[Content note: discussion of abuse, rape, child sexual abuse, and coverups of same.] There are approximately five different ways that a community (as distinct from an individual) can react to bad behavior: Nothing Whisper network Callout post Action by leaders
Thank you. This is an excellent post which summarizes a lot of important dynamics well.
There's an interesting combination of "Action by leaders" and "Bringing in outside forces" that is particularly promising for serious cases: the leadership of an organization can call in neutral, outside help to investigate the extent of a problem.
For a hypothetical example, imagine that you're a leader in public radio, and someone raises a sexual harassment complaint against a famous on-air personality. You check the whisper network, and you receive further nebulous but concerning information. At this point, what do you choose to do?
One option is to hire a law firm to investigate the situation. The law firm publicly requests anyone with relevant knowledge to contact them confidentially. The law firm then makes a written, internal report summarizing their findings and recommending a course of action.
Then, the leadership of the organization issues a public statement to the effect that they are ending their relationship with the famous on-air personality.
I think the use of specialized law firms to perform internal investigations is particularly promising for dealing with sexual abusers. Using normal approaches, a wide variety of organizations have utterly failed to hold important abusers accountable. I'm cautiously optimistic that having some documented process for triggering an outside investigation would make it easier to handle these problems well.
What I see in my communities is that leaders either (a) basically never take action about problematic people or (b) if they start, then all their time gets taken up by it, partially because few other leaders are doing it so they end up doing a disproportionate amount of work. For option B, the leaders basically always burn out. I have not seen a good solution for this in my communities.
I’ve heard about multiple attempts to create third party groups that can scale whisper networks or develop community justice approaches that don’t involve the police but are more neutral than individual community leaders taking action. These have lots of obvious problems and I haven’t seen them work for long, but sometimes they work for a little while. The closest thing I’ve seen to an initiative that seems to help with various abuse issues while not taking on too much at once is the Burning Man Rangers (and similar initiatives in connected communities), who patrol Burning Man and can intervene when they see issues and report problems they see up the scale to various authorities.
Another failure mode of whisper networks, which is related to the point about how they only benefit the well-connected: it seems like they systematically seem to miss some of the people who could have benefited from them most, namely people who are close to the subject of the whisper network in some way.
I know of one case (in a community I'm not personally part of -- my knowledge just comes from reading people's blogs about it) of a couple, let's call them Alice and Bob. Some allegations were made against Bob, and of course a whisper network had been talking about him, warning people, etc. But you know who was never warned about Bob? Alice. When she and Bob were first getting together, that whisper network was whispering...but not to her. You'd think someone would have said to her, "You know that guy? He did X, Y, and Z." But they didn't. Instead, the fact that she was with Bob was taken by the community as evidence that she was a bad person and deserved to be punished along with him (which the community proceeded to do). In this case, it turns out to have been a good thing that the whisper network missed her -- a few years later, it transpired that the allegations against Bob were overblown and spun up into a smear campaign against him by someone who had a petty interpersonal beef with him. But there were people in the community who straightforwardly believed the allegations, and those people uniformly saw Alice not as a potential victim, but an accomplice.
A much smaller-scale version of this happened to me: when I was in a grad program, I became friendly with a male student who was a couple years ahead of me. Only after he graduated and left town did I learn that he had a reputation for not treating women well. (Not in a sexual assault kind of way -- mostly in a mansplaining, not taking women seriously kind of way.) Anyway, all of this was news to me, but once I did become more well-connected with the other women in the program, it seemed like they were talking about it as common knowledge. Of course, by that point it was too late. I felt like I'd been cast in a very "male" role in this affair, that of the male friend who's left stupidly going "I had no idea Chad did any of that stuff! He never did it around *me*!" Again, you'd think that people would see a woman in this situation and see her as a potential victim of the bad actor -- but no, the whisper network passed me by without saying anything. I guess they thought I was aware of his behavior and was fine with it, or something.
Isn't there a sixth option of "ostracition", when it becomes common knowledge in the community that person X is non grata everywhere and even mentioning their name causes a negative reaction. This is often caused by a call-out but seems to be its own thing?
I’m surprised noöne’s pointed out yet how stereotypically feminine, or, at least, unmasculine, this whole discussion looks.
As far as I know—which is not far at all—a stereotypically masculine approach simplifies the community’s behavior a lot:
> 1. Nothing
This seems the only plausible option.
> 2. Whisper network
Gossipping is backstabbing and cowardly. Whatever you have to say about someone, you say to their face, even if you expect them to reäct violently and to easily overpower you—especially if you do expect this.
