Internet justice sucks

[liv]

There is a big kerfuffle / imbroglio going on regarding a woman who was harassed at Readercon. Readercon decided to make an exception to their written policy and apply a reduced penalty to the harasser. Then the internet exploded, as the internet does.

Lots of people who know nothing about the situation have decided to extrapolate from Valentine's original, measured account of the bad behaviour she had to deal with that the accused must in fact be an evil horrible predatory monster, and indeed are reporting bad stuff he supposedly did that goes way beyond the original account, as if it were established fact. A few people who know nothing about the situation have decided that really, continuing to follow someone around and touch her after explicitly being told this attention was unwanted isn't that bad after all, and maybe he was just a bit of a nerd and didn't understand social cues very well.

And some people do know at least something about the situation. It seems like this guy is rather well connected within SF fandom. There's a prevalent assumption that this is why he got off comparatively lightly. But some people are having to deal with the fact that pretty serious allegations have been made against someone they consider a friend, and not only that, but while the original reported behaviour was at very least rude, the internet has collectively decided to assume the absolute worst possible interpretation of the facts, and then make up new facts to line up with that worst interpretation.

I know nothing about the situation either. I know none of the people involved and I don't want to make the same mistake I'm complaining about here of imposing my judgement on the situation based on my own fears and being too credulous about internet rumours. I hesitated as to whether I should even link to the original posts recounting the incident and Readercon's decision, but I decided that going back to the source would be less rumour-mongering than making vague allusions and leaving curious people to poke around among all the internet opinions being presented as facts.

What I do want to do is link to some interesting meta about how this controversy has played out, because I think it's generally applicable to similar situations. Which do in fact keep happening, because members of close-knit social groups do sometimes harass people, and every time it happens the same discussions play out. And when the social group is largely internet-based, extra dimensions of awfulness come into play.

xiphias talks about accusations being made against a friend, as well as discussing a bit how the principle of not spreading malicious gossip balances with the importance of protecting one's community from actually harmful people.

redbird talks about Friendship [and] boundaries.

ann_leckie directly addresses some of the it can't be that bad reactions that typically come up in these situations.

rose_lemberg utterly demolishes the internet diagnosis subset of that utterly, depressingly typical response.

Side-note on the last, though this is edging close to the unfounded speculation I want to avoid: the "maybe he's just a bit Aspie" non-excuse came up relatively late in the discussion. It seems like everybody who actually knows this particular guy, those who are monstering him and those who are defending him, agree that he is charming and "nice" and highly socially competent. Of course, he could be charming and neuro-atypical at the same time. But that's not the point; when people say "but maybe he's Apsie" they don't really mean that in a medical sense, they mean that the person is socially awkward and visibly weird. There's a problem here. Geek culture is (in many ways justly) proud of being welcoming to people who are socially awkward, whether that is because they are on the austism spectrum or because of their upbringing and personality and whatever other reasons. However, if someone who is socially awkward also doesn't respect other people's boundaries, making an amateur diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome to excuse that person is totally unhelpful. For all the reasons rose_lemberg outlines.

Also, people who do in fact make genuine mistakes through being socially awkward very much want to defend environments where people will be reasonably forgiving of such mistakes. Blaming awkwardness on inborn neurological traits can be one way to gain more understanding, but is dangerous because it leads to stereotyping of autistic and austism-spectrum folk. Also, there's a big difference between missing social cues and ignoring other people's preferences and boundaries; some people who themselves would never do the latter can be unwilling to see any rudeness by anyone else as deliberate.

The other side of this problem is that if you blame all sexist treatment of women on social awkwardness, you end up not being able to get your head round the idea that some people are in fact highly socially skilled, but also treat women (sometimes not all women, but the women they choose to target) as objects for their gratification. And when those women report harassment or worse, they aren't believed because surely a "nice" person would never do anything like that. So you're in a double-bind situation. If someone is socially awkward and also a creep, you are supposed to compromise your own safety in order to make allowances for his social awkwardness. And if someone is charming and also a creep, you are supposed to compromise your own safety so that your social circle can continue to enjoy the benefits of having a charming, likeable person around. CF this excellent Pervocracy post on what happens when you prize social cohesion over safety. (Note that Cliff's essay here is general, nothing to do with the current situation and nobody anywhere has suggested that the guy who received the mitigated punishment from Readercon is actually a rapist.)

