swadmin Post

What a Lawsuit Costs Us All

That the secular movement is litigious should not come as a surprise to anyone. The Center for Inquiry is suing Walmart and CVS. American Atheists is suing a state senator. Freedom from Religion Foundation and the American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center both use lawsuits and the threat of lawsuits as a primary form of activism. We know the good a strategic lawsuit can do in protecting our rights.

That doesn’t mean every lawsuit is good for our movement, of course. Among the secular organizations that do litigate, there’s been a push to more carefully consider all the possible outcomes of filing suit, particularly as the Trump administration stacks the federal courts. We’re in this for the long haul, and precedent can cost us as well as help us.

With that in mind, Secular Woman urges organizations and individuals in the secular movement to consider two current lawsuits and what they stand to cost us. In the last few years, two prominent men in our movement have been accused of a range of inappropriate sexual behavior and have chosen to respond by suing the women who have spoken up.

Richard Carrier was accused of persistent sexual advances and responded by suing two of his accusers, a nonprofit organization that reported banning him from their events, one blogger who collected reports of his behavior from him and others into one place (full disclosure: Stephanie Zvan is vice president of Secular Woman), one blogger who reported receiving reports for further investigation, and both blog networks on which these posts appeared. 

Three years after his original suit was filed, Carrier is reduced to two remaining lawsuits. He continues to sue a former student group leader and the atheist blogger who said the claims against Carrier would be investigated. The other suits were dismissed with prejudice for jurisdiction or because the statute of limitations ran out while Carrier fought to keep his suit in a state without anti-SLAPP statutes. None of his claims or those against him have been heard in court, despite him recently telling a judge that was all he wanted. The defendants have spent well over $100,000 on their defense.

In April 2018, David Silverman was suspended from American Atheists after unspecified allegations were made against him. Shortly thereafter, he was fired after a review of “internal documents and communications related to the initial complaint as well as evidence relating to the additional allegations brought to the Board’s attention”. A Buzzfeed News article states that the original allegations involved “financial and personal conflicts of interest” and the additional allegations involve sexual assault.

In September of this year, Silverman filed suit against Buzzfeed, American Atheists, its president, and its chair. He also filed suit against another board member and both his accusers, claiming they had conspired against him. He did this despite both claiming he’d only been damaged by the financial allegations and being on record elsewhere as knowing one of these accusations dated back to at least 2013.

What is the purpose of these lawsuits? Each man has already published his own account of events on a site anyone can read. The women who accused Silverman of assault cannot prove he had no financial conflicts of interest relating to his book. Carrier’s claims cannot be heard by endlessly litigating jurisdiction instead of moving the case to a court stipulated to be acceptable by the defendants. 

The only things lawsuits like these can do is use up the time, money, and energy of our movement and further discourage our activists from speaking up about how they have been treated. As a movement, we’ve spent years fighting past legal threats to warn people about those among us who abuse their power, like Lawrence Krauss and Michael Shermer. This work is critical to keeping our activists and building a stronger movement. If we want them to work for and support us, we must look out for them.

What can you do about lawsuits like these? You can take a critical look at them, ask whether they have any chance of doing what they claim to be trying to accomplish. You can ask what kind of conspiracy the accused claims is arrayed against them and what anyone could actually gain from being part of such a thing. 

You can count the costs to the movement. What could you do to support secularism with $100,000? What could you do with more activists whose attention isn’t scattered by legal demands, with volunteers and donors who feel comfortable working with you because they know they can speak up if they’re poorly treated?

We at Secular Woman know that many secular organizations and activists already privately denounce lawsuits like these. Some do so publicly. We thank you for that. But we also urge that, as a movement, we work to get better at not rewarding disruptive, punitive, costly lawsuits like these.

Secular Woman Article, Post

Reducing Barriers to Reporting Harassment

by Stephanie Zvan

Cross posted from AlmostDiamonds

With the conversations and reporting of #metoo showing no signs of slowing down, we’re being provided with a trove of information about the reporting of harassment: who is reporting, who isn’t, the social and institutional responses to harassment reports. This all means we’re able to see how serial harassers continue to function over time.

