How difficult can it be for a group of people to say, "let's do all we can to discourage the presence of Level 3 sex offenders"? Apparently, pretty damned-near impossible. Which, if we can't say that, is about the chances of this movement actually achieving anything good for society.
In full disclosure, let me say that this is not a subject I can be entirely objective about. I have been sexually assaulted in my life. Moreover, I have a young daughter. I learned retroactively that people within Occupy Boston knew of the presence of a Level 3 sex offender (convicted for raping and abusing 2 different children) at the encampment and did not share that information until after the camp was torn down. My daughter had interactions with this person.
The mother lion energy I am so full of is roaring over this. For all I know, my daughter was being "interviewed". If we're lucky, she didn't pass through that screen. If we weren't and the camp continued, she could have been "groomed". This could have happened because the Occupy Boston community was implicitly telling my daughter that this was someone to be trusted.
So many people in this movement don't seem to understand how trust-building is the key to our success. Since so many of us didn't know each other just a few months ago, we need to be extra-careful with each other. We need to go the extra miles toward helping each other feel safe. You do that by having impeccable integrity in the way you treat other, follow through on your words and enforcing boundaries for safety. You don't err of the side of "well, that person is verbally abusive a lot, but we're all adults..." You err on the side of making it aggressively known to any person who breaches trust or is abusive to others in any way that the behavior will not be tolerated. You don't let a single incident go unattended. You don't allow someone to re-inhabit a role he has abused. To my mind, anyone who is not willing to do this is a saboteur, whether intentionally or not.
After recent events, where the Occupy Boston community was unwilling to withdraw support from a man who had been violent toward others and who threatened me while I was facilitating a General Assembly - causing me to announce over the microphone that I was not able to maintain the neutral role of facilitator because he had done so - I have no reason to trust that this community is concerned about the physical and emotional well-being of it's members. They may talk about concern, but they don't enact care. Caring is an action verb, not an emotion.
Furthermore, my ex and I agreed to house some of those who had been at the camp and had not house to go to. However, we clearly said that we needed to know the people had been screened and were known to be safe, because we have a child in the house. We discovered, after a few days, that one of the people had multiple restraining orders out against him and was not allowed in the presence of any of the five children he has fathered with different women in different parts of the country. He was with a younger woman who is very cognitively limited and he was dominating her. Once she let us know that he wasn't letting her go home, we arranged to take care of that and get him out of our house. Meanwhile, I am livid that even after we expressed concern for the safety of our child, no one actually employed any real system of screening. Besides kicking myself for my own bad judgement, I also have the "fool me once" attitude. I don't trust Occupy Boston to be vigilant about interpersonal safety.
So, when I heard that there was a proposal coming before the GA about creating a policy regarding Level 3 sex offenders, I wondered how it would be treated. If Occupy Boston could err on the side of doing anything it can to prevent vulnerable members from contact with predators, that would be a step in the right direction. And really, how hard can it be? How many people really want these predators in their midst? How many people could be so callous to the large numbers of survivors of sexual abuse/assault?
Quite a few, apparently. Tragically.
The proposal included the following steps:
- identify and verify a Level 3 sex offender
- have someone approach the person and let him know that we're aware and we think it would be best if he didn't participate in Occupy Boston
- denying the person Occupy Boston resources such as food, clothing, shelter, etc.
The last item was described as "shunning" the person.
Nothing in this proposal spoke about working with the police or enforcing the law. (We know that the sex offender in our midst is out of compliance regarding reporting his whereabouts, for instance.)
Nothing in this proposal suggests that there aren't plenty of offenders out there who haven't been prosecuted.
Nothing in this proposal suggests that our law enforcement system is perfect.
All of us know that rape is far too prevalent in our society. One in three women will be raped in her lifetime. If you are in a room with 15 women, five of them have been or will be raped. If you are in a room with women, you are in a room with rape survivors. Yes, men get raped, too. I simply use the statistic about women to make a point about discussing this topic. If you start talking about rape and rapists around a group of women, the careful and considerate thing to do is to realize that this is not theoretical or statistical for them. It is a visceral reality of such profound proportion that it has impacted their entire experience of life as a human being. It is forcing them to recall trauma. It is likely triggering PTSD. You can actually cause harm by not treating the subject with enormous care. You need to turn your empathy dial to its highest setting.
