pleasE read my fancy chart

In order to write my recent post about Junot Díaz and the results of the #MeToo movement, I realized I needed a concrete way to analyze who has faced repercussions as a result of the movement. Luckily, Vox had already created a very thorough interactive page that outlines the specific accusations of sexual abuse that have arisen. Here is the chart I created as a result:

It might appear to have unclear language (why are there distinct columns for sexual harassment, sexual assault, and unwanted sexual contact?), and that is because our legal and social vocabularies around sexual abuse are varied and indistinct. So, I organized based on the direct language from Vox/the survivors––I decided it isn’t my place to try to interpret the accusations.

My initial intent was to count each perpetrator once. However, it wasn’t so easy. There were quite a few repeat offenders who generally left one job but then were caught again at their second or third. To report this, I would treat each instance of report/action as a new perp, since the data I was hoping to gain wasn’t really about individual men. What I was trying to tabulate was how we react to individual reports of sexual abuse. So, if a man was fired for sexual assault at one job and takes a leave of absence for sexual harassment at the next, I would add one number to the “sexual assault” column, one to the “sexual harassment” column, one to the “fired” column, and one to the “leave of absence” column.

Here are some further findings––all graphs were created by my dear friend Allie T, since Google Sheets recently changed its chart-making function, thus rendering me incapable. Click each image to see them larger.

I didn’t expect the process of creating this spreadsheet to be a learning curve in and of itself––it was supposed to be a hurdle to overcome in order to finish my Díaz post. However, dealing closely with the language of abuse and our systemic responses was informative. I learned that our legal definitions of sexual assault, sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and rape all overlap. Other than rape, which has a very clear legal definition, the other three tend to shift amorphously into one another. Moreover, workplace definitions vary greatly, as do the accusations by survivors.

It also revealed that the cases most likely to end in legal action were ones that involved: 1) rape, 2) minors, 3) battery, or 4) extortion. The less well-defined a term was, the less likely it was to lead to prosecution, even though many of the crimes committed are punishable by law. The reason for this seems, to me, to be twofold: firstly, it’s easier for a perpetrator to backpedal if the accusation is broad. Secondly, it must be harder to push for legal action as a survivor if the act committed against you fits underneath a wide umbrella.

Thank you for visiting my fancy chart. If you haven’t read the blog post I created it for, check it out here!