Harassment: What do we do?

[lydy]

ETA: In the first paragraph of this essay, I said something which can very reasonably be seen as a slam against paganism. I apologize for the phrasing. I was thinking of a particular interaction with a particular person, but in failing to be particular, I was rude to a whole variety of people, including many friends. I apologize for this.

****

So, if you've been following along, you'll have noticed that I've had a pretty full range of experiences with harassment, including having an Harassment Restraining Order taken out against me, experiencing harassment severe enough that the person who did it has been banned from Minicon and Mnstf, and heavily involved in writing the anti-harassment policy for Mnstf and Minicon, and being the Chair of the Code of Conduct Committee for Minicon, which involved handling several actual complaints. I'm glad I'm not a woo-woo pagan, because otherwise I'd have to think that I'd done something to draw all this into my life. Fuck that noise.

The thing that's most recently caught my attention has been Lou Antonelli and Sasquan. For those of you who haven't been making a hobby of the Great Puppygate Train Wreck, the extremely short version is that some guy, in this case Lou Antonelli, sent a letter to the Spokane police alleging that David Gerrold, one of the GoH for Sasquan, was dangerously mentally unbalanced and might incite violence. He then bragged about it on a podcast. There was a round of shock, awe, and horror; an apology to Gerrold from Antonelli; and other things. Sasquan was notified, as is proper. David Gerrold accepted Lou Antonelli's apology. Sasquan issued a statement saying, very roughly, that Antonelli had violated the Code of Conduct, but for Reasons, including a request from Gerrold, they've decided not to ban him.

So, then there's a bunch of Monday morning quarterbacking from just about everybody. Which is fine by me, I like detailed analysis, outrage, and train wrecks. But I'm paying special attention, because on a much smaller scale, this could be me. A lot of people were very upset, and there were two things that caught my eye. The first was a demand for consistent application of the rules, and the second was for transparency. There's a lot of variation on those two themes, but those were the two I am currently noodling on. Consistent application was often equated with zero tolerance.

So, let's start with the actual, root problem. People who feel vulnerable to harassment at science fiction conventions do not trust those conventions to fairly and justly administer the rules. I cannot come close to doing justice to how very reasonable it is for them to feel that way. That distrust? We've built it, brick and mortar, over years. It's not just well deserved, it's hugely massively utterly deserved. Harassment policies have been non-existent, or poorly explained or hugely badly enforced. We have multiple known cases of people being allowed to fuck up because they were well connected, or because the concom didn't want to be arsed, or because concoms just didn't think there was a problem.

The demands for consistency and transparency make a huge amount of sense. This is the way you fix a democratic process that isn't working. Sunshine, lots of sunshine, and clearer rules. And yet, you have only to look at the three strikes laws in various states, or mandatory sentencing, to see how those tools can create new, different, and enhanced problems. If at all possible, I'd like to avoid going down that rathole. We know what those mistakes look like. I'd like to make different mistakes.

In point of fact, I think that the demands for transparency and consistency are actually rooted in a desire that the process not be corrupt. That the rules not be applied only to people we don't like, that the responses to problems be fair and just. And I don't think that transparency and consistency are the way to get there, exactly.

This is, in my opinion, an incredibly hard problem, made harder by the fact that we are starting from a position of having screwed up royally, massively, and utterly.

CONSISTENCY

Let's start with consistent application of the rules, and why I think that we need not to do that.

Example
I have a young woman come to me Friday night of the convention. She's extremely upset. There's a man who has been following her all night. He's followed her into three different room parties, and has repeatedly tried to talk to her. She has consistently told him that she doesn't want to talk to him, and he will not leave her alone. She's afraid to go back to her room because she's afraid he'll follow her there and then know what her room number is.