It will be no surprise, at this point, for me to tell you that what we got instead was a lot of callousness. Even worse, a lot of concern for the sex offenders. They were referred to as a "marginalized" group of people. This was manipulating the sympathies and guilty feelings about truly oppressed communities to suggest that we liken rapists to them. (I can't even begin to tell you how much that says about the way people perceive those in marginalized communities.)
There were reactions to the idea of shunning. The concept of inclusiveness was twisted to mean that there is no room for holding people accountable for their behaviors, nor for generating a sense of safety for the most vulnerable. Rapists are aggressive and they are power abusers. They are not the vulnerable amongst us. They are bullies. They are predators. Being inclusive means making it safe for the meekest and the most vulnerable to participate. By sheltering predators or tolerating bullying or domineering behavior, you shun all those who are vulnerable to it.
It was asserted that denying people Occupy Boston's food was akin to starving them. I'm not sure when all the other sources of food in the Boston area dried up and we would all starve if Occupy Boston didn't feed us.
There were a few people who made the argument that we always meet in groups and nothing is going to happen in a group or public setting.
It was almost absurd to hear someone concerned about the use of "shunning" because it would make us like the Amish. We would be just another intolerant religion if we didn't accept known sex offenders in our midst.
There was railing against the use of the existing law enforcement's sex offender system as a measure for deeming someone at risk. A refusal to discern that the way in which that system is flawed is not in over-prosecuting rapists. Rape is under-reported and one of the most challenging convictions to secure.The system over-prosecutes the oppressed. The system is rigged to let the oppressors get away with their crimes. Rapists are oppressors. When we looked at the sex offender registry in Massachusetts the majority of the faces were Caucasian. White males are not disproportionately over-prosecuted here. What this tells me is that for someone to be prosecuted for rape - and repeatedly - they have to be pretty egregious. We need to be able to discern that and not have a knee-jerk reaction about Teh System which stops us from evaluating a specific aspect of it and seeing if it can be useful in any way.
The rapist sympathizers weren't only male, either. Several women were expressing views which suggested that rapists would be reformed if they were only embraced with more love and we believed in restorative justice. (I do believe in restorative justice, by the way.) This kind of wishful thinking on the part of women scares me more than anything. There are no records of reforming rapists. Particularly those who abuse children. While I do believe that the nature of the society we live in and our inability or unwillingness to tend to the most vulnerable amongst us is a huge factor in generating rapists, I'm not convince that once they've been generated they can be reformed. Perhaps we just haven't figured it out, yet. But, we haven't figured it out, yet. And Occupy Boston doesn't have some special skill set or resource in this arena to bring to bear. So, why are women - the mostly likely to become the victims of rapists - so willing to put themselves and the rest of us, at risk?
Perhaps the most difficult moment of the evening for me was when a woman stood up and said that parents should just teach their children karate. This was in the middle of a tirade about endorsing the corrupt justice system and something about keeping your children chained to you in a public place. It was imbued with the message that these things would stop a rapist and that if you don't do them, it's your own fault if your child is raped. (Later, I approached her directly about the fact that my daughter wouldn't be able to fend off a rapist even if she was a black belt in karate. Her response was, "You think you can prevent your daughter from being raped?!" The message was, "you'd better just accept that she is going to be raped." And, "most women submit!" The message being that women get raped because they just submit. This completely ignores all the evidence that submitting is likely a wise self-preservation choice, as women who try to physically resist are more brutally raped, sometimes killed. I simply told her that I didn't know why she was yelling at me and I walked away. What kind of person looks a mother in the eye and basically tell her to look forward to her daughter being raped and that there is nothing to done for it, so don't even consider asking the community to do anything to try and prevent it?)
