Formal and Informal Harassment

[lydy]

I've just now read through Meg Frank's document dump on what led her to quit the Sasquan Concom. She disagreed with the decision to allow Lou Antonelli to attend, and disagreed so strongly that she felt she had to resign.

My first thought, after reading them lightly, is that we need to get rid of the distinction between formal and informal reports of harassment. It does real damage, and has, as far as I can tell, no real benefits.

Let's start with the reporter. What you, as the person enforcing the code of conduct, have in front of you is a person who has decided to make a report to you of harassment. This is a person who has gone through the very difficult decision-making process of appealing to the authority of the convention. They may or may not be very upset about the incident that they are reporting. Likely they are. They have also gone through a difficult cost-benefit analysis on making a report. Reporting is not a no-cost exercise. It risks social capital. It takes time and energy. It requires discussing things that the person may very well prefer to ignore.

So, the first question you ask is, "Is this a formal or an informal report?" This is a hugely terrible question. First of all, you are asking someone who may very well be swamped to make yet another choice. The choice coming forward was difficult. Now they have to figure out what kind of report they want to make? It suggests that there are levels of offense, and that it is up to the reporter to choose that level. Probably you will need to describe the exact difference between a formal and informal report. Depending on your organization, it will be different things. Different levels of documentation and investigation. Different levels of response. And this will be complicated to explain. And you will be asking someone who has no expertise in the area to make that choice, moreover someone who may very well feel overwhelmed in the first place. And, to be honest, someone who has only minimal reasons to trust you in the first place.

The question is also an invitation to minimizing. "I don't want to cause too much trouble," is very frequently the first impulse of someone making a report. And a formal report is clearly more trouble than an informal report. Not only does it open the door to minimization, but it also has an implied invitation. There's a subtle suggestion that there's an easier, softer way, and that the reporter should take it. They might be really angry, or really centered and grounded, but if they're frightened, tentative, or don't really feel like they can trust the convention, they're extremely likely to minimize. And this minimization will be entirely independent of the event they are reporting.

The usual distinction between formal and informal is documentation. An informal report keeps minimal or no documentation. A formal report keeps lots. I think this is actually a very bad idea. Quick example: young person comes to me and says that they need to talk about something. I ask if it's a formal or informal report. I describe the difference, and the difference is that we don't keep records across conventions and we don't make any intervention, we just take note of it for that convention only so that if there's a recurrence, we can deal with it. The young person then describes an assault. You have just made a commitment to not do anything about this. You have basically promised an extremely minimal response to a situation where a minor has been assaulted. Now you have to decide if you are going to break your commitment to the person brave enough to report, or if you are going to let the predator continue to prowl, hoping to get a second instance. And if there is a second instance, and that young person also wants an "informal" report? This is a hugely untenable situation to be in.

We need to keep records. We really do. Human memory is fallible, staff changes. If someone comes to the concom three separate times with a problem, and we aren't keeping records because they're making an "informal" report, and they speak to three different staffers, they are going to get a very different response than if they speak to staffers who are aware of the previous instances. And even if the reporter is intellectually aware that no records were kept, emotionally they are going to have a hard time processing the fact that each instance is treated as a new and unique occurrence.

Keeping records is in close tension with confidentiality. And one of the questions you really do want to ask the reporter is, "What level of confidentiality do you need?"

When someone comes to you to make a report, start by saying that you need to take notes so that you don't forget anything important. Ask about their need for confidentiality. They're there to make a report. If you treat documentation as normal procedure, so will they. If they have a serious problem with it, they will tell you. If they do, listen to them and figure out what works best for both of you. But in the end, the decision about what to do with the report has to be the conventions, and the best way to make good decisions is to have good documentation.

And now I need to rewrite my procedures for Minicon. Because the current procedures do have a fairly muddled distinction between formal and informal, and it is a broken procedure, both practically and semiotically.

ETA: The other thing about the idea of a "formal" report is that it can be used to fail to deal with a problem you know about. I think that if the convention is aware that there is harassment going on, it should not have to wait upon a formal complainant to take action. That is legalistic thinking. Anti-harassment policies are not supposed to deal with illegal behavior. That, we turn over to the police. Anti-harassment policies are to deal with the stuff that harshes our squee. The stuff that makes the party less good, the stuff that gives us a bad rap amongst our friends.

