In light of recent events in crime fiction, and the ongoing conversations about abuse and harassment, I tweeted a thread tonight about my time on the board at Bouchercon. Twitter being twitter, the thread got all messed up for many people, and I’ve had a few requests to post the information in one place.
So this isn’t a coherent blog post, I’m simply copying and pasting my tweets. I may return to it a little later to write something more substantial, but for now, for those who struggled with twitter’s shenanigans, here’s the thread….
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Okay. One more Bouchercon thread for the day. You with me? Bored? Already asleep? Any and all answers are fine. I'm freestyling this. Let's talk 2016/17, harassment policy, and why it became hard to do.
The reason I wanted ON the board in the first place was to get a harassment policy written and implemented. This isn't too centre myself in the story, just to add context to why I talk about this. Erin Mitchell was the person who suggested I run for the board....
....partly because she had attempted to get a policy adopted before (Long Beach, I believe) and still talked about it needing to be done. So, cool, right? Allies on the board, commitment to the issue. This will be easy.
What happened next is, in large part, why the next six months of my life made me fucking ill, and also has a bearing on why even to this day the organisation keeps staying silent on such issues.
EM reported to the board that she had taken legal advice (no names disclosed or documents shown) saying that any policy, with or without 'enforcement', would make every member of the board PERSONALLY legally liable.
That’s a big thing to scare people with. Never mind that the LL in LLC stands for LIMITED LIABILITY or that Bouchercon had liability insurance covering the board members. People were now scared.
Never mind that those of us in favour could -and did- point to examples of organisations far far smaller than Bouchercon, with fewer resources, who had policies. And could point to policies both with and without 'enforcement' or 'teeth.'
Fundamentally, a lot of people were told, and told again and again and again, that they would be PERSONALLY LEGALLY LIABLE for the repercussions not only if Bouchercon asked a specific guy to stop being a dick, but also if Bouchercon politely said generally nobody should be dicks
Now, even putting morality aside, sticking to the legal arguments, this simply did not stack up against the potential liability if the worst case happened and it transpired Bouchercon had looked at the idea and decided not to adopt any policy at all.
The policy as it exists had a couple of authors. I really want to credit someone who did a lot of good work, but it feels wrong to name 'em without their consent, when they're still doing work in the crime fiction community. Just know...there were people doing good work.
the policy as it exists is also pretty vague and bland. The idea being, now that SOMEONE had scared everyone into thinking their lives would be ruined if we even looked in the direction of the word 'harassment' in the dictionary, adopt something small, get it approved...
THEN start making the case to IMPROVE it as an existing policy, which is less scary than convincing 17 people to back a brand-new policy on a hot button topic.
That other industries, other genres, other professional communities CONTINUE to be years ahead of crime fiction on this issue is now past embarrassing and into wilfully negligent. That Bcon had these discussions in 2016 and WE ARE STILL NOT ANY SAFER is unforgivable.
As a fun aside, the same person who scared the board off the issue, also told us that one woman who reported abuse had misunderstood the situation and tried to get me to have a Facebook messenger conversation with the accused author to hear him out.
Same person also said, when a female author spoke up about abuse, that the author was only doing it to sell books.
There are also some basic, easy, practical workaround to concerns about 'enforcement', if you insist on having them. Every venue a convention like Bouchercon uses, in the modern day, will already have its own harassment policy and THEY are clearly not too scared to use it...
So all you need do, as a detail-minded and conscientious organiser using their space is ask for their policy and follow it.
Th3re are a million different tangents and stories. There are people to credit with good work, people to call out for shitty bad faith behaviour. But really, I think this "legal" argument was something people needed to know in light of >
> this issue being debated again. I see it already in Facebook comments. It's like an election cycle, the same people saying the same things as they did on the last go-round. People need to know this conversation has been had, and we need to move beyond it.
It's 2020. It'll be 2021 when the convention circuit starts up again. Your job, conventions, is to keep your attendees safe. If you can't do it, you're not fit for purpose, and shouldn't hold the convention. And bad faith people in our community need to be called out.
I didn't quit the board solely because of this. That would be misleading. There was another issue too. But it was this one that had left me unable to handle the other one.
I didn't speak up publicly. And fuck, do I regret that now. At the time I had concerns -given the nature of harassment/abuse discussions- that speaking upon would be to co-opt other people’s trauma, centre myself in a story that wasn't about me. But honestly?...
I should have shouted all of this from the rooftops the MINUTE I was done. Maybe we could have had an important public conversation earlier.