So, here we are in a movement which is supposed to be about building a better world and doing so via horizontal democracy, which is a system borne out of a philosophy of collective thinking and collective responsibility, but when it comes to rape, there is no collective responsibility. Your children should be able to fend off adult male rapists all on their own and there is no need for society to establish an ethos of zero tolerance, much less accountability or transparency. (I learned that the reason people claimed for not revealing the status of the sex offender in our midst was concern for privacy. People actually believed that a rapist's privacy about his past was more important than the risk he posed to those around him. Never mind that criminal convictions are public record and sex offenders are publicly registered.So much for transparency.)
What was most disturbing about the entire evening, however, was that as we processed the "concerns" section of the proposal, people were allowed to repeat the same concerns over and over and over. It went on for an hour and a half. All this time, there are people in the room who are clearly being traumatized by the nature of the comments. You can see people crying and shaking and pacing. Not once was this acknowledged. Not once did anyone suggest that people might want to take a look into the faces of the people who were suffering while they debated the semantics of rape and "high risk level". It was so chillingly impersonal. So devoid of care for their fellow human being right there in the same room. People you supposedly want to work with on a very daunting task and risky undertaking, which requires trust. The death of a movement was in that dynamic.
Did anyone even note that the population of the US is 51% female, yet the population in the room was closer to 33% female? There's a reason for that.
A few weeks ago, in a Facilitation Working Group meeting, I was chosen to be part of the facilitation team for a potentially high-exposure General Assembly. As the group was sorting out who to have on the team, someone said, after I was named, "it will be good to have her to protect the process, now we should add someone who is empathetic." I can't begin to tell you how hurt I was by that comment and the ensuing support for making the unusual move of adding a third facilitator to the team. It was stunning to realize that this group of people had deemed me lacking empathy. My ex did champion me in that moment and told them, as someone who has known me for 20 years that I am one of the most empathic people he knows. One reply of befuddled surprise was, "is anyone else intrigued by this?"
Empathy is what makes me vigilant. I see those who refuse to enforce boundaries as lacking empathy. It is not an act of compassion to allow someone breach the boundaries of someone else, no matter how emotional the fist person seems. I sense quite a bit of what others feel. And I'm intuitive, so I can often suss out what's behind those feelings or something close, anyway. I am more likely to become protective of someone else's boundaries and appear rather militant or aloof than to risk breaching those boundaries. I will fiercely defend their need for safety, even at the risk of being deemed the "Queen Fucking Fascist Facilitator". (a moniker I was given and proudly bear.)
Being in the room the other night with so many people feeling traumatized was overwhelming for me. I was so close to letting out a literal roar; of revealing the full lioness regalia. I almost never yell. I am never aggressive with children. Raising my voice with emotion is very limited and yelling, for me, is a failure of self-expression. Yet, the people in that room defending the rights of sex offenders, ignoring the safety of the vulnerable, coldly discussing the virtual notions of distant systems rather than the physical reality of human beings in their presence were presenting themselves as predators to me. So, I could easily have become the predator huntress. Even in my most emotionally powerful states, I can exercise discernment and I would eviscerate a predator in a moment whilst being tenderly protective of the prey. I find it tragic that we, as a society, don't exercise this discernment all the time. If we did "hunt" predators and protect prey in all the small moments, we would generate such an ethos of intolerance for doing harm, we wouldn't have the big abuses. Instead, we chillingly sit by while others are treated badly and we support and even promote those who are abusive.
I had to leave the room for a while. I wasn't traumatized. I was outraged.
But, I'm the one lacking empathy.
I told the person minding the door to let me know when "statements of support" began.
During the statements of support, the energy of the room changed. It was far more effectively powerful to hear from people who shared their personal experiences and personal perspective on the need to do something, anything we can to send the message that we don't tolerate or harbor sex offenders. No one is saying that the proposal is perfect or will prevent all sex offenders from being in our midst. Yes, it could be mostly symbolic. Still, the message you send by blocking this proposal is that you don't care a whit about the people in your presence. (It was not lost on many of this that we were processing this proposal soon after an announcement encouraging mothers to come with their children, as there were people willing to provide child care. Does anybody think I would bring my child again, much less leave her in the care of people who won't stand up against the presence of known sex offenders?)