So, upon further investigation, it is clear that the reporter is telling the truth, there are multiple witnesses, and it is revealed that the subject of the report is:

1) an eighteen year old at his first convention who is very, very drunk

2) the man the reporter broke up with a week ago, and he's following her from party to party, trying to get her to just tell him why she left him

3) George, someone well known to the concom, who's been coming to the convention for 20 years, volunteers sometimes, and has never done anything like this before

4) Mike, who has been coming to the convention for a while. There's no formal report or anything, but literally every woman you ask says, "Euww, him? Let me tell you about the time that..." Stories go back easily twenty years, and some of them involve assault.

5) Nightmare scenario: the subject is your Guest of Honor. He's a big deal name, you've had a significant membership bump this year probably because of him, and he's heavily scheduled on Saturday, including a panel on Harassment at Conventions and another on Why Diversity is Important in Science Fiction. There are a significant number of people at this convention because he's here.

I submit that you absolutely do not want to handle these situations the same. The offense is absolutely identical. Harassment, stalking, making an attendee afraid. Completely unacceptable. And I think that, if I were running the zoo, I would handle them differently.

My drunk eighteen year old, I tell to go home and get sober. I impress upon him that his behavior is utterly unacceptable, and if he behaves that way again, I will bounce him from the convention. Likewise, if I find him illegally drinking again, I will bounce him from the convention. I document so that I remember this next year, if necessary.

The ex-boyfriend, I bounce from the convention. I totally get that love makes you do the wacky, and that he may very well only have a problem with this one person, but it is clearly too soon for him to be around his ex socially, and he violated the Code of Conduct. Go home, do better next year. I document so that I remember this next year, if necessary.

George, long time attendee. I have a conversation with George that starts out with, "George, what the fuck?" While it is very unlikely that there's anything in particular I can do to help George, I'd really like to know. He's actually probably a friend of mine. But I also give him a stern warning, and will bounce him from the con if there's a repetition. I document so that I remember this next year, if necessary.

Mike I bounce. Right now. I also instigate a more thorough investigation after the convention to consider a permanent ban. But that doesn't need to be done right now. Right now, he needs to be gone.

Nightmare Pro: Oh lords. I need to talk to the con chair(s), right fucking now. Then, I find the liaison and regretfully explain that his con got a whole lot more complicated. Mr. Pro now needs 24/7 babysitting. The liaison and I will need to strategize on how that is going to work, and if we need to get someone else to help out, what with the liaison probably having a life. We need to go over the programming schedule. Absolutely, he can't be on the harassment panel. And now I need head of programming, and we need to figure out if the panel needs to suddenly have a scheduling conflict which requires it to be cancelled, or if we just need to keep Mr. Pro away. We need to look at the moderator for the diversity panel, and make a decision about that, too. We also need to go over the program again, carefully, and decide if there's anything else that needs to be adjusted. We really hope not. Then, we need to meet with Mr. Pro, explain the complaint, explain that it's a violation of the Code of Conduct, and explain that he will be babysat from now on. We explain the changes to his programming schedule. This will not be a fun conversation, but there's no way around it. After that is over, I need to have another in depth conversation with the chair(s) about contingency plans. Total nightmare. And, by the way, no way out of this that doesn't involve the internet deciding that pros get special treatment and that my convention is just as corrupt and evil as [insert favorite despot].

But I submit that treating an eighteen year old drunk the same as a known serial harasser, even if I don't have impeccable documentation, is inappropriate. And treating a known quantity with no history of bad behavior the same as a drunk eighteen year old is also inappropriate. At very minimum, they are very different conversations. And those conversations, they're important. They're the way we build towards the future.

And in all of this, I create careful documentation which is available for future iterations of this convention. If ex-boyfriend has a similar meltdown with a different ex in a year or two, then huh, that's kind of a different problem. If George, with a 20 year impeccable history, fucks up again next year, huh, that's a different problem. Mr. Pro we need to not invite back, and absolutely need to keep track of if he decided to exercise his "free membership for former GoH" status.

TRANSPARENCY

Um, yikes? Really, yikes. There are so many good reasons for it, I'm not sure it's the right way forward. And I'm really interested in what people have to say.