Comments

[faunhaert.livejournal.com]

harassers have made use of the fear they create
to keep them free to continue their bad behaviors,
& trying to keep the victim safe from reprisal.
as long as we treat it like a secret
they will be free to continue being antisocial.

some how we need to emphasize
we are seeing the behaviors and recording it,
and that their actions will be known
as a warning to others.

But the only way to stop it
is for every one to know
what the person has done that was antisocial
so they can a avoid having them do it again.

when i find someone acting "interested" in me
it was very important to find out about them
from the other person s who dated them.
I avoided heart ache and harassment and abuse
thanx to the people who knew of previous behaviors.
Luckily i did not fall for the
"this won't happen to me" I can fix them" fallacies.

its also important for the other people in the few society to know
the behaviors of ; harassment , stalking, leeching etc,
are not sanctioned by the formal powers that be
and the con-com or club will back up this by stopping
said behaviors and even ejecting them when they
cross the line of our society.

it is a message to the perpetrator
and to the young fen who unfortunately
are out in society for the first time after years of reading.

documenting everything is so necessary
the convention needs the continuity for the next cons
and they need the names of who to talk to
incase it happens again or who to watch for.

It might also be good in some cases
to give a copy to the offender to read
after they're sober so they can see what they did in hard copy .
sadly they might just need to read about their behaviors to find out
what they did was antisocial- with suggestions of alternate/acceptable behavior.

Might be good to tack a note later to a report,
that a person at the next convention
was just fine and was back to being a normal with out the stalkering
or that they were of age for drinking and did not over indulge.
a sign that they learned something from the previous year/con.

we need to protect our selves and our society
being open about our expectations and documentation .

[(Anonymous)]

How much of an "Anti-Harrassment Committee" is there? Is there any time for the people going off shift to report to the one's coming on?

I've probably asked this before but is there any sort of log kept, one specifically for the "AHC"? (Sorry, I don't feel like I'm explaining myself very well, and if I'm coming off harshly I don't mean too. Just hoping to help.)

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Are you asking about Minicon in particular?

Last year, there was about 6 total people who took shifts. There was a log. But we also had a fairly muddled informal/formal definition which I need to get rid of.

[(Anonymous)]

Ack! These two anonymous comments are from David Cummer. If you want to verify you can contact me at dcummer815@gmail.com

[(Anonymous)]

Dear David,

You look a lot better than the Elephant Man. You don't really need to wear that paper bag out in public.

[vbg ]

Helpfully yours,

ctein

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I must say that the idea of creating a formal definition of "informal report" makes my head ache. If there must be two things, I think anything other than a Formal Report should be termed a "conversation."

[ctein3.livejournal.com]

Dear Lydy,

Much as I sympathize with Meg's position vis a vis Lou, I am appalled that she decided to make all the emails public. For no good reason that I can see, except so she can say to the world, "Look, see, I'm going to prove I'm right and they're wrong."

The PDF includes things the concom was told in private (by third parties). How do I know? Because it says so in the emails! It includes at least one remark from a concom member that says "do not quote me..."

It's a gross violation of privacy and process. Nobody engaged in a conversation like that can have any expectation of absolute confidentiality, but that's a long way from "it's all going to be on the public record." A lot of what was said there would NOT have been said had that been the known situation.

One ought not to forget (Marion Zimmer) Bradley's Law: "Never put anything into writing that you cannot afford to have read into a court record." (Yeah, it happened to her. Love letters she wrote in the 50's. To another woman.) It can happen. That doesn't mean I respect the folks who do it.

I totally support Meg regarding handling Code of Conduct matters. I can't imagine a circumstance where I'd be willing to work with her, after this stunt.

If it were me, I'd not have published the link to the PDF. Really, it doesn't need to be spread even wider.

pax / Ctein

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I've removed the link. In these days of the Google, I don't know how much that helps.

I have some very mixed feelings about the release of the documents. I need to look at them more closely before I have a firm opinion. I think I would have redacted the comment specifically flagged "do not quote" because I don't think it would have affected things. I can see not wanting to compounding the ethical problems by editing.

