[Content Note: talk about abuse and sexual assault with specifics and hypotheticals]
This is a part 2 to “Gaiman, Consent & Community Safety”, a reaction to the Vulture article “There Are No Safewords”
In the aftermath of exposing a community predator, as well as the inevitable disgust and horror, it’s always possible to see how the group contributed to the perpetrator becoming a sustained problem. Nonetheless, understanding how it happens is not the stopping point for the actions you can take to fight back. It will not be easy, but everyone has at least some agency to advise or nudge the groups they are part of to be safer. What I am sharing are lessons I learned from a history of very imperfect attempts to make things better.
I also take a shotgun approach to best practices, because dealing with community predation is equally important in prevention of allowing one to be entrenched, dealing with one who has dug into your group and managing the damage afterwards (and stopping them from coming back). I also share these without assuming who you are. You might be a kink newbie, a volunteer, a lurker or a micro-celebrity. Your community might just be surfing the web, or it might be an established non-profit with an official board of directors (e.g. TES). What you can do will vary, but all of this leans towards “better”.
If you organize something, you have a duty of care
This one suuuuucks. None of us are born knowing how to run shit, much less navigating the worst possible things humans are capable of doing to each other. However, if you set out to start a project, a meetup, a play party, or even a porn site you are at risk for developing a nice cozy home for a community predator. Even worse, this person has a high odds of seeing you as their new best friend and love bombing you to hell and back, and particularly good odds of being one of your rockstar volunteers.
How much you scale depends, of course, on the level of care you can be expected to give. A ten person movie night with your regular buddies is not the same thing as arranging to host monthly screeninging for kink cult classics to anyone who applies from a Fetlife event ad. But, within your locus of control, you can make a difference.
The two things you always have in your control, is an ability to ban people and the ability to maintain documentation. You do not need to be a hero who saves your entire city, but you absolutely are not powerless.
1) Establish you are allowed to exclude people, and try to maintain a degree of due process for that. When I ran the 18-35 munch in Montreal, maintaining the age bracket and making it clear if I believed you were a hazard I had the right to say no were both things people pushed back on, but they were invaluable to getting people to understand attending. Create a code of conduct and share that with group members. Often I found people who would violate the little piddly stuff were the sort of people who violated the big stuff. Remember, community predators like it when the rules have no teeth.
2) If you hear something, investigate. Almost invariably, when someone finally comes to tell you about the problem, there probably won’t be enough information to definitively say what is going on from just that. However, if you make a modicum of effort to discreetly ask around, most of the time you start finding other victims.
3) Document in a secure place, in plain and professional language. One reason people are paranoid about taking action in community safety is the terror of libel. “I talked to X on Y date, who said A, B, and C” protects you. It also means that if you are working with others you have a standardized process that makes it harder for people to attack you for things just being political drama.
4) If someone comes to you with a problem, explain where what you can do begins and ends. Ask them what they are comfortable with, but also make sure you make it clear documentation is non-negotiable. That also means picking your battles and watching for your energy levels. Conflict is not abuse, but it is labour.
If you want to do weird sex shit, it’s fun, but be mindful of the impact of pressure to participate, even unintentional.
Who is fucking (metaphorically or literally), will unavoidably weight who we invest in and spend time with. Scrutinize your own behavior by how people who say no to you (or others) get treated, and where and how you ask. Nothing is perfect, but a culture that respects people saying no cannot do so at the cost of ostracizing them, rendering them homeless or even just left out of the cool club. For example, if you are hosting play parties, have space that has another activity people can do instead. If one room is the orgy room, another one can be the place playing movies.
If you are considering hitting on someone, think about if you are giving them adequate space to retreat and if the context of this might give the impression if they say no they miss out on a valuable resource, be it a job or mentorship, or something more abstract like being perceived as belonging. Never corner people, metaphorically or literally.
