Thinking about how a friend of mine was assaulted at work by her boss, who was a very powerful person at her place of work, I wonder how it would have played out if she had stabbed him instead of punching him in the face. I don't think he would have been deterred by a hat pin, no more than he was deterred by the threat of ruining his career by assaulting his employee. (It is clear this was not his first rodeo)

In the stabbing scenario, he probably would have filed charges, and the police would have taken his side when he claimed she was an unhinged employee.

If he was close enough for her to stab him deeply with a six inch hat pin, then that is evidence that he was too close, and the obvious reason was that he was attacking her.

Typically a six inch hat pin stab will be more effective than a woman's punch in the face.

According to Mom, the hat pin solution is what was common and effective. I'm sure they thought of alternatives.

The attacker would be reluctant to take a hat pin stabbing to the police because the woman might file charges of the attack.

Of course, now a woman can carry a voice recorder of some kind where she screams "No. Stop". Then if the police get involved, she wins. If she gets fired, then with the recording she has a wrongful termination suit.

I'd much prefer the offender being afraid of complete societal ostracization.

Well, one way to pull this off is to have 2+ woman agree that he has attacked them. Then chase this up the management chain to the BoD, to HR, or if he owns the company, to some lawyers. There are a lot of lawyers looking for work, now including a lot of women.

Get the guy on record as an attacker, and then he will have to be really dumb to do it again, even dumber than to do it the first time, which was pretty dumb.