I am very glad to see discussion on this again (it might have been here all along and me unaware) because when it came up in the seventies, there was this pernicious "It's your fault, women. You wanted to be liberated, well, you take what you get" vibe. And that could include fandom.
UK fandom have been talking about it for a while now, but I wish it had started sooner. I had some experiences in my 20s which were horrible. I don't want today's young women to be in that position.
I've commented, expressing both my horror at this and my suspicion that the con committee is hiding behind vague and misunderstood legal concerns as an excuse for not taking a stand and banning this person.
This is why I keep on making the point at conrunning events that committees are completely within their rights to ban people from conventions. They don't even need to give reasons, and indeed in cases like this shouldn't. That way, if the banned person wants to complain that it was because of an allegation of sexual assualt, nobody has formally canvassed the issue other than him.
The convention with which I've been most involved on the running side has, as far as I can recall, banned two people in its history.
One of these was deeply inappropriate and creepy behaviour by a woman.
The other was common assault by a man.
In both cases, the banning was because of the potential deleterious effect on the other members of the convention if the person hadn't been banned. I feel that that's the point at which banning becomes justifiable - contrariwise, although a concom is within its rights to ban someone because that person once insulted the chair's girlfriend, or even because of fan political differences, doing so for that opens the organisation to ridicule.
(In retrospect, the first case was probably mental illness - but a naive concom didn't recognise it at the time. The second case was someone who didn't want to be there in the first place, but who let out his frustration not at the person who'd forced him to come along, but at a con staff member - it's conceivable he was deliberately trying to get banned.)
The two other cases I know of, one was totally justified, and the other was eventually reversed after a storm of bad publicity.
What worries me are the people who have never quite crossed that line, but who keep up a steady drip drip of harassment, and who are accepted and defended. It's hugely intimidating if you are young and female.
"Young" is not necessary. "Inexperienced" is. It's something I've had to deal with several times over the last few years, since separating, including in fandom :-(
The younger women, sadly, tend to get targeted more and to have fewer contacts within fandom who might protect or help them. It certainly can and does effect any woman, however.
I think that banning one or two extreme individuals after they've behaved unacceptably isn't anything like enough. The incidents which result in bans are really only the tip of the iceberg.
A positive statement of and commitment to unacceptable behaviour would be a start. This wouldn't do anything about the sociopaths but it would help with the idiots who suffer from the geek transitive groping fallacy and other delusions who provide them with protective camouflage.
One concern is that if we have rules that are too extensive and proscriptive then (a) the offenders will, in true fannish fashion, try to game them, and (b) it will put people off attending. (Would you feel happy, as a new fan, coming to an event that apparently felt it necessary to have a two-page code in the Read Me covering sexual harassment?)
A sensible comment - I'm afraid I can't remember who by - was that in reality the main required rules boiled down to a few simple and clear statements of how people should behave. If more detailed rules are necessary, they can be stuck on the Con website and linked to from other Con documents.
But what we really need, as was also discussed, is a willingness to confront such conduct and for Con committees to have mechanisms to deal with it. An interesting point (I think it might have been John Harold who raised it) was that part of the problem is the decline in use of dedicated and trained security staff at Cons. Ordinary gophers have no idea what to do if someone gets upset because of somebody else's behaviour, and the Duty Committee Member is probably at the other end of the site, perhaps dealing with admin problems. Getting Cons to bring back the idea of staff who have been specifically briefed on the convention policy for dealing with problems such as unacceptable behaviour, and have them wandering around the main social spaces, may be one way ahead.
And, at larger cons, where there are many many 100s of con staffers, they may not all be safe, either. One of the times I was harassed, the offender (a fan) was working security on the door.
A known problem with Con security is that the wrong people end up doing it. There's a good case for saying that anyone who wants to work security is probably not suited for the job. Ideally you want a Con committee that vets its staff carefully and puts people in sensitive positions on the basis of their suitability for them.
Whether Con committees are willing to put the effort into doing this - and that includes having the moral courage to reject unsuitable volunteers, even when you are short of staff - is another question altogether.
