[booty]

Sure, I perfectly understand how bars work. Like you say, it's totally possible nobody at the bar knew this woman was being harassed. Especially if this guy has plenty of experience being a creep and has gotten good at doing without attracting attention.

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.

[lambda]

OK, sure. If your response is not "it's not the conference organizers problem" but "we should also try to look out for each other in social situations," I will agree wholeheartedly with that.

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.

[JohnBooty]

I'll drink to that!

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.