How to Tell if Your Whisper Network is Broken

Most of my experiences with the whisper network have been…broken, by any standard.

…The women who warned each other about the ‘creep’ but tried to set me up with him and told him ‘don’t take no for an answer’.

…The women who admit they haven’t told the new hire about the rapist exec because she is rumoured to be having an affair with a different exec.

…The men who say they were doing everything they could to rescue women from a creep…who wait until a woman puts her name on the line to admit it.

…The men who warn some women but not others, but imply they all already know.

These are just a small collection of ways in which the whisper network has actively failed to keep me safe. Which prompts the following list of ways you need to vet your network to work out if it is keeping you safe, or keeping you ignorant, or keeping you out.

• does it rely entirely on non-specific warnings with no content? Because that can be a sign that it is about personal issues AND it does nothing to actually keep you safe either.
• does the person who brought you in try and ensure they are your only source?
• does the person telling you the information tell you not to share it with women closer to the situation? That can be about trying to keep each other safe, or it can be about delineating who is acceptably victimised. Or it can be about keeping you ignorant because those women have more information.
• does the person you tell go straight to the offender with your name, or take it public, or insist on having the offender in the conversation with you?
• does the information follow specific company lines? It’s usual that you know what goes on in your company more, but if your network only ever tells you about a competitor? And derides the victims of anyone in your circle? That’s not going to keep you safe.
• have you spoken to the women closest to the source or the missing stair? Does their perception/experience directly contradict that of the whisper network? It can be because that person is an exceptional actor and chooses their victims well, or it can be the network being wrong, or used for purposes other than keeping women safe.
• does the target move? Does the person at fault shift from perpetrator to people around them, to their victims, or their previous victims? That won’t keep you safe either.
• do the victims all have a similar profile? This can be a particularly sticky one, I admit — is it because the missing stair chooses his victims well? Is it because they’re the cohort who can speak out since they were fired/rejected/dumped? Or is it that they are speaking out of hurt from being in that cohort?

I have a lot of personal reasons to be suspicious of the whisper network — it’s a living embodiment of White Feminism™ for one thing, and gets easily warped by bad actors for another, but beyond all that I find it triggering. I find it terrifying. I find it actively making spaces unsafe for me, and women like me, the queer and gender-non-conforming, the neuroatypical and the odd ones, the trans ladies and the brown ladies and the black ladies and the Butches and the nb people and the queer boys who are victims too, or the straight men who have no real practice avoiding predation being thrown to the wolves because there’s no space for them in that network.

Because let’s be real here — it isn’t a whisper network. It is just a network. It isn’t keeping anyone safe outside the people you choose to keep safe, it changes nothing, and it gives an illusion of safety and support where there is none. It is a system designed to eat you and these networks are as much part of it as the ones the lose the paperwork, and forget the complaints, and claim due diligence because they asked a question over a beer.

This world eats its own but we are a social species and we can change it. We can change it by not letting one person cloud how we approach things. We can change it by being honest, being vulnerable, and being kind. By pushing, relentlessly, for change. By recognising when we have been wrong, when we have been complicit, and making whatever amends we can. By recognising when someone is changing and making amends. By supporting who we can, when we can. By protecting each other and ourselves.

Silence will smother us all and the whisper network is weaponised against us.