I don't get it

Note: I do not agree with this attitude. I sure don't enjoy unwanted physical contact, on any part of my body.

Investigations into matters like this involve medical examinations, and taking of statements from witnesses and the complainant.

Cowboy ideas about the offender being dramatically carted away minutes after calling the police are unrealistic in my experience.

Even if eventually the person is spoken to by police he will be released on bail, and is free to return to the conference the next day.

Unless the conference organisers do something about it.

No one is legislating against anything.

We are applying our right to self selection.

People are free to be jerks, and others are free to ignore them and exclude them from their community

Really? Because authority figures have, you know, authority. I mean, standing up for yourself is a fine thing to do, but there's a limit to what you can do as a random attendee, and I don't see how it'd be some moral failing to ask the organizers to do their damn job. If someone is harassing people, the appropriate response is to kick them out, and I can't do that, but the conference organizers can (and should). Or would you prefer, like, some sort of vigilante justice?

The fact is, in a conference setting, some people have more authority than others. So those people have to make a choice. They can use that authority to back up the jerks (e.g., by egging them on from the podium or just ignoring legitimate complaints) or to back up the non-jerks (e.g. by kicking out people who harass others and not inviting them back).

And the nature of authority is that whichever option they pick is likely to have much more of an effect on how the conference turns out than whatever I do. So in practice, telling attendees that they should stand up for themselves and stop whining means (1) you're saying that it's okay for people with authority to back up the jerks, and (2) it's the responsibility of individual (female) attendees to take on not just the jerks, but the whole conference apparatus.

What you are saying is that adult victims of any kind of harassment (be it sexual harassment at open source conferences, bullying at work, war rape, ...) have to deal with it on their own, because it's their own fault?

True, but we can make it very difficult for them to do it at our conferences.

This isn't about stopping everyone in the world from being jerks, this is about keeping it out of our conferences, so that a minority don't spoil them for everyone else, and prevent us from getting more contributors.

One jerk can do a lot of damage, including stopping 10 or 100 people from contributing to a project or attending a conference.

James

There's plenty the organisers can do. They can eject the individual concerned. They can prevent them from attending the conference in future. They can let other conference organisers know what trouble they had and how they dealt with it. They can make it clear that this kind of behaviour is not tolerated. They are in no way bound by a requirement that law enforcement be involved, and if they insist on that then they are failing in their duty towards their attendees.

It's a scale. Some inappropriate acts can be dealt with by simply taking the person concerned aside and suggesting that they modify their behaviour. Other acts are sufficiently serious that the involvement of law enforcement may be required even if the victim isn't willing to do so themselves. But they're different extremes of the same thing, and talking about both in the same context isn't mixing things up.

Their first responsibility is to avoid this situation happening in the first place.