Comments

[jack]

One thing I'm taking away is that when you write policies, you should consider "what happens if this applies in the most inconvenient place possible"? If it's going to be controvertial, leaving it till later to specify the edge cases may often be better.

But it also means that there's a lot less point saying "if you do X, you will have a lifetime ban" unless you also say "if you do X, you will have a lifetime ban, even if you're the president of the con" because lots of people DO mean it when the say "anyone" but some people don't, and if you're specific, people know you mean it.

[liv]

One of the rumours that's going round is that the policy was originally written in order to give the con an excuse to expel a guy that everybody hated anyway, while covering their backsides from a legal standpoint. No idea if that's true or not, but it would be a very good example of creating a policy without thinking through when it might need to be applied.

Some part of the reaction to this has been that zero tolerance policies are bad in the first place, partly cos no matter how much you think that a certain action is always always wrong, there will always be circumstances you didn't imagine when you first made that determination. But the thing that can be good about them is that they do help people to get over that incredibly human reaction of "surely not my friend!" or "but we need that guy, we can't possibly actually punish him!" It seems that a lot of the problem here is not even that a two-year ban is too lenient a punishment, but has arisen because of deliberately ignoring the policy because it was too awkward to enforce.

[jack]

The other thing I was trying to say yesterday is that a lifetime ban, if that's actually enforced beyond two years, may be unfair if the harasser genuinely changes. But it's much less unfair than letting people go on being intimidated and harassed, so the second shouldn't be condoned simply because it's the status quo.

If you're trying to start enforcing rules that you should enforce but have traditionally been lax, it's pretty much guaranteed that SOME people will get caught out not thinking you mean it or not having got the message. If you deliberately choose an example for a particularly harsh punishment to send the message, that can be immoral. But if you do your best to tell everyone "Look, we really mean it", and someone knows that, but still gets caught by your policy, then it's sad, but you did everything you could, and there's bound to be some price to pay for progress towards a slightly more equal society, you have to pay it sometimes.

And I mean, the same applies whether the penalty is "suspension from a con" or "death", and people will ALWAYS complain that something is too harsh. But the first is a lot easier to live with, so it's easier and necessary to say "we must enforce this even-handedly, even if some people are penalised more than others", whereas there's a lot more pressure to only enforce the death penalty when you ABSOLUTELY have to.

[liv]

Oh, I'm glad I made this post and provided a place for you to park your thoughts about this, I was interested in what you thought about it when we didn't quite have time to finish the conversation last night.

it's much less unfair than letting people go on being intimidated and harassed
Yes yes yes, this is exactly the point! A few people have pointed out that endless agonizing over whether the punishment was too harsh for the offence is a complete distraction here. Even if it's all a horrible misunderstanding and the accused didn't morally deserve any punishment at all, letting known harassers attend cons at all effectively punishes a huge proportion of women who haven't done anything at all, not perpetrated any misunderstandings, nothing except happening to be female. Which is more unfair, definitely. I think that is a big part of what the internet is angry about, but unfortunately angry internets tend to get a bit carried away with outrage.

shouldn't be condoned simply because it's the status quo
Also a good point; this is one of the situations where choosing to do nothing is itself an action with moral consequences.

I also think you're right with a lot of your examples of how inconsistency can be a problem as much as having bad rules in the first place. That doesn't mean that consistency should always be the ultimate goal; obviously if you go around executing people because you want to be consistent with the last time you executed someone unjustly, then your society has some serious problems!

One of the interesting points some people have raised about zero tolerance, which I think don't contradict your points here but perhaps add to them, is that if the penalty is widely perceived as being too harsh, victims will be reluctant to report and authorities will be reluctant to enforce any penalty. So I suppose Readercon here didn't quite fall into that trap, they didn't say "we can't ban this guy for life for one small misunderstanding, so we'd better do nothing at all!" but pretty close.

[jack]

*hugs* Thank you.

Yeah, there are quite a LOT of red herrings here.

1. If you make a dumb policy, I think often the correct thing to do IS to change it, even if that IS in response to a particular incident. It's just that in cases like this one, that sends a massively bad message that you may be ALWAYS willing to bend the rules.