An interesting comparison is with beer festivals, where stewards are now effectively a sub-organisation within Camra, self-policing, and within a few years will probably all be SIA card-carrying. To some extent this is because of the more stringent requirements when you are running licensed premises, but it may be that con security staff need to move in a similar direction.
How would I regard such a con? More favourably than one which which doesn't make an unequivocal commitment. The comments about a code being two pages do sound like classic distraction tactics to me.
If a large group of people genuinely wants to act on a problem, then usually the first step is to actually agree on problem and action and tell other people what they are doing. If a group isn't prepared to take even that first step, then I suspect any other action will be less effective than it could be.
I think part of the problem in dealing with this is that a lot of fans see this as a "one obvious bad apple" issue -say one rapist- rather than as the tip of a more widespread and continuous malaise .
I don't think having "security" is the answer for the same reasons the marquise gives.
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la_marquise) wrote2010-02-25 12:51 pm
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workplace, safety and women.
school, safety and women.
life, safety and women.
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This is why I keep on making the point at conrunning events that committees are completely within their rights to ban people from conventions. They don't even need to give reasons, and indeed in cases like this shouldn't. That way, if the banned person wants to complain that it was because of an allegation of sexual assualt, nobody has formally canvassed the issue other than him.
no subject
One of these was deeply inappropriate and creepy behaviour by a woman.
The other was common assault by a man.
In both cases, the banning was because of the potential deleterious effect on the other members of the convention if the person hadn't been banned. I feel that that's the point at which banning becomes justifiable - contrariwise, although a concom is within its rights to ban someone because that person once insulted the chair's girlfriend, or even because of fan political differences, doing so for that opens the organisation to ridicule.
(In retrospect, the first case was probably mental illness - but a naive concom didn't recognise it at the time. The second case was someone who didn't want to be there in the first place, but who let out his frustration not at the person who'd forced him to come along, but at a con staff member - it's conceivable he was deliberately trying to get banned.)
The two other cases I know of, one was totally justified, and the other was eventually reversed after a storm of bad publicity.
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A positive statement of and commitment to unacceptable behaviour would be a start. This wouldn't do anything about the sociopaths but it would help with the idiots who suffer from the geek transitive groping fallacy and other delusions who provide them with protective camouflage.
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One concern is that if we have rules that are too extensive and proscriptive then (a) the offenders will, in true fannish fashion, try to game them, and (b) it will put people off attending. (Would you feel happy, as a new fan, coming to an event that apparently felt it necessary to have a two-page code in the Read Me covering sexual harassment?)
A sensible comment - I'm afraid I can't remember who by - was that in reality the main required rules boiled down to a few simple and clear statements of how people should behave. If more detailed rules are necessary, they can be stuck on the Con website and linked to from other Con documents.
But what we really need, as was also discussed, is a willingness to confront such conduct and for Con committees to have mechanisms to deal with it. An interesting point (I think it might have been John Harold who raised it) was that part of the problem is the decline in use of dedicated and trained security staff at Cons. Ordinary gophers have no idea what to do if someone gets upset because of somebody else's behaviour, and the Duty Committee Member is probably at the other end of the site, perhaps dealing with admin problems. Getting Cons to bring back the idea of staff who have been specifically briefed on the convention policy for dealing with problems such as unacceptable behaviour, and have them wandering around the main social spaces, may be one way ahead.
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Whether Con committees are willing to put the effort into doing this - and that includes having the moral courage to reject unsuitable volunteers, even when you are short of staff - is another question altogether.
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If a large group of people genuinely wants to act on a problem, then usually the first step is to actually agree on problem and action and tell other people what they are doing. If a group isn't prepared to take even that first step, then I suspect any other action will be less effective than it could be.
I think part of the problem in dealing with this is that a lot of fans see this as a "one obvious bad apple" issue -say one rapist- rather than as the tip of a more widespread and continuous malaise .
I don't think having "security" is the answer for the same reasons the marquise gives.