When We Said Our Default Is To Believe Accusations, We Meant It
In the BEHIVE consent and conduct policy, we wrote "Our default approach is to believe accusations unless there is powerful evidence to the contrary." This caused some consternation and objection from one person. He compared it to the satanic panic of the 80s and falsely imprisoned anti-war activists of the 1960s.
Later, he backed off and apologized, saying "I have been reassured that the statement means that any and all accusations will be taken as seriously as possibly and investigated, thoroughly." Another observer agreed, "With some very subtle changes the meaning could have been more clearly presented to eliminate any confusion."
We did not mean that. We meant what we wrote.
We don't intend to conduct investigations.
We are not investigators.
We don't have the training. Or resources such as background checks or ability to subpoena evidence. We have no desire to build a formal investigative procedure. Not to mention that in the case of consent violations, legalistic questioning is often retraumatizing, and sharing information with the accused can put the accuser in danger.
Even if we could conduct thorough investigations, in most cases there would remain a fog of uncertainty. Very many consent violations don't have witnesses except the people involved.
With all the information in the world - which we will not have - you still have to make a call. And we choose, by default, to make the call to believe the accuser.
This is different from the legal system! It makes sense that the legal system should require an assumption of innocence, with the burden of proof on the accuser. We do not. The key difference being, and I can't stress this enough, that one involves going to jail, and the other, not getting to go to a dinner.
Positive, lively kinky atmospheres are so fragile. I have seen them wither and die because of only a couple of individuals, and those events continue on, dead. Zombie events. I've seen people show up at an event, smell the decay, and turn right around and walk out, never to come back. And that's a good scenario, compared to the one where an event becomes a hunting ground for serial predators.
We built the BEHIVE executive, and started our jobs, ready to fight for the atmosphere. The need to deal with consent violations and creepiness doesn't take us by surprise. That would be like a hotel manager not being ready for shit-clogged toilets - it's a horrible part of the job, but it's the job. And since all of society is weighted towards dismissing assault reports, the best way to do our job, and deal with that shit, is to believe accusations, the first time.
That said, of course we're going to use our intelligence. Even though we don't consider false reports to be a big problem relative to actual cases of assault (when it comes to rape, the Journal of Forensic Psychology estimates about 20 true ones for every false one, and that's based on law enforcement reports), it's happened. And of course rules can be gamed, consent rhetoric can be weaponized. (and if you don't believe that, you've never seen someone accused of an assault turn around and accuse the accuser) So nothing is automatically triggered by an accusation. We make a decision by having a discussion, and then taking a vote.
That vote is among the five of us on the executive. Three are femme, and three are people that primarily bottom. That means that even if I turn out to relate a bit too much to an accused person who is like me, an older male dom, I can be outvoted. By people who each have more than enough experience with being creeped on.
All this is designed to weight things towards believing accusations, and taking action. If this stance rubs you the wrong way, start your own club! I'm serious about that! All you have to do is click "Create new event", and then call a restaurant.
The only other part is, who will show up? My friend @jukeboxemcsa says, if you don't ban consent violators, you are effectively banning the people they drive away. Will you be left with just the thickest-skinned event attendees? The ones who are not from any vulnerable minorities? The ones we banned?
For the people we most want, hopefully this all sounds good, but words are not that useful - watch our actions. Over a long period of time. If you make a report, see how we react to it. But here are some actions the BEHIVE exec has taken in its first six months, besides write a consent and conduct policy:
We've added three previous munch attendees to our ban list, and sent one official warning.
We created an anonymous reporting form, and we've discussed reports at every executive meeting.
We created Google docs to accumulate reports and observations about people, even minor ones, so that people can be banned for patterns of subthreshold behaviour.
A different person, who has never been to one of our events, wrote to us: "I think that your group is very concerned with rules and laws and control, and not so much about considering the humanity of people." I disagree: I think that we are using explicit rules and laws (which include, by the way, such laws as "Be nice") to express our intention to protect the humanity of our spaces. It's an agonizing, painful thing to ban someone, but not to do it is to fall into geek fallacy #1, and to fail the amazing people we might not even get to meet.
We are doing our absolute best not to make mistakes. But, inevitably, we will. We're going to ban people who shouldn't be banned, and not ban people who should be. All this is just to say: we want to risk making more of the first kind of mistake than the second.
And that's what we meant.
(this is a personal essay, not a BEHIVE statement, but it was read by the other four executive members)