Let's start with Sasquan, who I think screwed the pooch in a very important way. When they said that they decided not to ban Lou Antonelli, they said it was in part because of a request by David Gerrold. This is probably true. They should never, ever have said that. The problem is that the convention must own its own behavior. It must be responsible for maintaining and enforcing its Code of Conduct. And they must never put that off on the victim. That's never ok.

As a person who has actually recently been harassed, I can state affirmatively that it was months before I was distant enough from it to have anything like a reasoned response to it. And in the first days after it had passed, I veered wildly from "I want him to die in a fire" to "I think that maybe it wasn't that big a deal" and back again. Ctein, who was a party to the same instance of violation, had similar responses. It is really, really hard to sort it all out. And it puts an additional burden on someone who is already under a strain and is having All The Feels. Moreover, the convention has multiple responsibilities, and they need to remember that there are other people involved. A person who is harassing someone is quite likely to do so to someone else. So even if your reporter is saying, "Well, it's no big deal," that doesn't mean it won't be a big deal to someone else. We also tend to underestimate the amount of damage this stuff does to bystanders. In my theoretical example, not only did the young woman experience grief because of the persistent stalking behavior, but all of her friends and casual bystanders were subjected to acrimonious confrontations. This changes the mood and energy of the party, and can do real damage to some people. We can't stop every unpleasant encounter, nor do we want to. But we do want to foster a better environment than this, surely.

Conventions cannot implement a judicial model for dealing with harassment. We have none of the infrastructure that goes with the legal system. We don't have investigators, prosecutors, defenders, juries, judges, enforcement arms, checks, balances, etc. What we are is a social organization, and as such, what we are making are social judgments. Who do we want to hang out with? Does this enhance our overall environment, or is it detrimental? We can't aspire to certainty, either. In practice, that means that a lot of the information that we use to make these judgments is going to be either confidential or subjective, probably both.

So, when I had a problem with Ken Konkol, I pointed out to the powers that be that Ken has been a known problem for 40 years. All well and good. But when the powers that be looked at that statement, they were also aware of a bunch of contextual stuff. I've only been around Mnstf for about 20 years. I am good friends with people who have been around Mnstf for much longer. They know the types of behaviors I have and haven't tolerated in public. They know how likely I am to confabulate. They have a good sense of how often I get upset in public. The fact that I completely lost my cool, to the point of shouting at the top of my lungs for some little time, is partly understood in the context of a person who almost never does that. And so on. Lots of contextual information. Also lots of reputational information. My reputation and Ken's were well known, and weighed against each other. Much of this you wouldn't really want in a court of law. But I think this is appropriate when looking at a social situation.

Many times, the person who reports harassment is going to have at least some confidentiality issues. Possibly he doesn't want his name used, possibly she wants to have some of the details kept private, possibly they don't want anyone to know they said anything. Possibly you will have witnesses that have confidentiality issues.

Transparency in this case is a huge problem. "Yep, we have a credible report from someone whose name we can't use, backed up by another person we can't identify, about some details we can't reveal." How is saying this better than not saying anything? I fail to see being vague is more likely to cause people to trust us than not saying anything.

TRUST

And, we're back to trust. We've built this lack of trust, and now we're suffering for it. And I'm not sure what they best way forward is. I really feel for Sasquan. I think they handled their public statement badly, but I have no way of knowing if they actually handled the situation badly. Back into theory land: I have a guest of honor, someone invited because he is generally loved and revered. One of my goals, as concom, is to honor him. And he comes to me with this problem, and then tells me, "It would so totally ruin my convention if you banned this guy. I really feel that my harasser and I have come to a good place, and I really need you to let him attend. It's important to me. I know it's not how you would prefer to handle this, but it really matters to me."

