Thinking more about Wiscon, I came back to the point Rose Fox made two years ago, in the wake of the harassment problems at Readercon:
When someone does something we find noxious, they become the focus of attention: how will they be punished? Will they apologize? Can they be brought back into the fold? Meanwhile, the person they targeted with their noxious behavior is forgotten, dismissed, or scorned. Harassers are often charismatic, which is how they get close enough to harass, and they often target the shy and vulnerable, who are that much easier to ignore if they manage to speak up at all. We are all intimately familiar with the narrative of sin-repentance-redemption, and it’s startlingly easy to try to follow someone through it while all but forgetting that they wouldn’t have even started down that road if they hadn’t treated another person badly.
That is, that too much of the focus in this is on the harasser and that cons even when starting to address harassment do this, sometimes with the best of intentions. As with Wiscon, you get all those pseudolegal procedures and folderol to make sure that harassment policies are fair and balanced and while having due process is important in the justice system, if you run a con it should be more simple to expell people who hassle and harass other congoers. There’s no need to reinvent the legal system.
And at the forefront of every conrunner’s mind should be the simple idea that for every harasser treated with kid gloves and not expelled, several victims or potential victims will feel unsafe and not go to their convention.
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