2. Zero tolerance is occasionally necessary, but is usually REALLY stupid, even for zero tolerance of bad things. If zero tolerance is accompanied by extra enforcement, that can work, but if it's accompanied by harsh punishemnts instead, the enforcement is usually so inconsistent the punishment has to be massively out of proportion to have ANY effect, which is rather wasteful and can be counterproductive. But it's bad because it creates a double standard of people who are sort of in the gray area and may be caught or not: school children with 3/4 of a nail file ignored, those with 7/8 expelled for life and condemned to a criminal underclass. But none of that matters, because everyone agrees that he DID do what everyone says he did, and (in a minor bright point) no-one's arguing that he shouldn't be excluded at all, they're just arguing about whether fiddling with the sentence is ok or very bad.

3. It's certanily POSSIBLE for someone to be completely innocent of intent or negligance, and for someone else to be harassed by it. Usually there's a sliding scale where even if someone didn't know, they SHOULD have known. Occasionally completely by coincidence, somenoe is thrust into a situation whcih is threatening to someone else. Occasionally someone's medical condition does trip someone else's panic button. We have to accept that there are SOME cases of genuine miscommunication, while still pointing out that MOST cases are of people being wilfully ignorant or wilfully malicious, which is totally different to social cluelessness or autistic spectrum handicaps. But again, even though that CAN happen, and some people even think it likely to happen OFTEN, people only seem to be raising it as a theoretical possibility -- no-one seems to suggest that, however nice a person he may be in many respects, he SHOULDN'T have known better.

[jack]

Although I say that no-one DOES seem to be arguing he was clueless, in fact, that seems to be a lot close to it. Making sexually charged conversation and physical touching is bad, but the harassee was willing to let that slide, it was following her around trying to apologise and get forgiven that was what brought the matter to everyone's attention. GValentine explained exceptionally clearly and succinctly why this is not ok, but I also suspect that LOTS of people would fuck up and do something similar if they were in the wrong, they're just fortunate enough to usually not be in the wrong. And I can see why if you know and like someone who's story is "I did something stupid and tried to apologise and now everyone hates me" you will listen to that without checking how many sins are hidden under the details of "bad" and "tried". But when I first read the links, I'd assumed this was a case of "someone who will always take advantage when they can hiding in plain sight because they're popular and well-liked", which is a giant problem, especially because people with that mindset ARE unlikely to ever change. And in a case like that (eg. GoH blatently gropes GoH on stage), people are likely not to feel safe if he ever comes back, whether he knows better or not. But it's also possible for something to fall into "he SHOULD know better, but once 'don't touch people even if it's a joke' has been explained again and he gets a two year suspension, I don't actually feel less safe with him than most other people at the con". So I don't know where the flamewar started, but I wonder if it was more with "the committee had to vacillitate because they didn't have time to decide whether to enforce their policy or not", not with the original harassing.

[liv]

I think this interpretation is consistent with the subset of the facts here that are credible / verified rather than just internet rumours, yes. And I think it's a near-certainty that the flame war is here because of the committee vacillating rather than because of the original incident.

[liv]

Agree that you sometimes need to change dumb policies, but you have to be shown to go through the appropriate formal process. If your official reason is not that you suddenly noticed a flaw in your policy, but that the person apologized, you can't be surprised if people speculate that he got off lightly because he has friends in high places!

Zero tolerance has a really bad reputation because it's a totally inappropriate way to do law enforcement. But if you're deciding who gets to be invited to what is essentially a private party, albeit a big one, I think the situation is a bit different. For one thing you don't have the resources to carefully adjudicate all the possible grey areas. Several people have pointed out that the board likely don't have any expertise in dealing with sexual assault, for example. And it's not necessarily even about punishment, it's about keeping the con pleasant and safe for the majority of attendees, with an amount of effort that's reasonable for a bunch of volunteers to achieve.

I think the problem here was not that the lack of flexibility in the "sentence". It's that the zero tolerance policy was treated as being zero tolerance of individuals, rather than zero tolerance of bad things. Sexual harassment is a bad thing, and if you try to excuse it and be tolerant of it, all you do is punish a bunch of innocent women. But people who commit sexual harassment are not necessarily (wholly) bad people, since very few people who sometimes do morally bad things do so because they're cartoon villains who are only motivated by acting as evilly as possible for no reason. So the board here found themselves in the unfortunate position of trying to sit in judgement over the harasser's character, and reasonably enough came to the conclusion that he's not irredeemably eeeeevil. Except that "is this guy (who also happens to be our friend and an active volunteer in our subculture) evil?" was totally the wrong question to be asking in the first place.

