The Readercon sexual harassment debacle has been discussed on a couple of podcasts recently. Gary and Jonathan had Genevieve Valentine as a guest on Coode Street at the weekend, and a good part of the episode was given over to the Readercon issue. I thought it went very well. Kudos to a couple of old, white, cis, straight males. 😉

The latest episode of the SF Signal podcast also discussed the issue. The ladies on the podcast did a good job of explaining the issue, including mention of a truly awful story from a previous World Fantasy that Jeff VanderMeer rightly jumps all over here. However, I do with that Patrick Hester had done some research before the show. And I also wish that they’d had someone on who was more closely involved in running conventions. While I’m very keen to see conventions adopt good anti-harassment policies, I’m staring to lean more towards the view that the smart thing to do is to get out of con-running.

Tero Ykspetäjä has run the numbers on panel participants at the recent Finncon. They look pretty good overall, close to 50:50. Drilling down, men were in a clear majority when the subject was science, but women had a clear majority on panels about writing SF. So for Helsinki next year we need more women scientists and more male writers. Volunteers?

The thread on anti-harassment policies is collecting some useful ideas. This post is not about that. It is about illustrating some of the complexities of the issue.

I’d like to start by addressing the idea, expressed in many posts on the subject, that people, specifically women, have the right to feel safe at conventions. I certainly support that, but at the same time I’m rather sanguine about it as a target because, to a certain extent, I stop feeling safe when I get outside my front door.

I say “to a certain extent” because as trans women go I am very lucky. I’m not pretty enough to have ever suffered from sexual harassment — I’m much more likely to be told I shouldn’t be allowed out without a paper bag over my head (and indeed have had comments of that type from men) — but at the same time I’m not often followed down the street by people yelling “freak” and “weirdo” at me, though it has happened. I’ve never had any trouble using public bathrooms, or changing rooms in clothes stores. I do tend to avoid places like pubs unless I’m with friends, which is true for many cis women as well. But I do have specific events that make me nervous.

Ironically the worst types of events for me are public LGBT-focused events such as Pride days. That’s partly because people tend to go to them hoping to find some freaks to abuse, and partly because people seem to think that Pride is an excuse to ask people all sorts of intrusive questions about their private lives. Conventions, in general, are not a problem, but fear for my personal safety is the main reason why I have never attended the SFX Weekender.

As I noted in my previous post, there is a potential issue with RadFems. I didn’t stop going to WisCon over that. While there are (or at least used to be) people who attend the convention who hold such views, the WisCon committee generally gives them short shrift. If I had any qualms of that sort it was more along the lines of not wanting to be the person who was the cause of Great Drama at WisCon, even if things turned out in my favor.

A more pressing issue for me was potential trouble with trans activists. WisCon has many of those attending, and it became clear that some of them felt that I was Doing Trans Wrong. I had no particular desire to spend my convention being lectured by such people. Judging from what I have seen online, at least one person of that ilk now attends Eastercon, which is one of many reasons why I no longer go to that event.

Of course being lectured on one’s lack of gender correctness is a minor issue compared to sexual harassment or fear of being beaten up. The reason I bring it up is to illustrate that there are things that might make me uncomfortable at a convention, even to the extent of causing me to stop attending, that don’t amount to abuse and shouldn’t result in anyone being disciplined. If Kevin had been able to attend WisCon with me, rather than needing to be at BayCon that weekend, I may have kept attending as I would have had emotional support.

In a way this is a type of cultural issue. There was a prevailing culture at WisCon that made me feel uncomfortable. But even greater cultural issues can arise when you travel to non-Anglo countries.

Finncon, as you should be aware by now, has a sauna at the dead dog party. The Finns, as is traditional, do sauna naked. Most of them have been doing so with their families for years, and are very used to mixed gender naked sauna. For Finncon, because of the presence of foreign guests, a slightly different pattern has been adopted. There is a women-only sauna, followed by a men-only sauna, followed by an open period when anyone can go in. This allows foreigners to enjoy the naked sauna experience without being exposed to mixed-gender groups.

This year one of the Finnish men managed to miss the instructions and joined in the women-only sauna. Most of us were in the lake swimming when he arrived. I wasn’t, because I would have been bitten to death by mosquitoes had I gone outside, so I saw him walk in. He looked harmless to me, so what I did was wait in the ante-room for the others to come back and let them know what was going on. No one had any objections, so we got on with the sauna.

