[Noisebridge-discuss] I got groped at noisebridge at hackmeet

[Sai]

Susan -

I was at Hackmeet (pic: saizai.com). I won't speak for anyone else
there, but a couple points that hopefully may be helpful for you.

Let me start off with the obvious: I'm really sorry that happened to
you. It's obviously something we need to address so that it doesn't
happen again and so we can take corrective action on this specific
situation if possible.


0. tl;dr version:

I don't think that hacker culture in general, or Noisebridge's
particularly anarchist / maker / queerfriendly variant thereof,
condones social hostility to newbies. But it does unfortunately suck a
lot at being proactively inclusive. Plus we have the same cognitive
and perceptual issues as anyone else, which impair our ability to act
on unexpected situations.

So, two suggestions for you:
a) In the future, please approach an organizer, oldbie, or someone who
just seems kind and tell them what happened ASAP. Once action is
started, I think we're a lot better at responding; the problems are in
realizing that there's a problem and acting on that realization.

b) If you can identify the person who groped you now, try to do so,
and convey that privately to a small number of people who can act on
it; I named several people below who were there that I would
personally trust for this. Mitch Altman is also an excellent person to
contact; he has the unusual combination of very high social standing,
great hacker ethic/skills, and amazing personal warmth. He's usually
there on Mondays IIRC.


… and three for everyone else:
a) If you've been around enough to know a significant proportion of
the NB community and space, and you see someone you don't know, please
get up, introduce yourself, offer them a tour of the space, and offer
to introduce them to people or projects they'd enjoy.

b) If you see someone who looks distraught, please approach them
gently and ask what's wrong and if there's anything you can do to
help. If you're not comfortable doing that, please ask one of the more
empathic members of the community to do so.

c) If you see something that might have been creepy and might not; or
you hear anyone getting told they're not welcome 'cause they're a noob
or the like, please a) immediately ask the target of the possible
creepiness whether that was okay and if not take appropriate action,
b) tell the person who's being an asshole to the newbie that they're
being an asshole, and offer to hook up the newbie with a non-asshole
they could talk/work with.


… and explanations:

1. Culturally speaking, I don't think it's true that we actually
defend or support actions of the sort you describe. This is Hanlon's
Razor at work, or the Genovese effect / bystander effect.

Personally I try very intentionally to overcome those — and as a
result I've often been the only person in a crowd to initiate action,
eg when someone needed medical help — but it's hard to overcome the
psychological resistance to action, both for you as the assaultee and
for the people around you.

That doesn't mean we *condone* it, only that we (like most people)
kinda suck both at noticing that something is wrong and that we need
to initiate action to address it immediately.

The problem is — as it often is in similar situations, sadly for too
many friends of mine who have been victims of assault — that
a) to someone who doesn't know you or the person who touched you, the
situation may *look* ambiguous

e.g. it may be possible you have a sexual relationship with the person
who touched you and this is just normal touch between you; they may
not have seen that the person was touching your breast was actually
doing that, rather than just a pat on the shoulder or the like

Mind that I am not offering these as excuses for your assailant's
behavior — only as explanations for why someone viewing it might not
realize that it was an assault rather than a normal friendly
interaction. It's a natural tendency for people to latch on to
ambiguity and find reasons to not act; it's an unfortunate one, and
one that causes bad effects like in your case, but it's not malicious.

b) they may not even have seen it at all :-/

What you describe sounds like it happened in a couple seconds, total.
Because you were crying both before and after, someone would have to
have seen the incident to realize that immediate action needed to take
place.


2. Regarding sensing people as being hostile if you don't already have
social connections: honestly, this is a bit of a problem for me as
well.

My history with the space is, shall we say, very mixed (I'd rather not
dig up that drama, so if you know what I'm referencing please just let
it be). As a result, I've never really felt at home at NB, though I
enjoy it anyway. I try to overcome this by initiating conversations,
joining ones that seem interesting, wearing my "hi let's talk" shirt
so people feel more comfortable approaching me, etc. Unfortunately, I
tend to get very dissociative very quickly if I'm feeling alone among
a crowd.

So I can empathize with not feeling welcome, and with there being a
high bar of initiative to becoming included in what's going on —
especially when you're also trans. FYI, we have a number of trans
community members and it may help if you connect with them for
support. I also have several trans friends who aren't part of NB but
are definitely part of the larger hacker community, both in and out of
the SF Bay Area, and could introduce you if you want.


That said, if people actually *told* you to fuck off because you
didn't know anyone, that's also definitely *not* acceptable behavior
(unless perhaps it was a personal conversation about private matters,
but that's relatively rare in the space).

Yeah, it's an anarchy, we tolerate a lot of assholery, and we don't
*force* people to be inclusive and all that, but I think on the whole
we *want* to make sure new people feel included, respected, invited.


We used (2 years ago) to have a convention that anyone who looked new
was offered a tour of the space on the spot; I've personally given
that tour dozens of times. I dunno if it's still in practice. It
really helps break the ice so that you know at least a few people, and
if you take the opportunity to express interests in things you like, a
good tour guide oldbie should also be able to introduce you personally
to people you'd like to talk to.

