Ideological Abuse Series: Effective Altruism And Child Sexual Abuse
It's important to think about this before it becomes a big deal.
[Previously: Some Terminology; Ideological Abuse Is A Spectrum; Take Care When Discussing “Loaded Language”]
One of the most depressing facts about high-commitment communities is that they almost all cover up child sexual abuse.
The Catholic Church is the most famous, of course. But the Protestants are just as bad; they’re so fractured that each individual story gets less play, because it feels like a small group that most people haven’t heard of being awful, but if you add them up together the scale of the problem is staggering. The Amish? Check. Orthodox Jews? Check. Gymnasts? Check. Science fiction fandom? Check.
At some point, you start looking suspiciously at the communities that don’t have reports of covering up child sexual abuse and you think, “well, I guess they’re just better at covering it up.”
As a member of a high-commitment community, this worries me.
To be clear, I’m not aware of any cases of child sexual abuse in the effective altruist community. If I were, I would be doing something different than writing this blog post.
I don’t know what the right thing to do about this problem is, because I don’t know of any examples of groups that handled this problem well. That doesn’t mean that we have an excuse not to handle it well. It’s hard, but it’s important, and we have to get it right.
My intuition is that individual effective altruists will have to sit with how widespread child sexual abuse is until they realize that this is not a problem solvable by hoping that we’re lucky enough to avoid it. At some point in the next few decades, we will, as a community, face this test.
You might think that you’re a good person who’s opposed to child sexual abuse, so it won’t be a problem. Great! Everyone is a good person who’s opposed to child sexual abuse. There’s not an epidemic of Orthodox Jews who think that it’s great to rape kids. The cover-up happened anyway. You’re going to have to be better than most people.
We have some protective factors that many groups don’t. For example, children in the effective altruist community are likely to know what sex is and not to wind up so traumatized by purity culture that they think being raped is their fault. Our sexual ethics clearly and unambiguously distinguish between rape and consensual sex acts that some people consider sinful (such as premarital sex). We have respect for children’s consent and ability to make decisions about their own bodies. We don’t have the horrifying dynamic discussed in Richard Sipe’s excellent Celibacy in Crisis, where nearly everyone has done something wrong and is keeping it secret, and you have to cover up someone else’s rape of children because otherwise they might reveal the affair you had in seminary.
There are many temptations to cover up child sexual abuse that effective altruists have as much as anyone else: fear of embarrassment or awkwardness; fear of making a scene; worry about losing friends and career opportunities. But there are several factors about which I’m deeply concerned.
First: widespread consequentialism. A very common reason for covering up child sexual abuse is that the mission is too important: if the laity know how many priests rape children, it’ll separate them from God; this successful evangelist is bringing so many souls to Christ that we can’t make too much of a big deal out of the people he raped. I am concerned that many effective altruists would, in the dark corners of their hearts, be tempted by a similar thought. If someone sexually abuses children, and they’re an irreplaceable AI or longtermist or animals or global health researcher, are you willing to blow the whistle? If someone sexually abuses children, would you make it public if it means that everyone thinks of effective altruism as That Place With All The Child Sexual Abuse? (Unfortunately, you very rarely get credit for not doing a coverup.) The stakes are high. If you report child sexual abuse, people might die, animals might be tortured, the future of humanity might be in some small way a little bit darker—or at least you might believe that.
Second: unusual sexual beliefs. Many effective altruists disagree with mainstream society about the morality of certain sexual behaviors, such as polyamory. In cases such as science fiction fandom, this has led to people questioning the morality of sexual behaviors like having sex with children—or at least tolerating people who do. Something I’m particularly concerned about is that many effective altruists live in California. California has an abominable law in which a person over the age of 18 having sex with anyone under the age of 18 commits statutory rape—even if one of them is seventeen years and eleven months old and one of them is eighteen years and one month old. I worry, however, that widespread opposition to this appalling, life-destroying law might blur the lines between illegal-but-fine sexual activity and sexual activity which is genuinely exploitative of the teenagers involved.
Third: many effective altruists are—justifiably!—suspicious of the police. (Certainly, the police in my home city of Oakland combine horrifying police brutality with being completely useless about prosecuting any actual crimes.) Going through the justice system is retraumatizing to many survivors and may not lead to the perpetrator being punished. Some effective altruists also have deeply held moral objections to the American prison system and are conflicted about subjecting people to it. But if you don’t report the crime to the police—perhaps because the parents or the (teenage) victim don’t want you to—the line between respecting the victim’s wishes and doing a coverup can be blurry. Banning someone from events or arranging for them to be fired from their job or step back from public life is a wholly inadequate response. Posting information publicly can subject the victim to public scrutiny and also be retraumatizing, and is also wholly inadequate. In many cases, it can be hard to imagine what an appropriate response would look like.
I think my one piece of advice is to be prepared. Before you face a situation where someone is accused of child sexual abuse—especially if you’re in a situation of power or status in the community—plan for what you’ll do. Consider the ethical dilemmas—do you follow the victim’s lead or report any abuse you have reason to believe occurred?—before you’re in a situation where you’ll end up rationalizing choosing the option that’s least hard. Commit to yourself very firmly that you won’t cover up child sexual abuse no matter how frightening it is, no matter how difficult it is, no matter if it seems like the right thing to do. Encourage your friends to do the same. This is the only way we can prepare to handle this inevitable challenge well.