Sometimes, often, the problem is as simple as organizations and individuals with the power to make a difference failing in their responsibilities. At the Weinstein Company, executives helped Harvey Weinstein settle a multitude of harassment claims without taking him out of the position that facilitated that harassment. Outside the company, gossip columnists used him to advance their own careers while keeping his behavior out of the news. NPR News knew about Michael Oreskes behavior his entire tenure but didn’t fire him until it became public.

Several people who’ve come forward have also spoken about experiencing or fearing retaliation as a consequence of speaking up. Unfortunately, retaliation is a reasonable concern. It’s a common experience when reporting harassment in the workplace. An EEOC report suggests an overwhelming majority of those who report face retaliation from their employer or their peers.

Given that kind of response, it absurd to blame targets of harassment for not stopping their harassers from harassing again or even for not coming forward before now. If they stay quiet, they’re merely doing what we’ve trained them to do. The tsunami that is #metoo demonstrates that when conditions change, people are ready to report.

That means that those of us who have and enforce codes of conduct have the power to make harassment claims heard. I don’t mean we need to shout the names of those who cross boundaries from the rooftops. That can get you sued. No, I mean we can make decisions that lower the barriers to reporting. We can make it easier for those who want to speak out about their experiences to talk to us.

How? Well, we can start by remembering that most people don’t do this very often. Someone who’s been targeted for harassment at your event or in your organization has probably never reported harassment before they consider whether they want to report to you. We can and should take steps to make it easier.

The first step is telling them what constitutes harassment. It’s all well and good to disallow harassment in your spaces, but if you only tell people “harassment” is prohibited, there will be miscommunication. This is partly because “harassment” is both a term of art and a word in common, everyday usage.

When we’re talking about employment law, harassment only becomes prohibited when it affects someone’s job, “when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted).” Most of us doing events or running organizations on volunteer labor don’t want to let things get that severe. We start losing attendees and volunteers long before that, because we don’t pay people to put up with nonsense. Sample policies for these spaces list the kinds of behaviors that needlessly push people away so everyone is clear on what’s acceptable and what’s reportable.

The next step is telling people how to report. Unfortunately, we sometimes skip this step, thinking it suffices to say, “Please, tell us”, without telling people how to identify “us”. This can mean that people think they’re reporting when they’re not. From a post by Elise Matthesen on how to report sexual harassment:

Both HR and Legal were in touch with me over the following weeks. HR called and emailed enough times that my husband started calling them “your good friends at HR.” They also followed through on checking with the other people, and did so with a promptness that was good to see.

Although their behavior was professional and respectful, I was stunned when I found out that mine was the first formal report filed there as well. From various discussions in person and online, I knew for certain that I was not the only one to have reported inappropriate behavior by this person to his employer. It turned out that the previous reports had been made confidentially and not through HR and Legal. Therefore my report was the first one, because it was the first one that had ever been formally recorded.

Corporations (and conventions with formal procedures) live and die by the written word. “Records, or it didn’t happen” is how it works, at least as far as doing anything official about it. So here I was, and here we all were, with a situation where this had definitely happened before, but which we had to treat as if it were the first time — because for formal purposes, it was.

Not everyone may want to make a formal report, but a good code of conduct will tell them how.

A complainant who doesn’t want to make a formal report doesn’t let you off the hook, however. While an informal complaint may not, in itself, leave you with enough information to act, that informal complaint is information. You’re still the person responsible for deciding how to proceed, and you can’t un-know something you’ve been told.

Keep records on everything related to code of conduct violations, from what you were told to how you decided to react. It’s institutional memory that will help pass on your values and processes. If and when someone does report formally, it will turn up patterns. If someone is using your event or organization as their personal hunting grounds, you’ll know. Even if no one ever reports formally, you may see a pattern of low-level infractions that makes it worth having a discreet word with someone who continually rides the line of acceptability.

It may also keep you from facing a situation like the one the Center for Inquiry faced when Lawrence Krauss’s long history of misconduct came to light. Though they’d received complaints of an attempted assault and other inappropriate behavior, no formal complaints were filed. The lack of formal processes, however, doesn’t change the fact that their leadership knew about this behavior. They’re rightly under fire for having allowed him opportunities to continue. They’re still responsible for their own behavior even if no victim filed the kind of report that would have “forced” them to act.