I dunno. I have no idea if that happened or not. But if it were me, and my GoH said that, I might let the fucker attend, you know? On strict watch and stuff, but I might. I would have to consider, carefully, how likely the problem person was to be a problem in person, but in the end, I might allow the GoH to influence my final decision. I wouldn't say that in public, though, because I think that's a disaster on wheels. It implies that I'm not accepting responsibility for my decision, and that's a beautiful way to build more distrust. I have no idea why Sasquan did what they did. And I don't think I should. But I wish they'd handled their public face a little better.

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Blogging this; thanx

It's complicated

[livejournal.livejournal.com]

User supergee referenced to your post from It's complicated (http://supergee.livejournal.com/3648469.html) saying: [...] Clear thoughts [...]

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

Here via supergee. The problem I see with this is: Antonelli didn't just threaten Gerrold. He threatened everyone at the convention with a potentially disproportionate armed response. Whether or not this would actually happen or not is irrelevant. What matter is that he invited police attention to a public event, using words such as "deranged", in retaliation for someone being Wrong on the Internet. Context matters, and responses of individuals matter, but they're not the only thing that matters here.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I don't disagree with you. Context matters a lot.

Based on what I know, I would have refunded Antonelli's membership fee, and not allowed him to attend, but I do not know what Sasquan knows. I know only a little bit of what is out there on the net. I am declining to second-guess Sasquan because I literally do not know what they know. I am told they have a very good relationship with the local police. That is also a fact which matters a lot in how serious the threat is. And I would say that this is not, in fact, irrelevant. I'm actually vastly uninterested in punishment as a goal. That Antonelli did something horrid is not in dispute. What I am interested in is policing the social space. Whether or not his actions damage the social space is the important bit, to me. I can create arguments about how people would be uncomfortable in a social space that includes someone who would do such a thing. But I'm interested in real harm, not whether or not Antonelli is an asshole.

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

Having cancelled my WorldCon trip because of discomfort with this whole thing, I can say I'm not comfortable being at a convention with someone who has done such a thing. I don't have a great deal of doubt that he's damaged the social space.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I'm so very sorry you felt that was necessary.

And this is precisely the sort of damage that I am concerned about when talking about harassment and effectively policing our social space. In the end, we have to make a decision: do we want the community to be safe for harassers, or people who do not wish to tolerate harassment. I keep on coming back to this as the central issue. We can't have both.

A friend of mine talks a lot about modeling this as being bad for business, and damaging the brand. I don't find the metaphor as entrancing as she does, but it does have some uses. What we tolerate says a lot about who we are and who we aspire to be. And people will choose to be a part of our community based on that.

What is not clear to me is what Sasquan should have done, nor how they should have publicized it. As I said, since I don't have the same information they do, I am incredibly uncomfortable making judgments about whether or not their decision was correct. If I postulate that there are really good reasons to make the decision they did, I do think I can criticize their public statements. I think they were quite bad, and did not in any way contribute to making people who feel vulnerable at all confident that Worldcon would be a good place for them. I also think that by "blaming" Gerrold, they make themselves look incapable of administering their own policies.

Not meant to be a gotcha question. Real, question: Is there any way that Sasquan could have announced their decision to let Antonelli attend that would have made you feel comfortable to attend Sasquan? If they had said something along the lines of, "We are aware of the issues, we believe that our relationship with the local police is robust and that there will be no problems from that area, and we will be monitoring the situation closely," would that have helped? If they had said something about wishing to know immediately if there was an issue with Antonelli, would that have helped? And if they had said nothing, what would you have done?

I really, honestly, don't have good answers, here. At the moment, I'm struggling to ask good questions.

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

For me, it is more about the actual action than the announcement. The announcement coming in two stages - first the ban announcement, and then the rescinding of the ban based, apparently, on Gerrold's preference - did not help. Ultimately, though, I see this decision as fan preferentialism on a large scale. I just don't see how not banning someone who essentially threatened to SWAT the convention could be a defensible position, regardless of how they announced it or what assurances they offered. I've been involved in convention banning decisions before, and there's always been a concern not just for the specific person who complained, but the entire convention, involved in that decision. I do not see how Gerrold's support could have outweighed the broader concern here. (Obviously, I don't know everything the concom knows, but I've still got Opinions about it.)

