Growing Efforts Are Looking At How — Or If — #MeToo Offenders Can Be Reformed
You hear it said about sexual harassers all the time: "Guys like that will never change."
That may be true for those who are out-and-out psychopaths and those with other serious disorders, but experts say most sexual harassers are not in that bucket.
"They're apples and oranges," says forensic psychiatrist and Temple University School of Medicine professor of psychiatry Barbara Ziv, who has spent decades studying both victims and perpetrators of sexual misconduct. Most are "opportunistic offenders" or self-delusional, she says, but they're not beyond help.
"Those aren't individuals who are sort of hardwired to sexually assault," she says. "And those are the people that have the most potential for learning and not doing it again."
Ziv, who will testify for the prosecution in the upcoming rape trial of former film producer Harvey Weinstein, says the bulk of offenders are too often conflated with the most egregious ones who dominate the headlines.
"Even my saying that there's a distinction can be perceived as letting men off the hook," she says. But "the #MeToo movement has to become more sophisticated, and we should, two years out, be able to distinguish between these buckets."
Indeed, two years into the #MeToo movement, with growing focus on when --and if — it's appropriate for men ousted for sexual harassment to return to work, attention is also shifting to
