Thread by @Delafina777

I've been thinking a lot, in the wake of the Luke Crane thing, about the harm the lack of any real process for both making amends and for reintegrating someone who's fucked up back into the community is doing.

Like, to be clear, I don't *personally* give a shit if any shitty white man in games fucks off into the sunset and we never see or hear from him again.

However, I also recognize that that's my emotions talking, and not my understanding of how communities work. Because a lot of those shitty white men haven't been shitty to *everyone,* and may have given people who aren't shitty white men opportunities.

And also, people aren't wholly good or wholly bad, and I know plenty of people in this industry who have both championed and taught and opened doors for people who might otherwise not have a shot in games, AND been incredibly shitty to others.

And those things don't actually cancel each other out, as much as it would simplify things if we could just give everyone some sort of numerical Shittiness rating.

Different relationships with different people don't actually average out.

The ways in which a person changed someone's life for the better have *no bearing* on how they changed someone else's life for the worse.

If someone who sexually harassed me gave some other woman a life-changing opportunity in games, that doesn't somehow make what he did to me less terrible.

And while it might cast a shadow over what he did for her, if she cares about these things, it doesn't make it less real.

I've been thinking about this especially in regard to people in what I see as sort of a secondary ring of harm.

Like, you've got your people who do primary harm: harass, assault, abuse, etc.

And then you've got your people who do harm primarily by *enabling* people in that first ring.

And what's been sort of disturbing to me is that sometimes the consequences for the enablers seem to be worse than the consequences for the primary-harm people.

Part of that, I think, is that we have a tendency to write off the primary-harm doers as monsters, as irredeemable, so we don't *expect* anything from them. But we're disappointed in the enablers, so we actually feel angrier at them than at the people we enabled.

Sometimes it may also be availability, and the perceived safety of going after the enablers.

Mearls is a softer target than you-know-who, because he's not suing anyone he thinks is looking at him funny.

And I don't know how to talk about this in a way that isn't going to sound gross, but sometimes I think it's because the harasser/abuser/assaulter is marginalized in some way, and the enabler isn't, which makes it feel safer to go after the enabler.

Like, you-know-who is marginalized in some ways, and has a history of weaponizing those aspects of his identity against anyone who criticizes him.

Whereas Mearls? White, straight, male, and corporate.

The thing is, while we might feel like there's a bright line between us and the harassers/assaulters/abusers, for anyone who's actually worked in TTRPGs, there *isn't* a bright line between us and the enablers.

I'm pretty sure *every last one of us* knows about shitty behavior that we're not saying anything about.

Usually because it's not our story to tell, and the victims don't want it getting out.

So we can't say anything publicly, and we can't even usually warn people privately, because the industry's small enough that doing so would identify the victims.

So, okay, just as there is active enablement (giving a person who's doing harm work, publishing with them, etc.), there's passive enablement (just... not saying anything).

(I mean, the flip-side of this is that there can be active enforcement of consequences, such as voting no on hiring, and there can be passive enforcement of consequences, such as just not *offering* work.)

My point in this is that I'm pretty certain that *every last person who's worked at an RPG company* has been at least a passive enabler for some person who's done some serious harm, because we feel constrained to not speak up for various reasons.

And like, I feel like my conscience is pretty clear for *most* of the times I've said nothing, because the alternative was exposing a victim who didn't want to be exposed, but that doesn't make me not complicit. It just means that I chose a lesser harm over a greater one.

So anyway, my point is that I get a little uneasy when the focus on people who *enabled* harm seems to eclipse the focus on the people who actually *did* the harm.

And I think that we need to be cognizant of that.

But getting back to my original point, I think that we're seeing harm done by having no real, transparent process for "rehabilitating" people.

Because without it, what happens is it's largely left to people with power to decide on their own.

Either that's the people who did the harm themselves deciding that they've been "canceled" long enough, or--more often--it's their friends deciding that they deserve another chance.

And that's often without any real involvement of the people who've been harmed, or the people who are likely to be harmed, it's without any clarity around what "doing better" looks like, and it's without any public knowledge that it's happening.

(And again, I want to be clear here that I'm not advocating for this in cases where someone's, say, actually sexually assaulted someone.)

But communities should be able to take someone who, say, has a history of creeping on women at conventions, and say, "okay, here's what 'doing better' looks like: you don't drink at conventions, you socialize with a friend who'll nudge you if you start saying inappropriate shit"

Like, there should be a public way for people to get together and say, "okay, if you're genuinely sorry, here's what you need to personally take on to be safer to be around, if you want another chance at being part of this community"

And instead of just trusting that hey this person is going to try to do better, there's actually measurable behavior there to look at, there are actually guardrails that they agree to to lessen the chances that they keep doing the harmful thing.

And it also gives people who *aren't* comfortable giving that person another chance the transparency of knowing that, okay, this person is going to be present in the community again instead of just being blindsided when they show up at a convention or on an author list.

It also gives people who want to help that person come back a community-mediated way to do so that doesn't involve just... inviting them to shit and not telling anyone and hoping everyone's okay with it.

Or just vouching for the person and hoping it turns out all right.

I also feel like it gives people who aren't genuinely sorry but want back in less cover if it's transparent.

Maybe they're sincere, maybe they're not, but if what they're *supposed* to be doing to be safe to be around is public, it's a lot more obvious if they're not doing it.

And in cases where it's something like, "don't be alone with people to whom you're offering work" or whatever, even if they're not sincere, it doesn't really matter because they're not getting the opportunity to do the harm they were doing.

Anyway, I recognize that this wouldn't be easy to institute, because we don't have A Community, we have a bunch of interlinked communities, with different standards and focuses and all that.

But I do know we need something better than what we currently have, which is largely:

-talk about it on social media
-maybe boycott their stuff?
-???
-find out they're back, someone gave them work, they published a new thing, they went to a convention
-rinse, repeat

I could go on a whole rant about American Forgiveness Culture here and how it's tied into this, but that's a different thread.

Suffice it to say that there are models from many different non-European, non-Christian cultures about actual *processes* for reintegrating harmdoers.

The TL;DR version is that focusing on forgiveness, let along turning the other cheek, is actually harmful to communities when it comes to dealing with someone who's repeatedly done harm, and I think a lot of the anger behind so-called "cancel culture" is a reaction to that.

Like, people are (rightfully) going "fuck this whole 'turn the other cheek' thing, how many times are we supposed to forgive this *pattern of behavior*"?

and that anger is real and legitimate

the problem is, though, while we might want to ditch that shallow, pop-culture-Christian paradigm of "just forgive, just be the bigger person"

without an alternative framework, that anger doesn't end up *changing* things

in the absence of an alternative framework for handling this sort of harm, what ends up happening is just... the more privileged someone is, usually, the less they have to do to come back

or put another way, anger at the status quo without alternative proposals ends up not doing anything to change the status quo, because ultimately we just end up defaulting back to it

so most shitty white men end up being fine

people who aren't white men sometimes do something considerably less terrible than the white men who end up being fine, and they don't end up being fine

Anyway, it's not like I have a fully-formed process or framework ready to suggest, but I feel like we need something better than what we're doing.

And yeah, people are going to be frustrated that I don't have a solution and are going to want to read into this that I want to center abusers in this convo or whatever.

Which is why it's fucking exhausting to talk about this stuff on Twitter, because it's not soundbite-ready.

But, well, I'm an extrovert. I think out loud.

And right now, I'm an extrovert quarantined during a pandemic and in the interests of not overloading my introvert housemate by ACTUALLY thinking out loud, I sometimes think out loud on Twitter.

Deal.