Following on from this post, if we do want to change as fandom, want to make cons safe, what should we be doing? For a start of course cons need to do what Readercon and then Wiscon failed to do: not allow a known harasser back next year. Cons need not just a consistent, thought out policy against harassment, they also need to make it known to concom, volunteers and members alike and make sure that any incidents and harassers are known to next year’s concom and volunteers as well.
The key point to remember is that if a con doesn’t prevent know harassers from attending, it means excluding or even endangering their victims; while it may be harsh on a harasser to be ejected and banned, it’s much harsher to subject victims to potential new harassment. The other thing to remember is that for every victim of a harasser that comes forward, there are usually more who don’t for various reasons, especially in a climate where until very recently harassment wasn’t taken seriously.
But there’s a larger problem. Even if every con has its harassment policy and bans harassers, it of course won’t help much if they can just amble along to the next con to menace fresh victims. That’s the silo problem, where each con knows who their problem cases are, but the cons aren’t sharing that information. There therefore need to be some way to share information. You can’t rely on informal networks, as Deirdre Saoirse Moen’s comment on the previous post shows, because there will always be people and cons left out of it.
So there needs to be more formal ways of cons to inform each other about harassers, as well as its own members, volunteers and concom. This doesn’t necessarily mean making this information public, but there are back channels for con “professionals” where this sort of exchange could happen. We need to get this in place sooner rather than later, to avoid harassers just choosing new cons to trawl.
