| Blog and Media Roundup - Thursday, December 14, 2017; News Roundup | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Dec 14 2017, 04:59 AM (86 Views) | |
| abb | Dec 14 2017, 04:59 AM Post #1 |
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https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/UCSF-fires-head-of-sexual-harassment-prevention-12428999.php UCSF fired head of sexual harassment prevention office By Nanette Asimov December 13, 2017 Updated: December 13, 2017 7:45pm The medical school confirmed that it fired Cristina Perez-Abelson in April after an investigation prompted by a whistle-blower found she also had instructed her staff to hide files from an auditor. She had been on paid leave since June 2016, according to the investigator’s report obtained through the California Public Records Act. Perez-Abelson denied the findings and called the investigation process inadequate. In an interview, she painted a picture of an office overwhelmed by rising numbers of sexual harassment complaints, too few employees, and poor guidance from University of California headquarters on such key questions as when the official start date of a complaint should be. UCSF said it had fired Perez-Abelson “for serious misconduct that included instructing her subordinates to withhold files from an auditor, falsify dates on case files in her office and backdate an investigation report. This action was taken after a thorough investigation into whistle-blower complaints.” Perez-Abelson, an attorney, was hired in August 2013 and soon became director of UCSF’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination — just as the number of complaints at UCSF spiraled upward. Nine UC Berkeley students and alumnae had just come forward, accusing campus officials of treating their sexual assault allegations too lightly, an action that precipitated an avalanche of sexual harassment complaints on university campuses across the country. Within months, dozens more students from UC alone had filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Education accusing administrators of mishandling their investigations. Perez-Abelson said her predecessor at UCSF handled about 40 complaints a year. Her workload, she said, jumped to 250 a year. “I don’t think anybody expected that to happen,” she said. “And I had no investigators for a very long time.” Perez-Abelson investigated some of the cases. Others, she said, went to her associate director. Some went to outside investigators and some to human resources — which often bounced them right back because they were overworked, she said. Meanwhile, UC changed its sexual harassment policy three times from February 2014 to January 2016. “I would scream from the rooftops,” Perez-Abelson said, recalling her frustration. “There was no guidance in how to implement them.” On June 10, 2016, someone called UC’s whistle-blower hotline and said Perez-Abelson had “repeatedly instructed staff to cover up and put inaccurate dates” on the cases they were investigating. She was placed on leave a week later, the report says. Staff members in the prevention department interviewed for the investigation called it a “regular practice of Perez-Abelson to delay assigning cases that came into the office. When assigned, the cases typically had a date in the file that was later than the date the complaint was actually received,” according to a copy of the investigative report. One of the unnamed employees gave the example of a case involving a faculty member that remained unassigned on the director’s desk for about nine weeks. When the employee asked about it, Perez-Abelson replied, “Stop nagging,” the staff member told the investigator. Date changes ranged from 24 hours to three months after the harassment complaint came in, according to the report. Employees told the investigator that it was done to make UC appear more efficient. Several employees also said that files had been stashed under desks to prevent an auditor from seeing them. The investigator upheld both allegations. Perez-Abelson denied concealing files and said they only set aside boxes that contained old and irrelevant files. Asked by the investigator if she had instructed a staff member to inflate the number of cases her department closed each month, Perez-Abelson said, “absolutely not.” She told The Chronicle that it was never clear what date an investigation should formally begin. Amid the confusion, she said, she’d had dates changed “to improve the record keeping.” A spokeswoman for UC’s Office of the President, which sets policy for the 10 campuses, said that for years, campuses have had 60 days to conclude sexual harassment investigations — but she acknowledged that until February, it’s been “unclear how campuses marked the beginning of that investigation time frame.” In February, UC clarified that investigations must begin on the date a notice letter is sent to the complainant and the accused, said Claire Doan, the spokeswoman. Perez-Abelson said that having the dates altered on reports “was really correcting, not changing” them. “The allegation that I did it to shorten the time frame was just crazy. It’s nuts.” She said she had nothing to gain by suggesting that her department was more efficient than it was. “I’m begging every week — I need additional staff! Look at my office! Stacks and stacks of cases!” she said. “When you’re the person sitting across from the victim, and you’re listening to her complain — and you know you have no one to assign to the case — that wrenches your heart.” UCSF said the campus has improved its handling of sexual harassment complaints by hiring more and better-trained staff, and a new director. Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NanetteAsimov |
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| Quasimodo | Dec 14 2017, 09:42 AM Post #2 |
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Let's see... suppose there is a suit against powerful entities, and the suit may involve testimony about felonies and conspiracy by ranking members of the NAACP. And that the judge is a lifetime worker for (from the age of 13) and lifetime member of that organization. And that said organization was potentially part of a conspiracy (or several overlapping conspiracies) to falsely convict plaintiffs of a crime that never happened. Moreover, the conduct and rulings and interventions using his judicial prerogatives might appear to be biased on behalf of the defendants, even to the stalling in taking of depositions (such that two witnesses died in the interim). Should plaintiffs' attorneys in such an example had sought a new judge? |
