Apparently, I need to clarify
Jul. 30th, 2014 04:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lydyFirst up, I just want to say that I think that physical safety is incredibly important. It's pretty high (or, technically, low) on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. At no point did I mean that this was somehow unimportant. I am also aware of the fact that women have safety and security issues which are gendered. While most victims of violent crime are male, most perpetrators are also male, and women are more likely to be subjected to certain forms of violence than men. Women both by training and physical capacity are less able to defend themselves physically. Moreover, while harassment and violence are not equivalent, I did not mean to deny or minimize the relationship between the two. Not all harassers escalate to violence, but much violence does start with harassment, and it is not the least bit strange or inappropriate for someone subjected to harassment to worry about that escalating to a physical attack.
What I am trying to suggest is that the current use of "safety" when talking about harassment is being used both as a metaphor and a heuristic. As metaphors will, it has metastasized in such a way that it influences how we think about harassment in ways that I think are less than entirely productive. As a heuristic, it has pluses and minuses. There was a quite good article contrasting the way Wiscon dealt with the norovirus versus harassment, and suggesting that the procedures and attitudes used towards the virus were a better model. I thought it was an insightful article in part because it dealt with the fact that the existence of an harasser within the community is, in fact, a community problem. It cannot be adequately dealt with by looking at it only as an interaction between two people. Letting a harasser wander unhindered through the convention has consequences which are not completely dissimilar to letting a virus wander unhindered, and only treating people with symptoms.
However, framing the issue as safety also has draw-backs. All metaphors are incomplete. They help us think about things, help us find useful congruences, but it is a common failing to start to deal with the problem based on the metaphor rather than the thing itself. And the thing itself is always a little different. One of the drawbacks of the safety metaphor is that it leads to paternalism and infantilizing of victims. It can steal agency from the victims. It frames the harassed as a person who has no power, and the harasser as the person with all the power. There are ways in which this is true, but there are also ways in which it is false. Moreover, it has a bad tendency to create a perception that if the person being harassed has sufficient power to resist or respond powerfully, somehow no actual harassment has taken place. It creates a pressure for people who have been harassed to perform a correct victim response. If they fail to do so, then there is a perception that there has been no harm, no foul.
When we think about violence, we often think about our responses as being dictated by the results of that violence. It is a crime to conspire to murder someone, but a considerably lesser crime than actually murdering someone. Breaking someone's nose is punished differently than breaking someone's neck. So when we frame harassment as violence, we often then follow up by wanting to know the exact amount of damage so that we can determine a correct and proportionate response. The problem is that the metaphor is useful but vastly incomplete. The ways in which harassment do violence to the victim map in some ways to physical damage, but not in other ways. When we start talking about emotional damage (and gods, do I believe in emotional damage) we are suddenly in the realm of policing people's emotions. Was she upset enough? Was she hurt enough? Was she sufficiently damaged? While these may be useful ways to think about some of the damage that harassment does, they are not universally applicable.
The previous post was a rant. I was shouting at the top of my lungs out of frustration. I have been following the Wiscon problems for more than a year and I am currently on the board of a fannish club working to create useful policies and procedures. This stuff is enormously hard. It really is. There are a lot of stumbling blocks. And I am getting very tired. This is my community. It is incredibly important to me. I deserve to be a full, participating member of it. And when someone harasses me, even if it doesn't upset or hurt me, it is an attempt to keep me from being a full member. It is an attempt to reduce me to an object, to steal my agency. And even where that attempt fails, it takes up space and time and energy that I would otherwise have available to be a happy, engaged fan having weird arguments at three in the morning in the consuite. And I am entitled to be angry, and I am entitled to recourse, and you, all my friends, my chosen family, my lovers, my enemies, my wonderfully complicated community, should care about this. Should look beyond my safety concerns. Not ignore my safety concerns, but also be interested in whether or not I can participate fully, engage fully, be a complete person. I am not fragile, I am not scared, but I do need you. And I hope that you also need me.
Does this clarify anything, or is it further muddying the waters?
What I am trying to suggest is that the current use of "safety" when talking about harassment is being used both as a metaphor and a heuristic. As metaphors will, it has metastasized in such a way that it influences how we think about harassment in ways that I think are less than entirely productive. As a heuristic, it has pluses and minuses. There was a quite good article contrasting the way Wiscon dealt with the norovirus versus harassment, and suggesting that the procedures and attitudes used towards the virus were a better model. I thought it was an insightful article in part because it dealt with the fact that the existence of an harasser within the community is, in fact, a community problem. It cannot be adequately dealt with by looking at it only as an interaction between two people. Letting a harasser wander unhindered through the convention has consequences which are not completely dissimilar to letting a virus wander unhindered, and only treating people with symptoms.