It was good to see the shifts occurring. One man approached me after I had spoken and acknowledged that he hadn't considered that while rape might not occur in the group setting, that establishing the trust to build the foundation for an abusive relationship would. So, one person learned something. It was worth it for me to speak.
Still, I'm not sure how we build trust from this. I am now aware of a large contingent of people who argued against keeping known sex offenders away. And it's not just about sex offenders. This is the extreme end of a continuum of misogyny. Certainly, if you accept rapists in your midst, you're not going to stand up to the more subtle and pervasive forms of misogyny. Misogyny is the underpinning of our male-dominated, imperialist, competitive, cold-hearted plutocracy.
I don't see how we're going to manifest the changes we seek if we aren't embodying the changes we seek. At every turn, whenever someone feels impatient or frustrated, they seek to alleviate those feelings with solutions right out of the existing culture's playbook. I hear calls for making things go faster, for debating rather than co-creating, for a sports program on our radio station. We don't, as a community, acknowledge or discuss the fact that we have yet to actually start doing real consensus-building. We don't explore deeply why this movement embraced consensus decision-making. How that is connected to the worldwide global democracy movement. How it is the antidote to competitive thinking and the ill-effects of that. We don't learn about the values and principles of collective thinking. So, we don't really have a critical mass of people who really understand it, much less internally own it. This makes it impossible to evaluate resolutions to conflicts or frustrations. We don't recognize how instinctively we opt for what we've known, like comfort food which tastes good in the moment but clogs your heart in the long run.
If we really understood and embrace the values of consensus-building, we never would have had the very disturbing scene we played out the other night. Connecting to the people with you and considering what they need, not what your philosophies are, would be at the top level of any consideration. You don't attract people to your community if you can't demonstrate that you care about the people already there. And you certainly don't have more concern over excluding rapists than you do over the safety of your comrades-in-arms. In true consensus building, someone might have asked, "how many people in this room need us to pass this in order to feel safe working with Occupy Boston?" In real consensus-building, if even one person raised a hand, the approach to the proposal would have been very different. You address needs, not philosophies or ideologies. We would have couched every piece of input in the terms of "what does this need to be so that she can feel safe?" Every word out of everybody's mouth would have been steeped in concern for those who don't feel safe. By doing so, it would have immediately imbued the process with a sense of safety that would allow everyone to think more clearly and be more optimistic about our community.
Instead, we did a lot of damage. What is happening is that mistrust is being sown. In this case, traumatically so. If we're lucky - in terms of surviving as a meaningful movement - people will find affinity groups and do most of their work through them.
Over the weeks of Occupy Boston, there have been lots of accusations of infiltrators and provocateurs. There no more powerful agent provocateur than misogyny and the callous disregard of it. One in three women are raped. All women know the fear of rape. Men fear rape, as well. (The homophobia of men is as much about not wanting to live with the fear of rape that women live with, as anything else.) If you can't make a unified stand against rape culture and a unified front of collective protection, you cannot build a movement. You can build it, but they won't come. Those who do, will end up running. So, whether a man is paid by a government agency, doing the work of political opponents, or not, if he is perpetuating any kind of misogyny, he is a saboteur; an agent of destruction. We should be less concerned about where he is coming from or whether he has external motivations for his behaviors and more concerned with an absolute intolerance of those behaviors. That would be the most profound change that people can believe in. That would signal the beginning of the real revolution.
We didn't finish processing the proposal on Tuesday night. It was "rolled over" to this evening. I wish that everyone coming to tonight's General Assembly would read this enlightening pieceabout the role misogyny has played in destroying every progressive movement in this country. I hope we end up doing the right thing, even if it takes a few more General Assemblies to work through it together. Even if we do, though, we are further damaged by the way this has gone down. We will need to find some way to tend to that damage. I hope we do, though my experience to date leaves my expectations low.