Ideally, of course, you do want a formal report. Sometimes, as with attempted assault, you have to act to keep your members and attendees safe. (Sarah Jeong makes a good case that we should do some hard thinking about how much of the responsibility for consequences we put on victims as well. I expect, however, that changing this practice will also require significant work to shift the blame for outcomes off those who report violations.) In cases like this, it helps to have all the information you can get. So how do you get it?

The easiest way is to make reporting as comfortable and easy as possible. Start by building into your processes the understanding that someone filing a report is doing you a favor. Is it disruptive to have to devote resources to taking reports in the middle of an event, or even after you think your event is finished and you can rest? Of course it is. However, it’s even more disruptive for the person who planned to attend, maybe learn something, and have a good time. If they give you that time, you should appreciate and honor it.

Make the process as easy for them as possible. Identify people who can devote the time to taking reports without interruption. Make sure everyone else working or volunteering for you knows how to find those people easily. Train them before you need them. Make sure they understand what information you need and how to balance your needs with the needs of a person reporting a violation.

There are also important things to avoid.

Back at Chi-Fi 0 in Chicago, I was on a panel discussing anti-harassment policies and I told the audience that if the methods a con or event has for dealing with harassment create more anxiety for the victim than the actual incident of harassment, you’re doing something wrong. At the time, I said this referring to an incident that happened to me a couple years ago at TAM where the security hired by the event pressured me into reporting a minor harassment incident, took me into a storage closet and questioned me about the incident until I cried, then told me I couldn’t tell anyone about them or their questioning. It all seemed suspiciously like an overreaction meant to protect the event organizers rather than the attendees. You can have the most well-written anti-harassment policy of any con ever, but if a harassment incident is reported to you and you conveniently ignore it to avoid dealing with the fallout or if you make the response to a report so traumatic for the victim that making a report is just not worth it, then your well-written anti-harassment policy is insufficient.

Photo of "Wrong Way" traffic sign against a leafy background.
We need to be careful we don’t tell people not to report. Credit: “Wrong Way Sign” by Victor Björkund, CC BY 2.0

TAM replaced their code of conduct that year with a policy (unwritten) that event or hotel security would handle any complaints. That’s a great idea if you want to replicate the conditions that lead so few people to report being raped. It’s not a terrible idea if you want to look like HR, complete with the threat of retaliation. It’s very, very bad, however, if your goal isn’t keeping people with complaints as far away from you as possible.

You want this information. That means you want to make people comfortable when they report. You don’t want to make reporting more intimidating than putting up with the behavior being reported. You certainly don’t want to make it more intimidating than just walking away from all association with you.

This is why it’s critical to talk about reporting in your code of conduct. That’s your main mechanism for communicating everything you have to say about harassment and how you’ll deal with it. That’s where people will look when they decide whether to report.

What should be in your code of conduct? At a minimum:

  • Your desire to hear about bad experiences. This seems like it should be a given, particularly when you do want to hear the bad news, but not everyone does. Make it clear what you want.
  • At least a brief description of what happens when you report. You can include more online if you wish, but help people visualize how their experience will go.
  • What you’re prepared to do for those who report. Maybe someone needs a quiet place and a glass of water after a bad experience. Maybe they need to feel safe until a friend can show up. Maybe they need a rape crisis line. What can you help with?
  • What the range of responses to a report may be. As long as targets of harassment are held responsible for what happens to the people they report, they need to know this to make informed decisions. If you’re committed to “zero tolerance” (not a best practice), you should say so.
  • The fact that decisions on consequences may not be up to the reporter. In a world where “Listen to the victims” is a mantra, we can forget that we may have to put other people’s safety first sometimes. Make that explicit.

None of those have to be long essays, though some codes of conduct do devote a lot of space to them. But they should be there to lower the barriers to reporting misconduct. Doing that will help us all deal with harassment as it happens instead of allowing it to quietly go on for decades the way it has.

Iris Vander Pluym Iris Vander Pluym's Blog, salon

Andrew Sullivan: FREE SPEECH™ of straight white d00ds dooooomed by evil feminists.

Portrait of Andrew Sullivan

by Iris Vander Pluym
oil on canvas, 30 ft. x 50 ft.
$10 million

[TRIGGER WARNING: discussion of sexist, racist and other problematic language.]