A real life example was a dance community where the conference/events had some people running secret sex parties in the attached hotels. This is absolutely normal human joy EXCEPT in this particular case where some of the participants were bringing in newbies to hang out without bothering to tell them that at some point in the party people were going to start having sex with each other. Newbies to the community at large felt if they didn’t join in they were bad sports offending their friends. The onus is on the people who want to have horny fun times to be risk aware and ensure everyone participating is doing so from a place of informed, enthusiastic consent.
If you are in a position of authority or prominence, do not fuck your fans, mentees, creative team or employees, side eye folks who do.
This can feel incredibly lonely, particularly since the stuff that makes you popular or effective is an inherent aphrodisiac. If you are a big deal, you need to acknowledge that and pull laterally not vertically. Watch out for “but they are really mature for…” and other special pleading. Even if you happen to be correct, you are making a cover for your fellow fancypants folk to point at you and either say you are just as bad as them or that if it works for you it must always be ok.
Consider it a sign you need to diversify your network if you struggle to find anyone else on your level. If all the other people with equivalent power in your group are people you wouldn’t touch with a barge pole, consider that a damning indictment of whatever community you are part of and work to diversify your peer group. Kink social prestige might be relatively small and petty, but if you have it, acknowledge it.
Watch out for over dependence on white knights, wise oldbies and whisper networks as your only safety mechanism.
This one is a doozy, because everyone says they hate abuse. Even if you were running a community dedicated to the most vile shit imaginable, you probably have some lines you don’t want crossed. The problem happens when everyone’s acknowledgement of a desire for safety rests entirely with things that either don’t help or actively make the problem worse. It’s sort of like if everyone wants to stop forest fires, and their idea of prevention is a guy with a pile of old newspaper to throw on the blaze and a Smokey the Bear fibreglass animatronic.
In your group, does the buck stop with any of the following or tend to default to these?
- A champion (and maybe their crew) will step up! Often they promise they will do literal violence against these bad, bad people. This might be a mama bear or a band of bros.
- A wise person with a long tenure but no official standing says if you are abused to come to them (or their friends) and they will sort it all out for you. They do not say any specifics.
- Safety begins and ends with you finding and hearing about who the problem is through gossip and tips.
I will reiterate that nothing is perfect, but each is terrible in their own way because they provide the idea of a solution, but ultimately operate on a mindset that simultaneously tends to treat abuse more like stranger danger/rare than a community wide problem and works against accountability and anything approaching due process.
The white knight approach is bad, in the obvious first place because most community predation is not a tidy situation of stumbling on say, an unconscious person being assaulted and you and your righteous band laying the boots in. More realistically it’s an imperfect or ambivalent-due-to-the-trauma victim who isn’t immediately seeking a posse to throw hands. It’s also bad because most people who posture, don’t back it up. And in the event you do, the power of a white knight concentrates authority with them, creating an environment where the chest beating promise to Uncle Phil toss a bad guy ultimately is a wonderful lure to community predators to dig in with Sir Safetypunch/the Amazon (or be them) and twist the implied threat of retribution to their own end.
Similarly, the unofficial tenured oldbie guardian probably only has a whisper network at their disposal, a massive blind spot around one of their buddies and being a listening ear becomes a place where problems go to disappear. This is also the zone where someone will promise to “have a word with” the predator and shake their head sadly at your behest. Tenured Oldbies are only really useful if someone uses them as part of an investigation of say, who to also speak to when you get a single complaint about someone and you start looking for the other metaphorical bodies.
From this, you might guess that I think whisper networks beat the alternatives only if the alternative is nothing. They are the safety equivalent of falling out of an aeroplane sans parachute into a forest canopy rather than onto jagged rocks. The problem with them is threefold, first of all their informal nature means the most vulnerable people can be left out, secondly, they almost immediately get weaponized with additional noise and counter accounts. A community predator gets very versed with seeding stories of their crazy exes and the human love of sensation (and our innate biases) encourage certain kinds of sensational to get passed along with any real warnings. Finally, a whisper network also serves to normalize the presence of a community predator. It tells you everyone accepts this risk cannot be changed. That’s great if your goal is to tell people to wear bear bells to deter the endangered grizzly in your national park from mutual destruction. It is not good if you are, say, a person deciding if they will pay for a ticket to a professional development conference, or the person organizing that conference.