> 3. Callout post
Better than gossipping, but still, any problem you have with someone isn’t really anyone else’s business. You should just talk it out with them, with words, fists or blades.
> 4. Action by leaders
Snitches get stitches.
> 5. Bringing in outside forces
Greater snitches get greater stitches.
In the same vein, I see frequent mentions of death threats, but I’m much more familiar with people just daring you to meet up and speak to their face so they can inflict on you whatever physical punishment they deem appropriate and are able to carry out. If you refuse, everyone knows immediately what a coward you are and how utterly undeserving you are of any trace of respect they might once have had for you.
If your religious leader is coercing you into smuggling drugs, then going directly to the cops is, um, sub-optimal. You are smuggling drugs, which is a crime! The better strategy is to hire a lawyer who can negotiate some kind of immunity or plea deal for you.
Another problem with whisper networks is that the shape of the network can determine what information gets filtered through.
E.g. say the EA community has two clusters, the europe cluster and the america cluster with very little communication/overlap. The people who do have communication with both sides can suddenly determine a lot of what information gets filtered through, so if e.g. in the american whisper network someone has a bad reputation and they decide to move to europe, they can ease their transition by befriending/seducing/bribing the people who are connected to both networks to not let their bad reputation from america filter through to the europeans. This gives these information bottlenecks a lot of power. (See the field of network theory for even weirder ways in which information can get biased/held up)
An official process that actual worked quickly and consistently would be the best solution. The big issue is that even when there ARE official processes the official process usual de facto protects abusers. Often this is blatantly obvious from the 'outside' but outside criticism is dismissed because the official process has more information. I have been extremely critical of the EA community health teams for years. They just very, very consistently refused to take action against even moderately well connected people who acted badly. Recently the EA community commissioned a report on how the EA community health team handled Owen Cotten Battet's sexual misconduct.
Was the team's behavior predicted accurately by 'they wont take action against well community members even when information is brought to their attention unless the situation is truly egregious'.
Why yes it was! Their own report agrees. Have they replaced anyone on the team? Nope. People don't manage to get on official 'community health teams' unless they are sufficiently simpy for the locally powerful. But the simpy team members are going to be very slow to take action. Really hard to see how to square the circle besides 'happen to have people who are both extremely high integrity and somehow talented enough to outcompete the simps in the fight for control'
Thank you. This is an excellent post which summarizes a lot of important dynamics well.
There's an interesting combination of "Action by leaders" and "Bringing in outside forces" that is particularly promising for serious cases: the leadership of an organization can call in neutral, outside help to investigate the extent of a problem.
For a hypothetical example, imagine that you're a leader in public radio, and someone raises a sexual harassment complaint against a famous on-air personality. You check the whisper network, and you receive further nebulous but concerning information. At this point, what do you choose to do?
One option is to hire a law firm to investigate the situation. The law firm publicly requests anyone with relevant knowledge to contact them confidentially. The law firm then makes a written, internal report summarizing their findings and recommending a course of action.
Then, the leadership of the organization issues a public statement to the effect that they are ending their relationship with the famous on-air personality.
I think the use of specialized law firms to perform internal investigations is particularly promising for dealing with sexual abusers. Using normal approaches, a wide variety of organizations have utterly failed to hold important abusers accountable. I'm cautiously optimistic that having some documented process for triggering an outside investigation would make it easier to handle these problems well.
What I see in my communities is that leaders either (a) basically never take action about problematic people or (b) if they start, then all their time gets taken up by it, partially because few other leaders are doing it so they end up doing a disproportionate amount of work. For option B, the leaders basically always burn out. I have not seen a good solution for this in my communities.
I’ve heard about multiple attempts to create third party groups that can scale whisper networks or develop community justice approaches that don’t involve the police but are more neutral than individual community leaders taking action. These have lots of obvious problems and I haven’t seen them work for long, but sometimes they work for a little while. The closest thing I’ve seen to an initiative that seems to help with various abuse issues while not taking on too much at once is the Burning Man Rangers (and similar initiatives in connected communities), who patrol Burning Man and can intervene when they see issues and report problems they see up the scale to various authorities.
Another failure mode of whisper networks, which is related to the point about how they only benefit the well-connected: it seems like they systematically seem to miss some of the people who could have benefited from them most, namely people who are close to the subject of the whisper network in some way.
