Thread by @wad3mullen

THREAD:

Organizations that have successfully escaped taking responsibility for their own history of systemic sexual abuse have typically employed numerous tactics of impression management to control the ways in which people view them.

Here a few ways the system deceives:

One type of justification suggests sexual abuse is not just a problem within the organization but a problem that spans all organizations and is a human problem. This comparison with industry and societal norms leads us to believe the problem is not unique to the organization.

Blindspots remain as they use this justification to support their decision not to do their own investigation into the scope of the problem. Their ignorance might be negligent if they do in fact possess the tools to assess the scope and severity of the problem on their own.

That ignorance conveniently provides them with a ready-made excuse if the scope of the problem is ever revealed by outsiders. They simply claim a lack of knowledge or foreseeability (hence, their surprise/shock). This isn't a valid excuse if they had their own means of discovery.

It especially isn't a valid excuse if others had been telling the organization for years of the scope of the problem but they refused to listen. Their culpability is even greater if they engaged in tactics to discredit and silence those who were trying to sound an alarm.

If the exposure of their problems is unavoidable, they will unsurprisingly concede the basic facts of the exposure. They can easily get away with these concessions, even publicly praise the rightness of the exposure, as long as they can use excuses to argue their blamelessness.

One common type of excuse organizations use is to deny volition, or ability. Someone can't be expected to possess the ability to control a behavior they know nothing about. Or if they do know something about the wrongs, they might argue they lack the authority to intervene.

Determining whether or not an organization is actually excused due to their inability to prevent personal injury to their stake holders is an important moral, and legal, concern. By denying ability, they can deny responsibility, and therefore be excused.

In consideration of moral concerns, the example of the Good Samaritan is one of exhausting every possibility to help, not offering every possible excuse for not helping. The claim of inability must be met with challenges to the actual limitations of that authority.

One challenge is to look at ways in which the organization was able to monitor, assess, regulate, and resolve other types of behavior that it deemed a problem. If it possessed the ability to respond to problem A, why did it not possess the ability to respond to problem B?

If the excuse of inability turns out to be valid, then the next challenge should be to the rules that determine the extent of that ability. Rules that provide for the protection of the organization from blame by not allowing them to protect their people from harm are bad rules.

But they might argue that their rules are based on deeply held convictions or beliefs, at which point we might justify their adherence to those rules. In fact, they might even suggest that their followers are the ones who demand these rules be kept because of those beliefs.

But perhaps their polity is based on mistaken beliefs about the structure of their organization, the roles of those who govern, and about who can govern. If so, then the structure of the organization is no longer justified, and the negligence of the leaders is no longer excused.

On top of these justifications and excuses are layers of prosocial behaviors typical to organizations in crisis: condemnation of the wrongs, expressions of sorrow for the wronged, and promises of renewed efforts to do better through training, checks, and awareness-raising events.

But these prosocial behaviors are often driven by desires to regain legitimacy, trust, and support, and are therefore not indicators of change in a new direction, but the predictable next steps in their continued efforts at managing the impressions others are forming of them.

If the problem that's causing harm to so many is indeed systemic, then any efforts that fail to consider every part of the system and their potential contribution to the problem falls short. This includes examining parts that speak to organizational culture: values and beliefs.

Their choice not to consider all possible factors that contribute to abuse within their midst keeps them ignorant. And if someday the factors they refused to consider are exposed as contributors to that abuse, you can be sure they'll use a well-learned excuse: denial of volition.