What I'm saying, though, is that the people around them at the bar are far more likely to be able to assist than a conference organizer who's not physically there.
"The point is that conferences should have a policy for how to deal with these kinds of situations. Those policies are probably going to depend on a certain amount of judgement from the conference organizer."
I totally agree that there need to be policies. But policies are just words, and they won't get the job done alone.
What will get the job done is looking out for each other. In social situations, particularly bars, we should all be looking out for each other, especially women, since they're disproportionally the ones on the receiving end of predatory/harassing behavior.
If she went to the bar with a group, every single one of them ought to have been looking out for each other. And yes, I've been in scores of similar situations where I and others have looked out for the welfare of others. You don't need to be an obnoxious "white knight" about it; you don't even need to be overt. Creeps tend to look for girls whose friends aren't paying attention.
Example: Your female friend is caught in a conversation with a potential El Creepo. Play dumb and introduce yourself to the guy in a purely friendly way. Heck, maybe buy a round of drinks. Just knowing that somebody noticed him will often nip things in the bud.
Yes, there are things that we should do while we are there in person. And there are things that should be handled at the conference organizer level, if there is someone who has demonstrated unacceptable behavior at the conference. And, of course, there is also the police level, for things that go so far beyond the bounds as to be able to make it to that level.
I was just concerned that a lot of people were saying things like "well, she doesn't have proof, so we should do nothing" or "well, this should be a police matter, so we should do nothing," and I thought that your comment might be along those lines, "the other people in the bar should have done something, so we shouldn't do anything." Sorry for having misinterpreted you, and yes, I agree that we should fight this kind of behavior at all levels.
As somebody who's organized community gatherings himself (and made plenty of mistakes in this area himself) I do feel that organizers play an important role as you say.
To put it in really literal terms, when I organized my first meetup, we had a mix of under- and over-21 members. I was really concerned about underage drinking. I really strongly let our members know what was expected of them. I think I stopped just shy of threatening to beat them up and/or report them to the FBI if I caught one whiff of something bad happening to anybody, especially the underage members. I definitely got the message across, at least.
While that kind of approach obviously doesn't directly scale/translate to a professional conference, I think the overarching principle is the same. The organizers set the tone, outline accountability, and (if it's a multi-year event) weed out repeat offenders. The rest is up to the community.
All of this is idle speculation that is really besides the point. The point is that conferences should have a policy for how to deal with these kinds of situations. Those policies are probably going to depend on a certain amount of judgement from the conference organizer. They make all kinds of other judgements, about who to include as keynote speakers or accept for talks. One of their criteria should, perhaps, be whether the person in question has stepped seriously out of bounds at previous events.
> I'm wondering where the rest of the community was when this harassment was going on at the bar. The victim says they were there in a group. So a whole group of conference attendees was just standing around, letting this victim be harassed?
You have been to a bar before, right? Many of them are dark, and loud. There can be many conversations going on at once. It's pretty easy, even with a large groups present, for people to have a conversation that no one else can hear, because there's music playing, and they are involved in their own conversation.
If people did overhear, there's always the bystander effect. In groups, people are sometimes less likely to intervene in a situation, because they expect someone else to intervene, or because they see no one else intervening and feel some social pressure not to break the ice.
And we've seen several other incidents like this. Sometimes, it happens off in a corner where no one else is around; or in a hallway in the conference hotel. Those are situations we need to deal with just as much, and we can't depend on there being a helpful bystander.
The only point is that we need a policy. The policy does not need to be bulletproof. These are human situations. There will always be cases that slip through the cracks. Some of them might just turn into a he-said, she-said that can't be resolved. Some people might never come forward to the conference organizers. Some people might abuse a policy to just get someone kicked out that they don't like. But you do your best to try and provide the best, most accepting environment that you can.
And right now, we have a real problem. We have people abusing the lack of any policies, the lack of will of organizers to do anything, to continue coming to events without repercussion for repeated behavior that is clearly unacceptable. We can do better.
You know, the policy might be a warning at first. It might include some form of adjudication if the events are in dispute. It might give someone a cooling off period, and allow them back after a certain amount of time. There are lots of options, and a large space to explore. But it is fundamentally unacceptable that we just say "well, we can't tell what really happened with a legal level of proof, so we're going to keep inviting creeps to our conferences and let anyone who feels uncomfortable with that stay away."