I definitely agree that there is such a thing as accidental harassment, and also that it is a lot rarer than people pretend. But wilful ignorance is also a thing, and I consider it morally blameworthy. If you're a competent adult and you don't know that following women around after they've said they don't want to interact with you is threatening and horrible, you're significantly culpable for not paying enough attention to how the world works to have figured this out.

[jack]

If your official reason is not that you suddenly noticed a flaw in your policy, but that the person apologized, ... speculate that he got off lightly because he has friends in high places

Good point. Yeah, if they'd announced they were changing the policy generally, that would still be problemtatic, but would have been a lot better -- suggesting that they may stick to the new policy, not that they have a policy which they stick to for people they don't like and not for people they do like.

Zero tolerance has a really bad reputation because it's a totally inappropriate way to do law enforcement.

Yeah. I think it's also that people are bashful about make harsh judgements if they're discretionary, so zero tolerance is invoked, not because anyone wants what actual zero tolerance (which is good in the right situations and bad in many others), but because it's a necessary excuse to do anything at all.

But wilful ignorance is also a thing

Oh yes! My point was supposed to be that when someone's caught out doing something hurtful, they're USUALLY being wilfully ignorant and are completely culpable of ignoring what they SHOULD know by now. And people bringing up the topic of actual, unavoidable, non-culpable ignorance are generally being wilfully ignorant jerks themselves. And it's right to not accept wilful ignorance as an excuse: you may need to explicitly say "you have a responsibility to educate yourself about this" if you want them to get better, but we shouldn't go on getting away with "oh, I didn't know".

I probably failed by mentioning the exceptions at all, because with a subculture, the case is almost always wilful ignorance, and I didn't want to perpetuate the idea that "oh, well, this one might be an exception". But I think it is also important to recognise that when you mix subcultures you will get a much higher level of ignorance about each other, and it is more plausible to hurt someone inadvertently, and if so people should resolve to do better, but may not be able to insist that every sincere apology is accompanied with an admission of wrongdoing.

[liv]

*hug* I think we're pretty much emphatically agreeing with eachother here! I do think it's fair that there may be misunderstandings between people who come from different cultural backgrounds. But ignoring an explicit request to go away is more than misunderstanding, even if the reason you got a negative reaction is partly because of cultural ignorance.

[jack]

I think we're pretty much emphatically agreeing with eachother here!

Yeah, I think we really are, but I find it hard to stop...

I don't think and have never thought that cultural misunderstandings have anything whatsoever to do with this case and have specifically been trying to avoid suggesting that they do. (Everyone involved is a regular congoer, and probably general American, so SHOULD know "don't follow someone about" even if they don't.)

But even though when HE followed someone around, he most definitely SHOULD have known better, I still feel squicky saying "X isn't cultural ignorance" of the behaviour, because it sounds like before passing judgement on this incident, I have to know that which behaviours occur legitimately in NO culture, and I'm very bad at knowing that in advance...

[liv]

It would be a bit of a bad idea, I think, to expect a complete absence of any cultures where any given bad behaviour is acceptable. Because some cultures are in fact really sexist!

My guess is that a small part of the issue here is that urban liberal USian culture is out towards one end of the spectrum in how much touching women you don't know is considered threatening and socially inappropriate. There are lots and lots of cultures where everybody hugs and / or kisses people of the opposite gender on first acquaintance, for example. If a fan came from a culture like that he might well creep some woman out completely unintentionally. Or just a culture that has a smaller personal bubble than urban liberal USA; that is a very common source of inter-cultural misunderstandings. For women doing the Schroedinger rapist calculation, a man who stands too close, let alone touches her when it wouldn't be the norm in her culture, is going to come across as a threat. And if he does happen to be a perfectly lovely chap who is in fact acting within the social norms of his culture, well, that's unfortunate for both of them, but he still needs to back off if he's told to back off.

[elf]

megpie71 points out that being socially awkward is often not the problem, and certainly not here--socially awkward people are OBVIOUS:

"It takes a lot of social skill to develop a set of behaviours which are both threatening to the recipients and innocuous to disinterested bystanders. It takes a lot of skill and practice to be able to perform these behaviours in a public setting on a regular basis without drawing attention to oneself."

A man who "just doesn't understand boundaries" comes across as creepy to everyone, not just his targets. (So does a woman, but is usually considered less dangerous.) A guy who knows how to hover far enough away that only the victim feels threatened... is not "socially awkward."

[liv]

Mm, megpie71 is right in general, but I don't really know how far that applies in this particular situation. I think there are less extreme cases; a person might be somewhat socially clumsy without it being disablingly bad, or they might be somewhat suave but not totally able to fool everyone they meet.