[ctein3.livejournal.com]

Dear Lydy,

My feelings become less and less mixed with further reflection. Aside from the "do not quote," in her zeal to prove herself Right On The Internet, she disclosed PRIVATE information a reporter had conveyed to the concom and that was clearly not meant for public consumption.

There's likely a lot more in that PDF that shouldn't be public. At that point, though, which was not very far in, I stopped reading.

No, there's no way she could edit it for privacy and still maintain her "here's the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" stand. Too effin' bad. It should never have been posted in the first place.

pax / Ctein

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that Meg was Proving Herself Right. That assumes that this was primarily a situation where a staffer disagreed with the decision made by management, and she's airing her grievances in public. My take on it is that Meg is, instead, a person who attempted to report harassment to the appropriate authorities, and got treated very badly. The fact that she is also a staffer makes the whole thing enormously more difficult in so many different ways I can't actually count that high.

I think that there's an argument that nothing she quoted conveys information that was not already public. I also think that there's an argument that the context and timeline provide sufficient additional information to support a claim of violating privileged information from the reporter. Um, we are talking David Gerrold, here, right? I will note that if he feels his confidentiality was violated, he didn't say so in the comments on her blog, but instead praised her work. On the other hand, we are both very much aware that people often do not say everything that they think, so that's not anything like incontrovertible evidence.

There are very, very few ways to redress a problem that has been reported and brushed off. Especially if the brush-off comes from the actual head of the department in charge of fielding such complaints. At that point, it makes sense that one might want to air the problem on the Interwebs. Wanting people to be held accountable for their behavior makes sense to me, and the internal procedures didn't work.

A lot of this is about boundaries. Where does Meg, the staffer and Meg, the harassed person, intersect, and what are their responsibilities toward each other and the convention? She felt that her work environment had become sufficiently unsafe that she needed to walk away from a job that she was, by all accounts, good at, and one which she clearly valued.

It's really hard to make judgments at this remove, without having been privy to the actual in-person interactions. But I think you are judging Meg more as a staffer and less and a target and I am looking at it the other way around. In point of fact, she is both.

And while I have very mixed emotions about her releasing the emails, I do find them very instructive. So there's that, too.

[ctein3.livejournal.com]

Dear Lydy,

We can debate this in private when I next see you. I am not willing to publicly dissect information that shouldn't be public. I'll leave this with two points. First, I am not viewing Meg as more the disgruntled staffer than the reporter. Second, David is constrained in what he will say "on the record" in ways I will not go into, on the record.

We can pick this up in October.

pax / Ctein

[pnh.livejournal.com]

I really appreciate the emphasis you put on looking at the state of mind of the person who's distressed enough to be approaching a concom with a harassment problem.

Being harassed tends to make people less effective at pursuing their interests, at making good decisions, at communication, and at self-presentation. If we signal that we're open to harassment complaints, we need to keep this common-sense fact in mind, and not create obstacle courses for people who are already hobbled.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Hey, who knew that being harassed was good for something? :-) Oddly, personal experience has played a role in how I understand this.

[pnh.livejournal.com]

The point I keep not seeing made in the Meg Frank matter is that what this guy did wasn't just a threat to David Gerrold, it was a threat to the entire Worldcon. The fact that David Gerrold decided to personally forgive him should not have determined Sasquan's course of action.

Western civlization figured out by about 1000 A.D. that, for certain crimes, letting the nominal victim decide the course of justice is a really bad idea, because certain crimes have effects that go beyond just the particular individual who was the target. If I board a New York City bus and proceed to punch the driver in the nose, I'm going to get arrested and prosecuted even if the bus driver publicly proclaims his personal forgiveness, because it's dangerous to the passengers and to other bus drivers to leave bus-driver-punchers wandering around unimpeded in their hobby.

To my mind, threatening to cause a police raid on a convention because you don't like one of the attendees (guest of honor or otherwise) is a really good example of the kind of behavior that should get your membership in that convention revoked, whether or not the attendee in question has decided to be forgiving about it. Every single concom member, staffer, and attendee had standing to complain to Sasquan about it. It was amazingly irresponsible of Sasquan to just brush the whole thing aside the way they did.