Friends, I am sorry to report that FREE SPEECH™ is, for all intents and purposes, dead. And not just in Dawkinsland either, where Richard and his fellow…what's the word?… "rationalists" I believe they call themselves, are at this very moment cowering in abject fear of no exaggeration witch hunts, actual Inquisitions and literal Orwellian Thought Police. As I'm sure we can all imagine, that is exactly what it is like being rebuked for saying factually wrong or long-debunked shit on Twitter—or worse, being informed that you've just said something harmful to people who are not you. Can you even imagine? Thankfully, Dawkins & Co. keep on bravely fighting the good fight for FREE SPEECH™ for all of us, by brilliantly deploying the tried-and-true tactic of repeating rape culture tropes that have plagued sexual assault victims for millennia. THOUGHT EXPERIMENTIN'! BREAKIN' TABOOS! PHILOSOPHIZIN'! 'SPLAININ' LOGIC! If that doesn't make feminists shut the fuck up, surely nothing will. I mean, what is the point of even having FREE SPEECH™ if other people are going to actually criticize things you say?

But this terrifying campaign of violent censorship has now gone far beyond even that. Andrew Sullivan, "conservative-libertarian" columnist, reports with alarm that "The SJWs Now Get To Police Speech On Twitter." For the uninitiated, "SJW" stands for Social Justice Warrior, i.e., a person who advocates for equality and against bigotry and oppression with respect to race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. (Believe it or not, SJW is actually meant as derogatory slur.) So what exactly are these jack-booted thugs doing to end FREE SPEECH™ on Twitter?

Well, a group called WAM! (Women, Action & the Media) has just entered into a pilot program in collaboration with Twitter intended to address the epidemic of gender-based harassment and abuse plaguing the platform. The purpose is to "learn about what kind of gendered harassment is happening on Twitter, how that harassment intersects with other kinds of harassment (racist, transphobic, etc.), and which kinds of cases Twitter is prepared (and less prepared) to respond to." WAM! will work with Twitter to track the data and improve their responses. The way it works is pretty straightforward: if you're being harassed on Twitter, you fill out this form on the WAM! site. Once they verify your information, they escalate it a.s.a.p. directly to Twitter, and try to get you a quick resolution. WAM! makes clear right on the form that they can only advocate: they have neither the authority nor the ability to make decisions or take any action on behalf of Twitter.

Just to be clear: we are not talking here about hurt fee-fees because somebody tweeted something mean at me and now I haz a sad. We are talking about relentless threats of violent rape and gruesome death, some credible enough that recently at least three women have been driven from their own homes. We are talking about violations of federal law under 18 U.S. Code § 875(c), which provides that "Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both." In New York State, we are talking about a class A misdemeanor under § 120.50(3), or depending on the circumstances, possibly a class E or D felony. In a case like Zerlina Maxwell's, we are also talking about a hate crime subject to enhanced sentencing. And more to the point, we are talking about violations of Twitter's own terms of service, which Twitter itself has proven unable to enforce.

This is the FREE SPEECH™ hill that Andrew Sullivan is prepared to die on.

If you think about it, it's actually kind of shitty that a nonprofit like WAM! has to step in and do this work for Twitter (to say nothing of local, state and federal law enforcement). But to Twitter's credit, this certainly represents a step in the right direction, and one with the potential to lead to in-house reforms.

But not for Andrew Sullivan. Oh, no. He is filled with the foreboding sense that this unholy alliance between WAM! and Twitter portends the end of FREE SPEECH™ as we know it. In his mind, "Twitter has empowered leftist feminists to have a censorship field day." And Sullivan does not like these lefty-feminists one bit, no siree! So much so that he imagines—naturally based on no evidence whatsoever—that WAM!s actual Sooper Seekrit Agenda™ is ultimately enforcing "gender quotas for all media businesses, equal representation for women in, say, video-games, gender parity in employment in journalism and in the stories themselves." Gender quotas! LOL! Also: simply stating the demonstrable fact that straight, white males have overwhelmingly dominated public discourse is disparaging straight white males as a group. And sure, WAM! may say their mission is to advocate for the inclusion of more diverse and historically marginalized voices in media, but Andrew Sullivan ain't buying it: "WAM can get to advance their broader ideas about policing the speech of white straight males by this legitimizing alliance with Twitter." WAM!'s real goal, he knows, "is to police and punish others for their alleged sexism." Never mind that, again, WAM! cannot censor anything, anywhere (except their own web site). Twitter is "handing over the censorship tools to a radical activist group bent on social transformation."