Ultimately, the concom don't control the police and they don't control the puppies. The only thing they control is individual access to the convention. I don't know if it was the "right" choice or not, what I know is that I'm not comfortable with it. The choice the concom made makes it clear that it's their game, so I've decided not to play. It doesn't really give the greatest impression, TBH.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the explanation. I haven't seen the term "fan preferentialism" before. Are you referring to the geek fallacy thing where it's terrible to ever exclude anyone? Or is it the fans are slans thing, where we just believe that because people are fans they'll magically behave better? Or some third thing I haven't thought of because I'm on my way to bed.

Any gate, thanks so much for your posts.

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[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Not allowing Antonelli to attend is a reasonable punishment, but it doesn't actually protect the con in the same way that banning a harasser does-- calling the police doesn't require being present at the con.

[evilrooster.livejournal.com]

I think the one thing that's missing from this -- and I know it's not part of harassment policies per se -- is what you do with the accuser. How do you liaise with her, what messages do you send her? Is there anyone whose job it is to listen to her and find out what healing/damage limitation can be done even apart from punishing the miscreant?

Should there be?

[kaffy_r]

I don't go to cons much these days, although I did attend a couple of Wicons within the past couple of years (including Yes, That One, during which I was completely unaware of the problem.) But reading about the issue of con safety, and con transparency, how they connect and synch, how they don't, is very important to me.

What you've written here is good stuff, well thought out, with passion that's well-interbraided with logical thoroughness. Thank you for writing it.

ETA: If I can get to it, and not be swamped by work stuff, I'd like to point people to this post. Is that OK?

[naomikritzer]

I like your examples. The thing I would note about "George" vs. "Mike" is that sometimes the person handling things thinks they've got a George, when they've actually got a Mike -- because this Mike is savvy enough to keep his misbehavior out of the sight of the people powerful enough to do anything about it. Treating the Mikes as Georges is one of the mistakes fandom has made over and over. And it's hard, because there are also genuine Georges out there. There's no easy answer.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Please do. I'm interested in some discussion.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Very, very true. And one of the ways we start to do better is by keeping records. One of the reasons you get Mikes is because concom membership changes, and our institutional memory is crap. And one of the reasons I think we need to use things like reputation and rumor to deal with the problem is that it will help you distinguish between the two, if you ask around enough. And we will still make mistakes. A lot.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I'd like to start out with not doing stupid shit. We need to not treat the reporter as if s/he is the problem. And we need to make it clear that we consider the problem that has been reported our problem, and not their problem. Their problem, hopefully, is now over. A thing happened. I doubt that there's any useful role the convention can play in the healing path deliberately but boy are there things we can do to make it more difficult.

I am coming to think that really good boundaries are important. Keeping track of your appropriate priorities. When I had the thing with Ken Konkol, at one point someone tried to appoint themselves my advocate, and that did not help things. It made me rather angry. I wanted to be heard, in my own voice. I didn't need someone to speak for me. The fact that this person also had a governance role made it even worse. I really needed to rely on her to look out after the needs of the convention and the club, so that I could let that piece of it go, and just worry about me. At the same time, I didn't feel like I could trust her to properly advocate for me, because of her role in governance.

When I first started writing policies for Minicon, I firmly believed that one of the really smart things to do would be to ask the victim what they wanted done. It took multiple, difficult conversations with someone with a good background in the subject to detach me from that idea. It seems so reasonable. But it puts pressure on the reporter in extremely non-useful ways. And it makes them feel responsible for the outcome, even if you don't do what they want. It muddles an already confusing and muddled situation, and forces them to try to maximize different priorities simultaneously. It shifts the focus from the target to the subject in the mind of the target, and that's not where they need to be spending their energy, just now.