Have a proper process in place for safety issues that is not just a hand wave and good feelings. If not at the highest level, at least at the level of individual events or projects.
Do not allow your group to hold one standard of conduct while working on the shared project and a different standard for “offsite”.
Another common form of missing stair is the person who seems scrupulous at official events, in a professional context, etc… but with a nightmare personal life. Or, whom has a pattern of victimizing people they meet at or because of the group, but never *officially* at a sanctioned event. The thrive in both a community’s distaste for trying to involve itself outside its immediate events and the fact that any bad behaviour on their part generally happens out of site of anyone with authority, official or otherwise. Nonetheless, community predators who use this two faced trick depend on the larger community to empower them to abuse and to hunt for victims.
For example, imagine a community that has an extremely on point monthly rave at a barn. The on-site volunteers are perfect, maintaining 0 tolerance on the dance floor, sober people lifeguarding the intoxicated, even a fund for some paramedics, and really, every other thing you can imagine is well run from the door line to the minute you exit. However, the larger infrastructure of a rave includes travel to and from, crash space after you are partied out, word of mouth to even know about the rave, and so on. A possible risk vector here might be that someone with a van or a crash pad nearby is picking people off after they leave or demanding surprise payment in sex at a rest stop on the way there. Over time the community becomes aware “D” is maybe mistreating some of the folks in transit, but D isn’t official staff and all reports of abuse are coming in third hand- they might be messy break ups, right? Our rave barn group may decide this is simply out of scope and decide not to look into it further.
The problem is that D is empowered to do this entirely because the rave exists. D would normally not impress a group of people purely because they own a van or can rent a motel 6 once a month. However, because they are the open transport/crash space person they suddenly matter and have power. This impacts the group in a number of ways. People at the group become shy about calling D out openly to not lose this resource. D gains prestige in the group for all their unofficial volunteering, which means if they misbehave at the rave itself they are more likely to get the benefit of the doubt. And, it’s only a matter of time before they get known as van-D and people in your rave community start feeding people to them in good faith. Oops, Molly was just so trashed on Molly they need to leave early, what a good person D is to take Molly from the official (vetted) volunteer and leave early! You can imagine what happens to our non-binary pal Molly next.
And of course D positions themselves as the safest party bus in the world, so anyone else who might step up for transportation or crash space is not incentivized to also driving or hosting. When D finally does get caught, they are a load bearing volunteer and nothing to replace them is immediately available. They also probably have an army of enablers and friends who will bring this fight to your event even if you say it isn’t your problem. Not dealing with D may even allow them to stack your event with their people, eventually letting them get power over you!
Groups are porous and what people do elsewhere absolutely comes to your events.
Your choice of association, sharing (and alliance) is a type of power.
If you are in a typical BDSM community, art scene or whatever, it probably feel like because there is no central authority it’s basically the wild west. You can try to keep your event secure, but there’s 11ty billion other things going on, some specifically out of spite/after a conflict with another sub-group. The reality is that you actually exist in an overlap. Sure, there’s no central Monarch of the Scene that everyone bows to, but there’s probably a loose, interlocking set of people doing the moving and shaking or volunteering. Likely you also do things to touch base on scheduling to make sure you don’t all plan things on the same night, or inversely stick a spotlight for another thing in your community when a new project is launched. The 80/20 rule also applies, both 20% of folks are doing 80% of the work, and 20% of folks are participating in 80% of the overall activities or shared aspects. Nothing is an island.
If you are planning events or projects, absolutely lean on the existing networks you use to coordinate to formally share things like your code of conduct, ban lists, and policies that work. When deciding who to cross promote, ask the people involved about their policy and who is also involved. You don’t need to be snooty about it- even just some gentle questions can help groups that don’t realize they could be more safe adopt best practices.