I want to stress that there was no question of any voyeuristic intent on behalf of the interloper. He sat there and chatted amiably with us, then went on his way. Most of the women involved were Finns and unfazed. Liz Williams is a practicing druid and probably used to mixed-gender nakedness elsewhere. And speaking for myself I’m just hugely grateful that I’m allowed in, rather than have someone complain that I’m “really a man” and should be excluded from the women’s sauna.

Sometime later Finncon staff had a quiet word with the interloper who was mortified at having made such a mistake. At the post-con debrief a new policy was adopted to make sure that, in addition to announcements at the event, notices would be posted on the sauna door making it clear who was allowed in and who wasn’t.

Of course it could have been very different. There might have been women involved who objected to a male presence, in which case I would have let my friend Karo quietly take care of the matter. She was head of convention security, after all, and she was right on the spot. And had it not been a mistake on the bloke’s part I have no doubt he would have been dealt with sternly.

So culture and intent play an important part on what can and can’t be done. The important part is that people should agree on what is acceptable behavior, and that those limits should be enforced. Where things go wrong is when one person engages in activities that others find threatening, and when that person is allowed to continue with their behavior despite clearly stated desires and rules to the contrary.

While I’ve been away over the weekend there has been much chat online about an incident of sexual harassment at Readercon and how it has been handled by the convention. If you need to catch up on things there is an excellent links round-up available here. As someone who runs conventions, incidents like this are of interest to me because I want to know how we can do better in future, hence this post.

Before I say anything else I should note that I am not coming to this incident neutral, because the perp in question is well known to me. I have worked quite a bit with René Walling in the past, but more importantly he was one of the people who had me thrown off the Hugo Award Marketing Committee. I have a great deal of respect for the work he has done, and I know he has helped Kevin out a lot, but I am deeply unimpressed with some of his behavior.

That caveat aside, here are a couple of headline thoughts.

Firstly, if your convention policy says that a certain type of behavior will result in a lifetime ban, then it should result in a lifetime ban. Not a two year ban. Not a ten year ban that gets rescinded for good behavior after a few years. A lifetime ban. As Farah noted, it doesn’t matter if the person in question is a friend, or is well respected in the community or is a “nice person”. On the latest Coode Street podcast Gary Wolfe talks about having to deal with a very high profile author who had been pestering young women. Policy is policy, no matter who breaks it.

Having said that, as various people have noted, if the only choices that your policy gives you are a lifetime ban or letting the perp off without punishment, then you have backed yourself into a corner with no room to maneuver. Draconian punishments inevitably result in a tendency to let people off if there is any doubt at all that they deserve such treatment. Also, given the way that convention staffs change with time, I suspect that a “lifetime ban” would be highly likely to be rescinded if the person involved really wanted to get back. If you can’t, or don’t always want to, enforce a lifetime ban, don’t have it as your only disciplinary option.

These things, I am sure, have been said in very many blog posts about the incident, but what I want to concentrate on is how we can do this better. What should a convention anti-harassment policy look like? How should we punish unacceptable behavior if the convention is a one-off? Can we put measures in place that enable us to crack down on bad behavior at the con before things get out of hand?

Let’s start with a few objectives:

1. We want all attendees to feel and be safe at conventions.
2. We want a policy that is seen to be fair.
3. We want a policy that can be implemented easily and effectively.
4. We need to be aware that there will always be exceptions to simple rules.

That last point is important. René’s case appears to be cut and dried in that there were repeated offenses with plenty of witnesses and he admitted his guilt. Other cases may not be so simple. And there will be outliers. As a bizarre but entirely plausible example, what happens if you have both hard-line Radical Feminists and trans women at your convention? As far as some RadFems are concerned, the mere existence of trans women is an act of sexual violence against them. If they encountered one in a women’s bathroom at a convention I’m pretty sure an official complaint would result, regardless of how the trans woman behaved.

Some degree of flexibility in the policy is doubtless a good thing, but at the same time it has to be administered fairly, not used as an excuse for favoritism. Much of the problem with Readercon is due to the fact that their policy said one thing and they did something different. If people think that the policy is being applied unfairly then they will not feel safe.

In addition you have to be able to implement the policy. There’s no point in making the lifting of a ban dependent on good behavior if you have no means of checking on how a person behaves in between conventions. And it would be unwise to promise 24-hour rapid response to incidents if you don’t expect to have enough staff to provide such a service.

In the spirit of the “If I Ran The Zoo” Worldcon training game I have a few scenarios I’d like to throw out for consideration, but as they are all based on real events I’ll need to ask permission first. In the meantime I would appreciate your thoughts on what a good convention anti-harassment policy should look like. Please try not to derail discussion by getting into specifics about the rights and wrongs of what Readercon as done, or trying to understand RadFem theory.