Bad Policy
Here we are again. I highly recommend you read the very thorough breakdown of issues by David Hill over here, then come back. Because this is…complex.
A few days ago Green Ronin released two things; a personal post by Nicole Lindroos, and a (zero draft?) policy about dealing with allegations of sexual harassment. I was doing my usual morning routine, a cup of coffee, saying good morning to my American friends still awake, and hit rpgnet. Where I saw an older thread I had started about #metoo and tabletop had been revived.
My first thought was ‘oh god who got hurt’ because I couldn’t imagine anything other than a new set of allegations dragging the thread out of retirement. But it wasn’t. A poster had linked to the following:
I had a lecture that afternoon, so more time than usual to read. I also had a lecture the next day about gender and work, so a lot of these issues were things I had been thinking about a lot, and researching. I also have a vested personal interest.
(At this point some may think I am talking about my existing friendship with Holden Shearer — somewhat, yes, given he has been one of my major emotional supports during this time. But my experiences with PTSD and being sexually harassed as a tabletop player, and my interest in keeping this hobby rather than having it turn into a mess of triggering bullshit the way video games did, are more relevant. I like tabletop goddamnit, I don’t want to have a panic attack every time I play, the way I do with video games, because exposure therapy is hard, and time-consuming, and deeply destabilising.)
This meant I sat down, fired off a message to my friends that I was busy reading and writing, that I was likely to need emotional support later, and sat down to try digest the Green Ronin announcements. First flinching moment: ‘Internet Justice and Whisper Networks’. That was not a valueless, impartial title. Those words, in both the previous instances of this issue, and in other related spaces, are used to devalue, deride, and dismiss the stories victims tell about their experiences, and to demand they give up on trying to make spaces safer. ‘Internet Justice’ is never leveraged as a good thing, and I have now seen three white men in ttrpgs alone use ‘whisper network’ as a grudge and a blunt tool to try and win unrelated arguments by implying their target (a queer man in two cases) is someone the whisper network has talked about.
The overarching menace of how ‘internet justice’ is both talked about, and implemented, is that it becomes a threat; don’t talk about what happened to you, because someone might lose their job, and that would be your fault and how dare you make that claim and try and do that to someone and...now it has turned on you, and you’re the one being doxxed and harassed, while predators tell everyone how sorry they are for being too intense, they promise they will change.
After that blip though, everything seems fair enough in terms of content. I agree with a lot of the whisper network problems, and have talked about that at length. Same with the problems around harassment policies — they are indeed often written to protect business bottom lines, often are written without care for the situations at hand. Dr Eva Cox recently released an essay about #metoo which I highly recommend reading, and she reminds us that;
There are multiple recorded problems with the individualised complaints model, as those accused seek to crush or shame accusers.
…
There are many other stories of how those who seek individual complaints are punished: lost jobs, character assassination, being labelled as “difficult”, and so on.
The call for due diligence also makes sense — as the One Shot Network situation showed, it is necessary and protects victims as much as it protects a business.
I also fully understand the trauma, and how badly it affects personal responses to situations that impinge on it. Since October last year, when #metoo hit hard, I have had to double my med dosage, taken up smoking (and mostly quit again), and stressed myself into being immunocompromised. I understand ‘reacting like an animal in pain’ as well; I just don’t understand why the trauma and pain Lindroos caused victims and the community is now irrelevant. The hurt you cause when you are traumatised is still hurt, still harms. And in the case of victim-blaming, slut-shaming, aggressive silencing of discussions about harassment, and accusations of conspiracies, the harm goes well beyond the people directly involved.
How many people are likely to come forward after watching someone claim to be working for a safer industry also claim that serial sexual harassment was of ‘the least severe kind’?
However, I still get it. It can be hard to let go of those things. This made my hackles stir though, once I had read through the post entirely:
It is an experience I do not want to repeat and as such, I will not be engaging in any further public debate on the subject. Instead, I intend to follow up with actions, to continue to provide opportunities for women through my company and my volunteer efforts, and to work for structural changes to the tabletop industry.