If you are just some person with no authority, you are still not as powerless as you think. Use the same mindset for your own protection. Ask those running events what their policy is, how they resolve conflict and what their attitude to safety is. Ask people at events about other things going on in your community what their impression is. If you have the time or energy to volunteer, value yourself and do not give your time to things that fly by the seat of their pants or to whom the attitude to safety amounts to “we care!” without anything more concrete than a vague promise they won’t let it happen.
Choosing who you associate with can give you fomo, but fomo is always better than discovering the thing you invested in is now abusive to you or others. Your presence and endorsement, no matter who you are, is power.
Do not let your group depend on one or a few hero-volunteers, resource, venue/site, celebrity, whatever.
Everyone likes having stuff (a piece of media, an event, an ephemeral moment), but not everyone has the time, budget and skill to make it happen. Likewise, the perfect space is as much a part of the experience of the group as the people. And, some people are just born with a sparkle and ignite anything they invest in. As such, these things all end up being the biggest avenue of risk for both community predation or exploitation.
Community predators thrive by locking down all of these and either positioning themselves as the gateway to it, or capturing the positive regard of the people who make things happen. Not only does the act of being co-opted into being an enabler form a secondary kind of abuse in itself (it is traumatic and isolating to realize you were duped into helping do harm AND the abuser usually will feed you to the mob if enough ever becomes enough), but community predators love when there’s a bunch of starry eyed folks burning themselves out to make a thing function or happen. It’s win-win for them, they normalize exploitation and their modus operandi is to eventually make themselves inseparable from the thing people love, so all that sacrifice ends up feeding them.
This risk vector is usually accidental. It can be very easy to depend on one person to host and plan things or be the creative director. Likewise, it’s very easy to just turn your brain off and know a specific person can always be counted on to do a thing and mentally decide they and the thing are now inseparable. Finally, we live in a time of scarcity, of time, money and attention so whatever group dreams we have are usually expected to be on shoestring. As a result, those who can tend to take a bit more of the load than they should.
Sometimes you have to be ruthless. A community that will not let you pass the torch, share the load or take a break doesn’t love you the way you deserve to be loved. A single funder may fail at any time. An inability to share the spotlight is always a bad sign, even if it’s because it seems like everyone is too tired, poor, uninspiring or disabled to succeed. Unfortunately, giving into this urge to carry on indefinitely breeds martyrdom.
An environment that expects people to carry on to this point also creates vulnerability to community predation. Burnout is real, and after tackling one or two problems your social battery and reputation may need a break. You have less energy for “drama”, and the invariable ability of a community predator to love bomb the beleaguered makes you ripe for recruitment. Ditto, watch out for when a venue is the only space a thing can happen in. Whether virtual or literal, this mindset makes you accept more potential harm just in belief that demanding change is attacking the group rather than helping it.
Try not to establish yourself in a “for life” role, or find yourself depending on one or two of the same people over and over again. At the very least, those people being deployed to work constantly may not have time to train replacements up to their standards. Also, be mindful that if you get extremely entrenched you may give people the impression that rather than you being down to your last shred of patience with the work, that replacing you would be an act of disrespect.
This can also mean that if you accidentally find yourself enabling a community predator, not only will people assume you knew due to your awesomeness, but that you are in fact in need of being taken out alongside them. And lastly, being too long on one chair can also make people take you for granted in a way that stunts your own development.
If you are a person joining a scene as just a member, do everything you can to prevent stagnation. For example, if your venues are limited to an unsafe space, consider if the super low door price that’s supposed to be inclusive to people of limited means are simply putting vulnerable people into a firetrap. If “M” is always the door person, ask “M” about spelling them for even an hour. Encourage, with love, hero volunteers to step down and take a break. If you have a few group “celebrity”, try to add other voices, and if you have a super funder or donor, lock that shit down into some sort of safety mechanism like an independent-to-them board of directors, or approach any gifts of space, time or money like it’s supposed to be impermanent.
It won’t be easy to make room for more people to pay, contribute and do the work, but long term survival of groups also depend on this even if they don’t get a community predator, so this investment is win-win.
