for men only, it seems.
The research involved asking men at universities to respond to “clear-cut” examples of sexual harassment,
with more complex cases inviting more scrutiny of victims (essentially, victim-blaming), and yet more
sympathy with men accused of harassing women.
Renata Bongiorno, who led the research, told The Independent:
“It is widely assumed that a lack of empathy for female victims explains why people blame them, but we
actually found that empathy for the male sexual harasser was a more consistent explanation of variability in
victim blame.”
It’s not necessarily surprising news. The men’s rights activists who reserve their outrage solely for the
purpose of arguing that “women sexually harass men too” each time a woman comes forward with her story,
or that taking accusations of sexual harassment seriously just opens up more opportunities to wrongfully
accuse men, clearly have more empathy for their own kind. But it is illuminating in the sense that their
warped perception of complex cases of sexual harassment, which are more common than not, seem to have
a hand in creating more hoops for victims to have to jump through in order to be believed.
Stop and ask yourself why your gut tells you to challenge women rather
than men, why factors like what someone is wearing, or how promiscuous
you deem them to be, trump the facts
It also explains why so many men fail to hold each other accountable. They simply can’t see a reason to
because, on some level, many men feel that doing so would mean admitting fault within themselves.
According to the academics who worked on the research: “Accusations of in-group wrongdoing, as in the
case of a man’s sexual harassment of a woman, may pose a threat to men’s sense of their gender group as
moral.
“To reduce this threat, men may afford male perpetrators the benefit of the doubt and interpret events in a
way that is biased towards that perpetrator’s perspective.”
So, what’s the remedy for this? If speaking out against harassment means men not only don’t believe
women, but also seek to blame them for what they’ve been through, how do we stand a chance of ever
changing that knee-jerk reaction to our truths?