I do think it's a good idea to make sure that the target has easy access to someone at the con if they experience sequelae. Someone to call and talk to. And I think that under no circumstances should the convention ever suggest what the target should and shouldn't talk about. It was their experience, we should never attempt to interfere with their ownership of the situation. They probably need to talk to their friends. I know that the support of my friendship network made a huge difference for me.

I don't think that we have the training or manpower to do much in the way of counseling and healing.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

A real "Mike" is fairly easy to spot -- as Lydy indicated, about any woman you ask in the social group will have a story. (This does assume that the "you" doing the asking has enough credibility to get an honest answer when you ask, which isn't always the case. If you don't have anybody with any credibility on this subject on your committee there's another problem....)

But a "George" is relatively hard to be sure of, yeah. Getting easier though -- it's getting more normalized to complain about such problems.

[lcohen]

i have a recent example of a convention where "everyone" knew that an attendee was a mike....only "everyone" didn't. i didn't, for example, and i had been attending that con for about ten years. if you got together with the right people, you got warned, but it was perfectly possible to miss the briefing. which is why it's important to get these things into the institutional memory, not just rely on what everyone knows.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

This. Is. Brilliant.

Have been on various sides of this, have fucked up publicly, have done things that I still think are "right" but which fucked up publicly, and have not ever seen as cogent an analysis of either consistency or transparency as this one.

Thank you.

[evilrooster.livejournal.com]

So there's a bunch of non-obvious things about dealing with reporters.

I am inching toward the idea that we maybe should be thinking about this in the context of harassment policies. Or some way of transmitting this sort of knowledge so that each person don't have to learn it, piece by piece, by experience, on vulnerable people.

Links I found interesting for 21-08-2015

[livejournal.livejournal.com]

User nwhyte referenced to your post from Links I found interesting for 21-08-2015 (http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2511912.html) saying: [...] ) Harassment: What do we do? [...]

Dept. of Catching Up

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User kaffyr referenced to your post from Dept. of Catching Up (http://kaffyr.livejournal.com/374471.html) saying: [...] spaces safe for fans, and the concepts involved therein, I commend to you this thoughtful post [...]

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Some basic guidelines, mostly swiped from Popehat and Readercon:

1) go to a neutral, private location. Unless the target absolutely insists on a public location, which they almost certainly won't. I've heard of horror stories of having a report taken in a hallway or a crowded room party.

2) Find out if the person making the report wants someone with them, a friend, a witness, whatever. They may very well want emotional support. It is best if they are not relying on the person taking the report to provide that.

3) Write shit down. Be certain you understand, but do not suggest that the person making the report is less than truthful. That is not part of taking a report. Assessment comes later.

4) Describe the next steps that will be taken, and give a reasonable time frame. Ask if any of these actions will cause the reporter a problem. (If, for instance, the subject of the report is someone upon whom the reporter is relying for a ride home, and home is several hundred miles away, that's kind of relevant. It shouldn't change how the convention deals with things, but it if you are about to do something that seriously discomfits the reporter, then you also need to ameliorate that if possible.)

5) Establish a way to follow up.

6) Create a written report in a timely fashion, and give a copy to the person who made the report. This turns out, in my experience, to be incredibly powerful. Among other things, it has the semiotics of "We take you seriously." It also allows for error correction. It creates a durable record. It helps clarify things for both the person who took the report and the person who made it; nothing like sitting down with your chaotic notes and trying to create a coherent whole to really clarify the situation in your mind.

7) Once a decision is made, tell the reporter.

These are procedure things, and procedure is fucking important.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Oh, and one other. Do not treat this like a crisis unless it really is. Almost always, you are taking the report some time after the event, and the person giving the report is not currently in immediate danger. You have time. Use it. If the target is too upset to make a good report right now, there is probably absolutely no reason not to let them sleep on it and go over the details in the morning, if that would help. Be very aware of your time constraints, but don't rush off to do stuff that doesn't need to be done this instant just because it feels scary and important.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

And also why, once you have a good institutional memory, you should actually ban the Mike. Because damn!