No public debate while announcing a public action to structurally change the industry? Providing opportunities for women to work in a company that dismissed complaints of sexual harassment while attacking victims publicly? Whose inaction and dismissal of complaints when confronted allowed the perpetrator to continue his predation and sexually assault a woman a month later? Who still has not released a timeline they promised would explain it, or apologised to the women who competed for the chance to work alongside someone Green Ronin knew to have multiple complaints of sexual harassment made against them, and who they acknowledged to be an asshole at times?
And that the ‘structural change’ being referred to is:
The intent is to create common and agreed upon set of policies for reporting issues of discrimination and harassment, setting up mechanisms for prompt, thorough, and impartial investigation into any such reports, and establishing protocols for taking corrective action. Green Ronin has paid for this document to undergo a legal review and we hope that GAMA can provide the impartial vehicle through which issues of inappropriate behavior can be properly addressed. The initial language we’re proposing can be found here: S.T.O.P. Harassment (Standards, Terms and Other Practices)
For one:
Policies that involve a community need more than a legal review (particularly, if as Lindroos claimed on facebook, that lawyer is primarily known for handling a multimillion dollar defamation lawsuit and for reviewing corporate policies). They require identification of stakeholders. They require the input of those stakeholders. Not necessarily public debate, which Lindroos ruled out in the previous paragraph, but input from those affected.
Two:
Are GAMA going to be informed about the apparently still ongoing investigation Green Ronin are doing into Colin A Suleiman’s assault on JH Moncrieff? Are they informed of the position Green Ronin are in? Are they informed regarding #metoo in the tabletop community as a whole? Because it goes way beyond this. Policies aimed at, and for, businesses and corporations are never ever going to protect the community except when it is financially expedient, or someone has the spine and courage to make it altruistic. Who writes a policy is important contextual information in both evaluating and implementing community engagement with it. The business focus of the policy needs to be made clear, and the lack of input from the community acknowledged as either deliberate (because it isn’t aimed at communities) or to be undertaken. In which case, why mention ‘no public debate’?
After I read that post I had a horrible feeling. I then read the S.T.O.P document and made a post on rpgnet detailing my problems with it. Others did the same. The post I made there is necessarily brief, but I will follow up this essay with a more detailed and cohesive review of the proposed ‘initial language’ policy, based primarily on my experience writing policy for government, public institutions, working with other entities who develop research that goes into making policy, and my own research into gender and communities (as well as that whole pesky ‘victim of assault’ thing).
Because this goes well beyond Green Ronin — they are trying to develop a standard without appropriate feedback or buy in from the majority of people who are going to be affected. They are trying to create individualised responses without actually changing the system itself. Dr Eva Cox sums it up as:
If we are serious about the abuse of gender-based power, we must look at its causes and make structural and cultural changes. We must overcome the serious, widespread gender-biased socialisation of boys and girls, in most cases long before they reach puberty.
Yes, that is a gendered point of view — for a reason. Some of the victims in tabletop, and in #metoo in general, are men. Some of the victims were assaulted or harassed by a woman. The response to those incidents is gendered — ignoring male victims, ignoring female assailants — as much as the power structures themselves. We cannot, as a community, ignore the gendered structures of power that reward predation with contracts, silence, support, and more victims, while punishing the harmed for speaking out. We cannot ignore the gender imbalance of tabletop, and we cannot insist that abusive cultures have nothing to do with it. We are a community made of people, from a wide range of spaces and communities and cultures, with all of that piled up behind us, so any policy for the community or the industry needs to recognise that in order to function.
Community buy in is integral to policy implementation and success. If a policy is meant for business only, then it is business only. It is still fair to critique the policy, to question its use for those of us not covered by it but still victimised by those within the business, but that is an entirely different proposition to an industry-wide policy aimed at dealing with a wide range of harassment. The foundational elements of the policy are lacking the things necessary to make it work the way Lindroos claims is the intent, because it is not built on safety, or equity, but is a set of rules focused as much on the perpetrator, on damage control, and on defensiveness, as it is on anything else. And it has to be built on the understanding that it is a short-term fix, to quote Dr Cox again, and “… we must realise that they will not drive the cultural and gendered power changes we need.”
We cannot rules-lawyer ourselves out of each instance of harassment into equity and safety.