"But people will be afraid of being accused of harassment!"

[xiphias]

Now that science fiction conventions are at the very beginning stages of starting to take harassment of women seriously, one thing you see people say is that this will make people scared to go, because they'll be afraid of being accused of harassment.

I just wanna say: if you are afraid you'll be accused of harassing people, maybe you should stop harassing people.

Comments

[sethg]

I’m sure some of the perfectly innocent women who have spent their lives carefully structuring their behavior in order to minimize their risk of being assaulted could give perfectly innocent men some helpful tips on how to place themselves above suspicion.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Depends. Is there a clear listing of what is and isn't harassment, or is "I think that guy is creepy and looking at me wrong" sufficient?

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

+1

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

This is NOT intended as any sort of attack, or negative statement, or anything -- it's just an observation. I'm not saying that this is right or wrong or making any sort of judgement about it.

You may be the only one of my female friends who doesn't have a strong sense of what being harassed and not being harassed feels like, and how they are different.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

...so my father was just telling me about how he first met my mother and she was so totally not interested in him, and over some period of time of first having to figure out how to find her he eventually managed to convince her to come to great falls some afternoon.

It's true. I will second guess most things. I found someone hugely irritating on Saturday - she popped into a conversation with someone else, and on learning I was going to fringe asked to come along. This was my first time ever meeting her. I wondered if it was she or I.

Re harassment, I've either escaped it, or let my obliviousness protective mechanism take over. (That or my extremely Swiss cheese memory - I once filed a former coworker looming over me hoping to kiss me as "why I haven't been sailing since '98)

In a situation without zero tolerance, I'm more sanguine, but given that the regs often read "if someone says you are harassing them, you likely are" it makes me oogy. Particularly after I watched a thread where person a finding person b creepy was being treated as person b having victimized person a.

I suspect that different people have different thresholds for what is or is not harassment.
(Mine is probably fairly egregiously lax, though honestly I can't remember much of guys following me around or anything like that.)

[edited - iPad and wine with parents]

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Sure people have different thresholds for what is and is not harassment.

The trick is to believe somebody who says they are being harassed.


"I find [person x] creepy" is not the same as "[Person x] harassed me," at least not to me.

[cheshyre]

I don't know if you had siblings growing up, but I can remember my brother and I in the back seat of the car, getting in each others' space yet with the deniability of "I'm not touching you!"

In that vein, I fear that any attempt at codifying a list of unacceptable behaviors would become guidelines for ways to obey the letter of the rules while violating their spirit.

That said, a commenter in Scalzi's blog posted a link to Anthrocon's code of conduct, which I rather like. It's harassment section calls out "harassment of any kind, including physical assault, battery, deliberate intimidation, stalking, or unwelcome physical attentions" but they also begin the page with a bolded general rule that forbids "any action or behavior that causes significant interference with convention operations, excessive discomfort to other attendees, or adversely affects Anthrocon's relationship with its guests, its venues or the public"

That seems clear to me, but still focuses on the effects rather than a specific litany of prohibited conduct.

[metaphortunate.livejournal.com]

If that ever becomes as big a problem as the current problem of actual harassment, cons should deal with it then.

And by that I mean the invader lord Insect People of Ladis XII who will be running the cons at that point should deal with it.