However, framing the issue as safety also has draw-backs. All metaphors are incomplete. They help us think about things, help us find useful congruences, but it is a common failing to start to deal with the problem based on the metaphor rather than the thing itself. And the thing itself is always a little different. One of the drawbacks of the safety metaphor is that it leads to paternalism and infantilizing of victims. It can steal agency from the victims. It frames the harassed as a person who has no power, and the harasser as the person with all the power. There are ways in which this is true, but there are also ways in which it is false. Moreover, it has a bad tendency to create a perception that if the person being harassed has sufficient power to resist or respond powerfully, somehow no actual harassment has taken place. It creates a pressure for people who have been harassed to perform a correct victim response. If they fail to do so, then there is a perception that there has been no harm, no foul.
When we think about violence, we often think about our responses as being dictated by the results of that violence. It is a crime to conspire to murder someone, but a considerably lesser crime than actually murdering someone. Breaking someone's nose is punished differently than breaking someone's neck. So when we frame harassment as violence, we often then follow up by wanting to know the exact amount of damage so that we can determine a correct and proportionate response. The problem is that the metaphor is useful but vastly incomplete. The ways in which harassment do violence to the victim map in some ways to physical damage, but not in other ways. When we start talking about emotional damage (and gods, do I believe in emotional damage) we are suddenly in the realm of policing people's emotions. Was she upset enough? Was she hurt enough? Was she sufficiently damaged? While these may be useful ways to think about some of the damage that harassment does, they are not universally applicable.
The previous post was a rant. I was shouting at the top of my lungs out of frustration. I have been following the Wiscon problems for more than a year and I am currently on the board of a fannish club working to create useful policies and procedures. This stuff is enormously hard. It really is. There are a lot of stumbling blocks. And I am getting very tired. This is my community. It is incredibly important to me. I deserve to be a full, participating member of it. And when someone harasses me, even if it doesn't upset or hurt me, it is an attempt to keep me from being a full member. It is an attempt to reduce me to an object, to steal my agency. And even where that attempt fails, it takes up space and time and energy that I would otherwise have available to be a happy, engaged fan having weird arguments at three in the morning in the consuite. And I am entitled to be angry, and I am entitled to recourse, and you, all my friends, my chosen family, my lovers, my enemies, my wonderfully complicated community, should care about this. Should look beyond my safety concerns. Not ignore my safety concerns, but also be interested in whether or not I can participate fully, engage fully, be a complete person. I am not fragile, I am not scared, but I do need you. And I hope that you also need me.
Does this clarify anything, or is it further muddying the waters?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-07-30 05:11 pm (UTC)Actual, functioning hierarchies emerge bottom-up, based on how the work gets done, and by who, but get co-opted pretty much faster than immediately by how the social group decides to value different kinds of work. "Decides to value" is not very complicated once one recognizes that this is the mechanism, and not some other (immutable, ancient, or unquestionable) mechanism for assigning value.
Patriarchial norms, which are current social norms, say women can only have a restricted range of values. Asserting that women should, ought, and do have full social value is a conflict with the existing "social group decides" mechanisms for maintaining the current social hierarchy of value. Shifting to "safety!" is a way to avoid having to use some other (unpredictable in its outcomes) set of rules, axioms, and assumptions for assigning social value, because everyone can agree that safety is necessary and important and how can you argue against what is necessary? Even gods can't do that!
So, no, it's not complicated. It might be difficult, personally, and it's certainly difficult socially because many or most people are going to be against anything that says "women are people" is an operant statement without restriction because then they don't know how the social rules work and people on the whole hate that, but it's not complicated.
One of the difficulties is that there isn't a majority opinion that this should really change. Another of the difficulties is that no one is describing harrassment as a refusal of equivalence in part because the whole "I get to define your social existince and how people interact with you on the basis of my needs and preferences" sounds (for excellent historical reasons) like slavery, not assault, and people won't deal well with it at all because they're self-defining as good and will act very badly indeed until you admit they're good.
Something that works needs people to not define as good but to interogate their behaviour, to suppose that their needs and desires have no priority or preference over anyone else's ("are you special?" always to be answered "no" by adults), and to have general, immediate, and vehement social support for "did you ask first?" being a question with immediate and lasting consequences.
Getting there from here? No idea what your local value of "here" is. I suspect the last of those three is the easiest to get somewhere with.