*Sigh*:
Multiple board members responded by saying that if we made the harassment policy any more concrete, we’d be tying the hands of any future chair of RainFurrest who wanted to work things out informally between the people involved, and we would enforce bans on socially awkward individuals who just didn’t know the rules. I heard from multiple people that making our harassment policy any more specific would cost us members, and they refused to consider that people who refused to show up because of our harassment policy were probably not the kinds of attendees we wanted.
Taken from a post-mortem on how furry con Rainfurrest got scuppered, this paragraph explains so much about how cons get bad. It’s the full on fannish fallacy in action: we can’t exclude people because exclusion is inherently bad, no matter what they do. In this case it went worse than usual as apparantly it empowered some part of the con to run rampant over multiple years, something the con seemed to condone as the cost of business, until the hotels it depended on had had enough. Whoops.
Of course the other side of the coin is that while it’s a sin to exclude people we know, people we don’t know or who are not quite like us, we’re happy to exclude, either deliberately or as a consequence of not dealing with harassers and other problem fans. Mark Oshiro found that out last year at ConQuest, where as a guest of honour he not only was all but ignored by the concom, but was harassed too.
It’s all so depressing to see the same problems crop up in con after con, when it isn’t rocket science to solve them. Plenty of conventions have managed to not only get a proper code of conduct assembled, but also provide the resources to deliver on its promises. All it requires is a mindset change, to understand that harassment is not a victimless crime or prank, but something that stops people from coming to your con, that will get your con into trouble sooner or later the same way it did Rainfurrest.
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