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| abb | Dec 14 2017, 01:36 PM Post #3 |
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https://newrepublic.com/article/146255/backlash?utm_content=buffer50dd8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer Backlash The implications of sending Al Franken packing are starting to become clear on Capitol Hill. And they are troubling. By Elizabeth Drew December 13, 2017 “You know who’s going to get hurt by this?” a member of Congress asked me recently, referring to the about-time uprising of women against predatory men. “Women.” He explained that male members of Congress are now going to be reluctant to hire a woman when they have the option of hiring a man for a job, and that very attractive women would be particularly at a disadvantage in obtaining jobs on Capitol Hill. (Buxom is out.) Self-protection, in other words, might well lead to a new form of discrimination. And this could travel beyond elected politicians, though they’re feeling especially worried now. Members of Congress have been speaking uneasily among themselves ever since Al Franken was drummed out of the Senate by many of his Democratic colleagues in early December. Nobody wants to talk about it on the record, but politicians in both parties and in both chambers remain disturbed by how Franken was dealt with by some of his Senate colleagues. In particular, a number of Senate Democrats were bothered by how Franken was treated, as was a large but unmeasurable portion of citizens. And some of the unfortunate implications are already becoming clear. The whole thing happened with startling speed—no deliberations, no process, and no pause for thought, it seemed. The main actors against him got increasingly worked up—and they struck at the first opportunity. The entire episode, from when the first complaint about Franken was aired to when he announced unhappily that he’d leave the Senate, took three weeks; his self-appointed prosecutors turned on a dime, at first supporting and then throwing process (consideration by the Senate ethics committee) to the wind. There wasn’t even a meeting of the party caucus to deliberate and discuss. (Male Democratic senators with misgivings didn’t want to get in the way of the women.) A group of Democratic women senators got up a head of steam; its ringleader, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, declared, a doctrine of “zero tolerance.” “Enough is enough!” became not just an expression of exasperation but a policy. With this precedent members of Congress (and others as well) became vulnerable to the acts of people not of good will. What is the protection against someone or several people deciding to gang up on a member of Congress by inventing incidents? What’s particularly disturbing about the Franken affair is that a senator was driven from the seat he was elected to because he’d become inconvenient. The death knell came with the seventh—or was it the eighth?—complaint about Franken touching or patting or whatever some woman’s bottom, or in one case (following the original charge of his forcing his tongue down the complainer’s throat) asking for a kiss. Almost all of these charges were of actions before he came to the Senate and several were anonymous. But it was less these acts—immature and jerky, to be sure—that threatened to overturn the verdict of the voters of Minnesota, than the fact that the charges were continuing to be brought. (An option would be to demand good behavior or else, and leave it to the next election.) What was the inconvenience caused the Democrats by the sudden spout of complaints about Franken? Well, you see, the Democrats—Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer weighed in, probably sounding Franken’s doom—didn’t want to have to answer the “what-about” question when they attacked the Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore for the documented charges against him of pedophilia or when they attempted a new assault on Donald Trump’s predatory behavior toward women in the past. Wait. The voters knew about Trump’s aggressiveness toward women when they elected him president. (True, a majority didn’t vote for him, not by a long shot, but are we going to get into the fine points of the Electoral College’s—or Russia’s—role here? Trump won the election.) They’d heard the Access Hollywood tape. The recent calls for Trump to resign over his sexual exploits strike me as pointless. (But of course they yield good publicity.) Obviously, he’s not going to, and Franken’s having been discarded wouldn’t make it even a teensy bit more likely. A senator is forced out of his seat for a talking point? Politics usually proceeds on the basis of mixed motives. We can’t know which of the senators pushing Franken to go was doing so to get him out of the way of their own ambitions. He’d begun to have around him that hazy presidential talk that also hovers over at least 20 other Democrats. A number of commentators have said that while shoving Franken aside was, well, unfortunate, it was excellent politics for the Democrats to arrange to have a “clean slate” when it came to the matter of sexual hijinks. Well, at what cost? Is almost any sexual infraction subject to, in effect, capital punishment—the loss of a seat in the Congress? Have Senator Gillibrand and some of her allies thought through what “zero tolerance” means? If loss of a seat over one infraction is considered too dire—if such lenience were to occur—then how many gaucheries would be sufficient to drive an elected official from office? Does it matter what they were? Are consensual affairs to be permitted? How consensual is consensual when the man is the woman’s employer? How are such decisions to be made? Is the punishment to be different if such reports come about at a time when one party isn’t trying to embarrass the other one? Or to decapitate its leader? Would the same infractions that have already cost a senator his job be considered less serious then? These aren’t hypothetical questions. And they’re all about to become more difficult. Rumors are all over Washington, and are the subject of concerned conversations on Capitol Hill, that at least one major newspaper is planning an expose of a large number of randy, self-indulgent members of Congress—perhaps some 30 or 40 of them, it’s said. Capitol Hill has long and widely been known as a place where Eros and opportunity meet. Now that the subject is out in the open—will that lead to an exodus of lawmakers? The great correction is overdue; can we pull it off without short-circuiting democracy? |
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