I know of one case (in a community I'm not personally part of -- my knowledge just comes from reading people's blogs about it) of a couple, let's call them Alice and Bob. Some allegations were made against Bob, and of course a whisper network had been talking about him, warning people, etc. But you know who was never warned about Bob? Alice. When she and Bob were first getting together, that whisper network was whispering...but not to her. You'd think someone would have said to her, "You know that guy? He did X, Y, and Z." But they didn't. Instead, the fact that she was with Bob was taken by the community as evidence that she was a bad person and deserved to be punished along with him (which the community proceeded to do). In this case, it turns out to have been a good thing that the whisper network missed her -- a few years later, it transpired that the allegations against Bob were overblown and spun up into a smear campaign against him by someone who had a petty interpersonal beef with him. But there were people in the community who straightforwardly believed the allegations, and those people uniformly saw Alice not as a potential victim, but an accomplice.
A much smaller-scale version of this happened to me: when I was in a grad program, I became friendly with a male student who was a couple years ahead of me. Only after he graduated and left town did I learn that he had a reputation for not treating women well. (Not in a sexual assault kind of way -- mostly in a mansplaining, not taking women seriously kind of way.) Anyway, all of this was news to me, but once I did become more well-connected with the other women in the program, it seemed like they were talking about it as common knowledge. Of course, by that point it was too late. I felt like I'd been cast in a very "male" role in this affair, that of the male friend who's left stupidly going "I had no idea Chad did any of that stuff! He never did it around *me*!" Again, you'd think that people would see a woman in this situation and see her as a potential victim of the bad actor -- but no, the whisper network passed me by without saying anything. I guess they thought I was aware of his behavior and was fine with it, or something.
Isn't there a sixth option of "ostracition", when it becomes common knowledge in the community that person X is non grata everywhere and even mentioning their name causes a negative reaction. This is often caused by a call-out but seems to be its own thing?
I’m surprised noöne’s pointed out yet how stereotypically feminine, or, at least, unmasculine, this whole discussion looks.
As far as I know—which is not far at all—a stereotypically masculine approach simplifies the community’s behavior a lot:
> 1. Nothing
This seems the only plausible option.
> 2. Whisper network
Gossipping is backstabbing and cowardly. Whatever you have to say about someone, you say to their face, even if you expect them to reäct violently and to easily overpower you—especially if you do expect this.
> 3. Callout post
Better than gossipping, but still, any problem you have with someone isn’t really anyone else’s business. You should just talk it out with them, with words, fists or blades.
> 4. Action by leaders
Snitches get stitches.
> 5. Bringing in outside forces
Greater snitches get greater stitches.
In the same vein, I see frequent mentions of death threats, but I’m much more familiar with people just daring you to meet up and speak to their face so they can inflict on you whatever physical punishment they deem appropriate and are able to carry out. If you refuse, everyone knows immediately what a coward you are and how utterly undeserving you are of any trace of respect they might once have had for you.
If your religious leader is coercing you into smuggling drugs, then going directly to the cops is, um, sub-optimal. You are smuggling drugs, which is a crime! The better strategy is to hire a lawyer who can negotiate some kind of immunity or plea deal for you.
Another problem with whisper networks is that the shape of the network can determine what information gets filtered through.
E.g. say the EA community has two clusters, the europe cluster and the america cluster with very little communication/overlap. The people who do have communication with both sides can suddenly determine a lot of what information gets filtered through, so if e.g. in the american whisper network someone has a bad reputation and they decide to move to europe, they can ease their transition by befriending/seducing/bribing the people who are connected to both networks to not let their bad reputation from america filter through to the europeans. This gives these information bottlenecks a lot of power. (See the field of network theory for even weirder ways in which information can get biased/held up)
An official process that actual worked quickly and consistently would be the best solution. The big issue is that even when there ARE official processes the official process usual de facto protects abusers. Often this is blatantly obvious from the 'outside' but outside criticism is dismissed because the official process has more information. I have been extremely critical of the EA community health teams for years. They just very, very consistently refused to take action against even moderately well connected people who acted badly. Recently the EA community commissioned a report on how the EA community health team handled Owen Cotten Battet's sexual misconduct.
Was the team's behavior predicted accurately by 'they wont take action against well community members even when information is brought to their attention unless the situation is truly egregious'.
Why yes it was! Their own report agrees. Have they replaced anyone on the team? Nope. People don't manage to get on official 'community health teams' unless they are sufficiently simpy for the locally powerful. But the simpy team members are going to be very slow to take action. Really hard to see how to square the circle besides 'happen to have people who are both extremely high integrity and somehow talented enough to outcompete the simps in the fight for control'