Be up front about high risk behaviors (eg sketchy shit), don’t let it become a free-for-all, and if your community has any sort of charter or guidelines, encode that.
Going back to those 6 risk factors I mentioned in my last post, you may have noticed that they involve a whole bunch of things that are very hard to avoid. If you have raves, for example, chemically altered states are a feature not a bug. Poor, scrappy queer people can’t afford all the resources of your local country club. Joyful open promiscuity in a play oriented part of the BDSM scene exposes you to new partners you might not have the time to get to know. Add that pesky stigma (did you know that sadomasochism is actually in a grey area of legality in most countries, or on the books illegal?) and exploring things can feel like clog dancing in a minefield
The challenge to get past is the idea that if something has some risk you need to throw all other safety practices out the window. It’s a sort of fallacy that if some things are permitted it’s accepting the possibility of virtually anything happening. There’s also an additional excessive weighting people do of presuming personal responsibility is the beginning and end of anything related to risk. You want to travel to a kink conference in another city and share a hotel room with virtual strangers, only one of whom is paying the majority of expenses? People are quick to say that it’s the fault of the victim if something happens to them. Regrettable? Sure, but what were they expecting?
This is a stupid mindset, which ignores the whole reason we do things in groups. Groups have a powerful ability to normalize certain behaviours, both for good and in service to a community predator. It also runs counter to how humans function. We are not a hive mind, but rather individuals bringing our own often imperfect baseline assumptions of what to expect.
If you are playing with a new person as a BDSM thing, you do not just leap into it with both fists, you talk about limits and even after that you take your time to slowly explore together. There’s nothing you could potentially do that’s automatic, and while there’s space to experiment, anything that could be a novel surprise they consented to must be back stopped by giving people a chance to affirm they are cool with it before it is irrevocable. Similarly, in playing with new people, anyone who is not an idiot knows that people fuck up and freeze, misunderstand and most importantly, communicate subtle signs they are not ok a little differently depending on the person.
Likewise, many things that are less safe already have very well developed practices for doing them. Humans are absolutely wizards at coming up with harm reduction schemes. Some of these are even turned into real laws, for example the rules in many geographic areas on serving alcohol or the fire code limiting guests and requiring multiple means of egress. An orgy run by smart people has bowls of condoms and single server lube everywhere, a gay bar used for cruising probably has not only free condoms, but public health posters about services for testing and PrEP up in the bathroom and foyer.
If you are running something, a site, an event, etc… as a part of your duty of care, think about the reasonable risks, and what steps you are taking to mitigate them versus what you cannot do. Accept that mitigation means not all behaviour is appropriate for every circumstance. Then, and this is a hard step, make sure people who pass through there have a place where they can see both your processes and where your limitations are. If you are an individual considering participating, one way you can test if a group has their pants on their head is to ask people about their risk plans. I believe some humans will be foolish and will deliberately still seek the absence of safety, but make people admit it.
Whatever you do, do not let people define things as “anything goes” or “entirely at your own risk” without making them publish that in a way anyone who shows up knows this environment is not concerning itself with anything other than what the individual can get away with.
Understand the dynamics of abuse in the community and the aftermath.
Reacting to, investigating and calling out abuse is made harder if you don’t know what to expect. To an extent, every generation needs to relearn the same common facts, but inversely, the last 10 years gave us a lot of data that as an elder millennial I had to learn the hard way. It includes the following:
Victims generally don’t get abused on day one, but several weeks or months in, after they are invested into the group. Their abuse will be unlikely to be the equivalent of a broad daylight leap from the bushes. Likely it worked like that metaphor of a frog being boiled, with the abuser either getting the person isolated and vulnerable or pecking away at them in a gradual escalation. When you hear about it, the community predator will have a counter story, often posited on how the victim didn’t immediately start screaming and stabbing the minute things were not ok, and how troubled the victim is, or vindictive.
