This article was written by me and originally published on the Ada Initiative’s website. It is republished here according to the terms of its Creative Commons licence.
As anti-harassment policies become more widespread at open technology and culture events, different ways of handling harassment incidents are emerging. We advocate a swift process in which final decisions are made by a small group of empowered decision makers, whose focus is on the safety of the people attending the event.
Open technology and culture communities, which often make decisions in a very public way, can be tempted to also have a very public and very legalistic harassment handling process, a judicial model, but we advocate against this. It prioritises other values, such as transparency and due process, over that of safety. Alternatively, because many members of such communities find ostracism very hurtful and frightening, sometimes they develop a caretaker model, where they give harassers lots of second chances and lots of social coaching, and focus on the potential for a harasser to redeem themselves and re-join the community.
But neither of these models prioritise safety from harassment.
Consider an alternative model: harassment in the workplace. In a well-organised workplace that ensured your freedom from harassment — a situation which we know is also all too rare, but which we can aspire to, especially since our events are workplaces for many of us — an empowered decision maker such as your manager or an HR representative would make a decision based on your report that harassment had occurred and other relevant information as judged by them, and act as required order to keep your workplace safe for you.
A well-organised workplace would not appoint itself your harasser’s anti-harassment coach, have harassment reports heard by a jury of your peers, publish the details of your report widely, have an appeals process several levels deep, or offer fired staff members the opportunity to have their firing reviewed by management after some time has passed.
Like in a well-organised workplace, we advocate a management model of handling harassment complaints to make events safer: reasonably quick and final decisions made by a small group of empowered decision makers, together with communication not aimed at transparency for its own sake, but at giving people the information they need to keep themselves safe.
The management model of harassment handling is that:
- you have a public harassment policy that clearly states that harassment is unacceptable, and gives examples of unacceptable behaviour
- you have a clear reporting avenue publicised with the policy
- you have an empowered decision maker, or a small group of decision makers, who will act on reports
- reports of harassment are conveyed to those decision makers when reported
- they consider those reports, gather any additional information they need to make a decision — which could include conduct in other venues and other information that a very legalistic model might not allow — and they decide what action would make the event safer
- they communicate with people who need to know the outcome (eg, with the harasser if they need to change their behaviour, avoid any people or places, or leave the event; volunteers or security if they need to enforce any boundaries)
- they provide enough information to the victim of the harassment, and when needed to other attendees, to let them make well-informed decisions about their own safety
Further reading
- Annalee Flower Horne’s discussion of Geek Feminism’s Code of Conduct on the advantages of a small group of report handlers over a large or ill-defined one.
- Rose Fox’s 2012 essay What Conventions Are and Aren’t, on the limits of what conference organizers can be expected to achieve with regards to justice and redemption.
- major_clanger, an English barrister and event organizer, commenting from a lawyer’s point of view on the limits of a judicial model.
- Valerie Aurora on our blog earlier this year, HOWTO design a code of conduct for your community
Handling harassment incidents swiftly and safely
by the Ada Initiative is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://adainitiative.org/2014/07/23/handling-harassment-incidents-swiftly-and-safely/.