The Cascading Effect of Speaking Out About Sexual Misconduct
http://www.ktvb.com/news/local/cascading-effect-as-women-speak-out-about-sexual-misconduct/495687971
This article analogizes the recent slew of sexual misconduct victims publicly speaking out against their perpetrators with the cascading behavior we’ve studied in class. “From Hollywood to the media to politics, America is witnessing an almost daily barrage of allegations of sexual harassment, assault, and inappropriate behavior,”Boydston writes. The catalyst? Harvey Weinstein’s victims.”It absolutely blew the lid off of this,” WCA Executive Director, Beatrice Black, said. “The courage it took for that individual – that woman – to speak up just changed everything.”
FACES Chief Operating Officer and ADA County Prosecutor’s Office special crimes unit chief, Jean Fisher noted that “This effect of coming forward and more people coming forward and actually seeing companies do something about it I think is really what’s made the difference. It’s that people are really falling…It is the atmosphere that the business itself has allowed to happen in many instances.”
Our model in the course is based on the assumption that as individuals make decisions based on the choices of their neighbors, a particular pattern of behavior can begin to spread across the links of the network. Moreover, per the textbook “Network models based on direct-benefit effects involve the following underlying consideration: you have certain social network neighbors — friends, acquaintances, or colleagues — and the benefits to you of adopting a new behavior increase as more and more of these neighbors adopt it. In such a case, simple self-interest will dictate that you should adopt the new behavior once a sufficient proportion of your neighbors have done so.”
In this analogy, it is easy to see why more and more victims have been coming forward. While at first it may have simply been because others were doing it, it is now clear that each victim does indeed have a self-interest in speaking out: that employers are actually punishing the alleged perpetrators. Thus, the benefits of each victim coming forward has increased as more victims have spoken out.