Obviously, if these terrible lefty feminist censors are not stopped pronto, next thing you know straight white men will be the ones fleeing their homes in fear for their lives. Just like Richard Dawkins.

Seriously, though, the whole rant is wildly entertaining. "Instead of seeing the web as opening up vast vistas for all sorts of voices to be heard," he writes with comical cluelessness, "they seem to believe it is rigged against female voices." D00d. In case the fourth paragraph of this very blog post did not adequately demonstrate for you that the web is quite clearly "rigged against female voices," a recent Pew research study found that (a) women overall are disproportionately targeted by the most severe forms of online abuse, (b) 25 percent of young women have been sexually harassed online, and (c) 26 percent have experienced stalking.

And guess what else? Queer women, women of color, trans women and women with other marginalized identities are especially targeted and abused. Sullivan quotes WAM!'s Jaclyn Friedman:

“I see this as a free speech issue,” Friedman said. She said she knew some would see the work WAM does as “censorship,” but that a completely open and unmoderated platform imposes its own form of censorship. It effectively prevents women, especially queer women and women of color, from getting to speak on the service.

Behold, his insightful retort:

How exactly? Does Twitter prevent women of color from using the service? Or is it simply that WAM believes that women cannot possibly handle the rough-and-tumble of uninhibited online speech?

Yes, that must be it: it's feminists who believe women are delicate flowers who cannot possibly handle the "rough-and-tumble of uninhibited online speech." Like routine rape and death threats, doxxing (releasing private information such as home addresses, phone numbers, employer, etc. in order to get people to harass women offline, too), libel, hate speech, revenge porn and all sorts of other "rough-and-tumble," "uninhibited online speech" Sullivan is apparently so invested in protecting. FREE SPEECH™, y'all.

Then he says:

I can find no reason to oppose a stronger effort by Twitter to prevent individual users from stalking or harassing others –

Okay! That's fantastic. We're all on board, then.

but

Uh-oh…

if merely saying nasty things about someone can be seen as harassment,

It can't. Because that's not actually what the word "harassment" means.

then where on earth does this well-intentioned censorship end? Is it designed to censor only misogyny and not racism?

No, dear. It's designed to curtail harassment and abuse. And it's starting with misogynist harassment and abuse, albeit with an intersectional focus (racism, transphobia, etc.). FYI, the group is called Women, Action & Media.

What about blasphemy?

Let's see. I just tweeted this:

"Jeezus fookin' Christ.
That is all."
-@irisvanderpluym

I await the terrifying Feminazi Stormtroopers who will be smashing in my door any minute, and dragging me away to be burned at the stake with all the "rationalists."

Of course no one wants to prevent Andrew Sullivan or anyone else from embarrassing themselves on Twitter. I mean, what would we do around here all day without conservatives providing a steady stream of hilarious blog fodder? Unfortunately, how these nefarious evildoers at WAM! will accomplish all of their evildoing by forwarding misogynist harassment complaints to some people at Twitter is left unstated by Sullivan. But I'll definitely be bringing it up at next week's regular meeting of the White-Straight-Man-Hating Social Justice Warriors For Censorship and World Domination™.

[cross-posted at perry street palace.]

Jadehawk Jadehawk's Blog, salon

Sticks and Stones and Jokes

The belief that words, especially if intended as humorous, cannot cause harm is counterfactual. And because it is counterfactual, it does harm in itself.

First, I’d like to point out that in many cases, even people who make this claim often don’t act as if they believed it: e.g. people who will defend the use of slurs because words are harmless will easily turn around and whine for ages about how being criticized is bullying. That’s not behavior consistent with “words don’t harm”, it’s behavior consistent with a belief that some words don’t cause harm, while others do.

Now, let’s look at the actual idea that words in general cannot cause harm. At the individual level, “verbal aggression, statements intended to humiliate or infantilize, insults, threats of abandonment or institutionalization” are all part of the medical definition of emotional abuse[1], and the CDC includes a number of verbal actions as constituting psychological abuse[2]. At the institutional level, the right to free speech is valued precisely because it is powerful; to believe this power only works for people’s benefit and never to their harm is to succumb to a Just World bias in which the Good Guys always win. In reality, any tool that can be used to threaten and discredit harmful institutions can also be used to prop them up, or else threaten and smear beneficial institutions (see: Fox News; all of it, on any topic. See also: Breitbart, O’Keefe, Rose)[3].