As you pointed out in conversation, of course David Gerrold publicly forgave the offender, for a pile of reasons. First, because Gerrold was looking down the barrel of being the Worldcon toastmaster and Hugo-ceremony host with the toughest task ever, and he was determined to take the high road to the greatest extent possible. Second, David Gerrold was somebody who'd just been the target of a crude act of harassment! For both of these reasons he should never have been made to feel that the decision regarding That Guy was his to make. Sasquan should have stepped up to the plate and taken responsibility on behalf of the whole convention, instead of letting Gerrold shoulder the burden.

Then of course there's the elephant in the room: the startling escalation in the last few years of the number of people killed by police, particularly in police actions in which lethal force never needed to be deployed. And the fact that there's a very particular profile of the kind of people most likely to be killed. It is dismally unstartling that almost none of the Sasquan committee members who breezily dismissed the issue of That Guy's threat are people who resemble that profile. Easy to be casual when you have born-to-it confidence that your life, you know, matters.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Since Meg was working in events, the harassment by Antonelli directly affected her job. While the entire convention was on ground zero, she was actually at the epicenter. And when she tried to talk about that with the concom, she got shut down, told she wasn't important. It isn't clear to me that Gerrold wouldn't have welcomed additional action by the committee, based on the documents. What is clear to me is that Gerrold had Sasquan's back, but that they didn't return the favor. Based on what I've read, they appear to have used his conciliatory words as a fig-leaf to not do anything.

I am glad, for instance, that they considered the problem of a bomb threat. Very sensible. I was worried about it, too. But they worried about it in all the wrong ways. At one point, there's an argument that they should use Lou as a human shield, on the grounds that while a Puppy might call in a fake bomb threat, they wouldn't actually harm one of their own. This is an incredibly broken chain of reasoning. It assumes, for instance, that a person willing to place a bomb actually cares about Lou Antonelli, for which there is no evidence. And if the argument is that the presence of a puppy is sufficient to deter an actual bomb why would not one of the other puppies do as well? What's special about Lou?

The argument they could have made, which would at least have made sense, is that Lou liked to do long-distance harassment, but doesn't seem to indulge in the in-person kind, so having him physically present would deter the kinds of terrible behavior we know he is prone to. I don't buy that one, either, actually, since he's perfectly capable of being well-behaved at the con, collect a list of enemies, and then go home and pursue his unsavory behavior from the privacy of his own home. So, presence might delay bad behavior, but I don't see it as a deterrent. On the other hand, I completely fail to see any added-value to his presence.

The more I see of this decision, the more I think it was a terrible one. And I really wish I didn't know as much as I did.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

If I were the first person to hear of a complaint, I hope I would have the presence of mind to make my first question, "Would you like to talk about it somewhere quieter?"

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Gods, yes! Although, honestly, I learned that from Ken White at Popehat.

This last MInicon, the hotel liaison was able to arrange for us to have access to a private conference room. It was incredibly nice. It had a nice, professional feel, it was private and removed, and it was quiet. While I didn't have to deal with anything traumatic, it would have been a place where crying or yelling would have been perfectly possible without disrupting anything or being particularly revealing to anyone. I made a point to stock it with Kleenex, and I'm very proud of myself for thinking of that. On the other hand, we didn't need them. So glad on that count, too.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

I appreciate this series of posts examining harassment, which problem fandom is still trying to get a grip on. Unfortunately, I also think that this fannish DIY approach can take you only so far, and they emphasize how much we're NOT finding (or even seeking?) assistance from relevant professionals. And by relevant professionals, I mean social workers, et al. who try to understand and solve problems comprehensively, as opposed to say lawyers in other specialities. Which is all I've seen thus far, myself.

Even so, I don't know where to start inquiries. What professions & professionals deal with harassment? Is domestic violence the nearest analogue? I'm not working, so I can't go to HR for pointers. The possible related professionals I know have also been stumped, alas.

ETA: What we're missing the most is reliable information that already exists about the mechanics of harassment, options for dealing with harassment, and what is already known to work (or not). Not that we need an outside authority to make those decisions for us, but we really, really need better information to determine what decisions we have to make.