Again, this is something I'd be happy to do, but it's been long enough
that I just don't know most of the people there any more; they're
almost all new since I last was there regularly. :-/

I would encourage reviving this practice, though. If you've been
around long enough that you recognize a significant number of people,
and you see someone you don't recognize, go up to them, introduce
yourself, ask if they would like a tour or would like to be introduced
to people they would enjoy talking / collaborating with. (If you
*don't* feel like you've been around long enough, but nobody else is
doing it, then you should do it anyway.) It's a really simple thing,
and I think improves the social situation dramatically.

It also has the side effect of improving group responsiveness to
incidents like Susan's — because she becomes less anonymous (thus more
likely to be casually monitored for OK-ness); because witnesses are
more likely to understand enough context to be interpret what they see
less ambiguously, and thus have less barrier to acting; and because
she would feel more comfortable approaching someone when she feels
threatened or assaulted.


3. I know that it's really hard to do when you're feeling excluded to
begin with and you have just been assaulted, but unfortunately the
only way we can really deal with this kind of situation — unless
someone sees it happen, realizes what it was, and immediately acts —
is for you to report it to someone who will take charge.

I'm glad that you had the courage to do so afterwards by email; that's
a good step. If this ever happens again, you can do so in person
during the event, that'd be helpful. It'd also be helpful to identify
who exactly the person was, so that we can take further action (find
who might have seen it, get their side of it, decide what if any
sanction is necessary to ensure it doesn't happen again).

It's been a couple years since I was last at Noisebridge regularly;
honestly I don't even recognize 90% of the people who were at
Hackmeet.

I can say that I do know the Hackmeet organizers to be reliable and to
really care about these issues. Liz Henry, Danny O'Brien, and Leif
Ryge would also be excellent people to approach; they're both
extremely compassionate and very willing to kick some ass if
necessary. (I'd be happy to help handle it as well, but I'm not around
often.)

If possible, it's better to do ASAP, because then memories are fresh,
we can get info from anyone who may've seen it, and we can easily
identify who did it because they're still there. A fact of the space
is that random people do come in all the time (especially for an event
like hackmeet), so we might just not be able to identify them if
they're not present to point at. :-/

Please understand that I am definitely *not* saying that it's your
fault, that you're misrepresenting your experience, that it's entirely
on you to take action, or that we can't do more to help.

I personally didn't see you crying, but if someone had, an early
intervention that would've been helpful would be to come up to you and
ask if there's anything we can do to help. (And if you see someone
crying but feel uncomfortable being that someone, you should go ask
someone like Liz Henry who *is*.) That would've been an opportunity to
make you feel less alienated, to introduce you to people you'd enjoy
talking and working with, and to make sure that you had social
monitoring so that the assault would've been either prevented or
noticed and acted upon.


I hope that you reconsider your opinion of the space and culture
overall, and give it another shot in a way that helps you feel more
socially included and cared for.

Yes, we have assholes in our midst, same as everywhere (perhaps more
so; hacker culture does tend towards introvertedness and harshness).
They do not represent us.

And yes, we too — even the subset of us who are explicitly activists,
queer-friendly, safe-space trained, etc! — have the same cognitive
biases as all humans that makes it hard to recognize and initiate
action in response to an uncomfortable situation. Sometimes you'll
have to meet us halfway in helping make sure we know about problems
that are happening so that we can organize a group response. (IMO
nonconsensual groping is an immediate expulsion offense at the least.)

But that's not representative of our values as a whole. Exclusion,
abuse, and hostility to newcomers are *not* condoned nor are they
intentional malice on the part of the larger community; rather,
they're known, old bugs that we're always working on.


Sincerely (and hopefully helpfully / nondramaflamey),
Sai



On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 7:19 PM, Susan Werner <heinousbutch at gmail.com> wrote:
> I went to hackmeet today, tried to join in a few conversations, and got told
> to fuck off because I don't already know people. As I was crying and talking
> to someone on the Internet about how these kinds of events are intentionally
> hostile to people who don't already have significant social connections, some
> guy walks by me, and rubs his hand on my right breast, and calmly walks on as
> if nothing happened.
>
> I got groped while I was crying at noisebridge, during an event with lots of
> people at it, and nobody did anything. Nobody spoke a word to me. Nobody
> offered any kind of help whatsoever, and lots of people walked by me, as I was
> there for about half an hour after that happened.
>
> I'm done with noisebridge, done with its community which enables sexual
> assault, done with events which are intentionally hostile to newcomers, done
> with all the bullshit about it being an "anarchist space" where nothing can be
> said about entitled jerks who make the space hostile for others.
>
> Until someone works on the whole "hostility to newcomers" bit of hacker
> culture, harassment will be endemic. As long as newcomers are seen as people to
> be excluded and hazed, no amount of non-harassment policies or codes of conduct
> will do anything substantial.
>
> Kicking out the people who grope isn't enough and won't cause systemic change.
> Change the culture which encourages treating newcomers and outsiders like shit,
> and ignores anything anyone does to newcomers, don't just kick out people who
> further this sort of culture.
>
> Have fun with your hackerspaces and your shitty-ass subculture based on
> exclusion and abuse. I don't even need to talk to people like y'all and I'm not
> going to spend a moment of extra time with a bunch of people who can't even
> look at me after I get groped in front of fifteen people.
>
> I have a key to noisebridge. If anyone wants it, let me know.
>
> --
> Susan
>
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