Certainly it is a pattern worth pointing out, as several people have done, that sometimes you get a skilled manipulator who is actively and deliberately using that skill to hurt people. Therefore people who think that charming people must also be morally good are making a dangerous mistake! But it's also a pattern that you sometimes get someone who's a bit rubbish at reading subtle social cues, and also doesn't bother to make an effort to look out for those nuances because he doesn't really take women's autonomy all that seriously.

[elf]

This is a man who chaired a Worldcon and was Fan GoH at Arisia; he's also a regular blogger at Tor. None of those would've happened if he weren't socially savvy. (I'm aware you probably haven't read up on all the history and whatnot of this particular situation; this is extra info, not "you shoulda known that...")

There *are* cases of "competently social but lacking the ability to sense fine nuances;" this isn't one of them. With an all-volunteer staff, the person in charge has to be, well, personable. Fan GoHs get invited because people enjoy being in their company, and that doesn't happen with people who can't tell when a conversation is over.

If he doesn't take women's autonomy seriously, it's sheer sexism, not a sign of of weak social skills.

[liv]

I definitely agree that not taking women's autonomy seriously is sexism, that's how I meant that comment. Basically I was trying to say that some people are sexist and socially skilled, and some people are sexist and socially clumsy, or sexist and somewhere in the middle. Not that poor social skills excuses sexism.

Thank you for this additional information, (and for including this post in your link round-up, though it's mainly itself a link to other posts). I'm trying to avoid speculating about the motives or state of mind of a person I have never met and have no connection with. I am talking a bit about his actions because the Readercon official announcement said that the facts weren't in dispute. I'm mainly interested in the range of responses to these actions, though.

[redbird]

That plus the strong impression that, even if the original policy wasn't specifically to get rid of one widely disliked creep, the different ruling this year was less "we've been thinking that zero tolerance is excessive but haven't had a meeting about it" than "We know and like René, and we want him to come back to our con."

"I know and like this man" is a reasonable basis for deciding whether to keep lending him books, or even have him over to dinner if the person in question feels safe in his presence. But "zero tolerance except for friends of the board" is a really horrible policy, especially from the viewpoint of the huge number of us who don't know which people the board counts as friends.

[liv]

Agreed entirely. The board's decision here is the worst of all possible worlds. If the incident really was an innocent mistake, the consequences for René are much worse now that the story is all over the internet than the consequences of applying the policy as written, a life ban from Readercon but minimal reputation damage. If he's acting at all out of malice he's blatantly got away with it and may well be encouraged to harass other women in future. And in either case it's impossible for anyone to trust the board or the safety of the con now, even if their decision was actually on some level just.

[dharma_slut]

when people say "but maybe he's Apsie" they don't really mean that in a medical sense, they mean that the person is socially awkward and visibly weird.

This is such a tangent, but I have noticed it too. And it's funny because that's what "insane" used to mean-- not schizophrenic or psychopathic or bipolar or narcissistic, suicidally depressed, or anything else we know understand as mental disorders;

"insane" meant palsy, epilepsy, tourettes, the manifestations of schizophrenia-- things that were *visible to onlookers* and disturbing to see.

All of those less visible things were considered 'personality.'

[liv]

Thank you, really interesting comment. My knowledge of mental health history is somewhat patchy, but that's a really good point about amateur diagnosis and medicalizing.

[con_girl]

Thank you for this.

[atreic]

Oh, I love your blog, it's rubbish I only remember to read it when you post LJ links. Does it work if you feed dreamwidth into the LJ syndicated feeds? Would that be horribly offensive to you if I did that (or has someone done it already? I don't think I can check without risking creating a feed you might not want created)? I know it wouldn't do friendslocked stuff, but the extra reminders that this blog existed would remind me to come over here and check for that...

[liv]

Thank you for being so appreciative!

It's partly my fault, I really ought to remember to post my sets of recent posts to LJ more often. I don't mind at all people using a feed, though; there's one at liv_dw. In any case the only locked posts I do are party invitations (which get crossposted anyway) and very occasional specific details about work or family medical stuff, the most interesting posts are always public.

[atreic]

Oh, excellent! I don't know why I didn't do that ages ago :-)

[I will admit, I personally and selfishly would rather you automatically cross posted, but I assume you have good reasons and respect them, and the feed will help :-) ]