Sexual violence is a crime of power, and opportunity, not desire. Most people sort of have a clue about this, but the corollary is that most community predators are also awful to people they are not attracted to. See, for example, the use of unpaid or underpaid labour in the Gaiman incidents. If you are investigating sexual abuse, other exploitation is a canary. Normalized exploitation is a big sign inviting a predator inside.
Inversely, when you look into information about a community predator, in addition to additional victims you will probably find a bunch of people the abuser did things to who were personally completely fine with it. For example if the abuser likes to randomly initiate sex by groping people without asking, there will be people who luckily for them were into it. By this, the abuser will maintain that what happened to the victim was a regrettable accident. You can’t catch every fuck up, but emphasize that playing fast and loose with things like enthusiastic consent is still an injury to everyone. Note these as a pattern of a potential abuser behaving unsafely.
In the effort to fight abusers, mud will get flung, not just at the victim, but those who helped make an accusation. Your skeletons will get dug up. If you are the amazing bone free minority, something will be invented or something you say or do in an effort to get people’s attention will be harped on as THE REAL CRIME. Most of you probably saw how, say, every single celebrity who accused Weinstien instantly had their integrity called into question, even people who simply endorsed those who came out as victims. This tactic is to make things look murky, but it’s besides the point, because it ultimately is actually trying to argue that abuse should be permitted and expected. I use the term community predation deliberately, because this kind of abuse has normalized the behaviour in the community at large.
Watch out for people who think they can convince an abuser to knock it off through their personal relationship to them. When you uncover something questionable through to dreadful, there are a lot of people who will agree with you that it’s bad, but their solution is to “have a word with” the community predator or promise to keep an eye on them going forward. They are enabling a community predator. Make it clear this isn’t a solution. If they are an event organizer you want a next step spelled out (what is the threshold of banning? Where is your concern being formally recorded? Is this an ongoing investigation). If they are just this person’s buddy, partner, whatever they are not on your side. If they really cared about you or their friend they would work on removing the predator from access to victims. Community predators use sympathy of their enablers to maintain access, but these enablers don’t take the problem seriously.
Acknowledge your at risk people.
There will always be people who are more vulnerable: the poor, the disabled, the marginalized by an -ism, newbies, etc… They will, by the way, be the imperfect victims. They will behave stupidly, fawning, downplaying or explosively attacking who they think is responsible. They will not have tidy narratives. They will ask or need too much of those who help them, and this will be used to paint them as unsympathetic by those who exploited this lack. They will be too emotional or not emotionally demonstrative in the right way.
Not everyone will want you to pursue useful action, and people who come to you to help probably really don’t believe themselves. That’s both the damage the abuse they experienced caused and also part of the highest at risk group. If your group has participation of the most vulnerable within it, not only prioritize keeping an extra eye on them, including things like checking it with newbies weeks and months after the new person’s shine has started to wear off, but an extra eye on those who work and assist the more vulnerable people. Onboarding is a life long process.
Inversely, anyone can be victimized, but the other group that’s probably doing poorly is the ones closest to the community predator. Access is one of the most important factors in risk. Community predators absolutely also abuse their enablers and eventually any camouflage that becomes aware of being used. is part of how they keep their people in line. Expect the extra horror of watching say, the partner of a person who valiantly defended their community predator spouse and even brought them victims to turn out to have also been a victim. The harm an enabler did means the group might not have a place for them, too, but take their report of their experience as data and don’t get too hung up on ignoring it in retribution.
You are not infallible, make your peace with that.
Accept that your squeaky clean reputation and your finite energy for conflict will be used against you. You will mess up, say the wrong thing, not catch every person. Do not let the community decide you are the One Good Person to fight all their battles. It will hurt a lot more when you can’t. It also, once again, makes you the Most Attractive Person to a wannabe community predator, because your endorsement is their camouflage.
If you are reading this nodding along and thinking I am awesome, know that I have fucked up. I have dropped the ball. People have been harmed on my watch, despite my best intention. I almost certainly have someone orbiting my social circle who is noxious. Do not make me the authority. This is about you and what you can do, not what I did.
And in the spirit of this, I do invite using the comments to share what best practices you found.