Reporting of Sexual Harassment and Cascading Behavior in Networks
“After Weinstein: A List of Men Accused of Sexual Misconduct and the Fallout for Each” – SARAH ALMUKHTAR, LARRY BUCHANAN and MICHAEL GOLD | NY TIMES
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/10/us/men-accused-sexual-misconduct-weinstein.html
This article summarizes the list of men that have been identified in the past few months as sexual harassers. While there was longstanding and widespread knowledge of sexual abuse in the entertainment industry and society in general, there has been an explosion of allegations against prominent men lately. Powerful men from Harvey Weinstein in Hollywood, Louis C.K. in comedy, and Charlie Rose in television news, have all been accused of very serious sexual misconduct. Due to their powerful status, women have faced major obstacles in coming forward with sexual misconduct allegations in the past, however this seems to be changing.
This explosion in allegations seems to match our discussion of the tendency of behavior to cascade in networks. With every woman that comes forward to expose this disgusting behavior, it socially warrants the ability for other women to come forward, do the same, and be taken seriously by society. This brings the q threshold down for more women to adopt the behavior of coming forward with allegations. Additionally, this effect is greatly speed up by the internet, as it allows women to connect with each other and share their experiences to a wider audience, changing the behavior of nodes in the network faster. Hopefully sometime soon this behavior of exposing sexual misconduct and accepting allegations of misconduct will spread throughout the whole of society, and the sexual misconduct will drop considerably.