So, words can hurt. How about jokes?

First, use of disparagement humor can be a sign of underlying problems. People high in hostile sexism and men high in benevolent sexism tended to experience more amusement and less aversion in regard to sexist humor[4]. Furthermore, when people feel a valued social identity is being threatened, they will often resort to disparagement humor against a group that’s deemed an acceptable social target for harassment by their immediate social environment[5]. In other words, frequent appearance of disparagement humor in a community can be an indicator for community members holding prejudices against the disparaged group.

Beyond just being an indicator of prejudice, disparagement humor also creates new negative effects. A 2004 paper reviewing some of the literature on disparagement humor noted a number of effects, some in common with non-jokey disparagement, some specific to disparagement in the form of a joke. Reciting prejudiced comments (jokey or not) worsens one’s own attitude towards the group disparaged. Exposure to disparagement humor on the other hand doesn’t seem to affect the prejudices people hold; instead, it seems to affect how/whether people will act on their prejudices. The authors suggest that this happens because the degree to which individuals high in prejudice act on that prejudice depends largely on external cues of prejudice-tolerance, and the presence of disparagement humor creates the impression of such tolerance more easily than non-humorous disparagement or non-disparaging humor; but (of course) only if the joke teller doesn’t receive pushback[6]. Despite the above evidence, the trope that something cannot be harmful because it’s “just a joke” is widespread enough to even make it directly into the title of a paper which tests the “prejudiced norm theory” suggested in the 2004 review. It demonstrates that “[t]he acceptance of sexist humor leads men to believe that sexist behavior falls within the bounds of social acceptability”[7]; thus, sexist men behave in a more sexist fashion than they would otherwise. In one experiment, that meant the sexists gave less money to a women’s organization; in another, it meant they actively took money away from such an organization[8].

Of course, disparagement humor doesn’t just affect the jokesters and bigots; it also affects the people who are being disparaged and/or who reject the bigotry in the joke. For example, disparaging comments, joking or otherwise, can trigger stereotype threat in certain situations[9]. There’s also evidence that exposure to sexist humor triggers negative emotional reactions (e.g. disgust, anger, hostility)in members of the targeted group[10]. In addition, finding oneself in the presence of bigoted humor can, in specific circumstances, actually lessen one’s critical stance towards that bigotry: if one believes oneself to be someone who speaks up against bigotry but then doesn’t act on that self-image, the discrepancy can cause cognitive dissonance. When the discrepancy can be explained by external factors (e.g. reasonable fear of harm to oneself), then the discomfort is the only end-result of experiencing cognitive dissonance. The same is true if there’s an opportunity to plaster over the discomfort by reaffirming a different part of one’s self-image. However, when external explanations are lacking (e.g. one believes there’s no actual harm, and all it takes is growing a thicker skin) and there are no opportunities for (self-)distraction, the cognitive dissonance is resolved instead by trivialization: since one is the sort of person who’d speak up against bigotry yet one didn’t, then the instance mustn’t have been all that bigoted; or maybe speaking up just isn’t that important to fighting bigotry, after all[11].

So what’s the overall picture? Disparagement humor is an indicator for existent prejudice, both in the jokester and the social environment where it appears; it strengthens the prejudice in the jokester; it creates permissiveness for other bigots to act more bigoted; and it may create apathy towards bigotry in previously critical, non-prejudiced audiences as well as discomfort and a hostile climate for the targets of the disparagement humor. And those are just the effects in the few papers I listed (I had to stop going through more literature, or else never finish this essay). Bigoted speech is, in other words, an indicator and partial cause for e.g. the toxic rape culture environments we find in fraternities across the country[12]. That’s not harmless. Bigoted speech hurts, even when it’s a joke.

– – –

[1] McGraw-Hill Concise Dictionary of Modern Medicine (2002). New York, NY, USA: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. [web]. Retrieved from here.

[2]National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (2008). Psychological/Emotional Abuse. [web].

[3]This point shamelessly borrowed from here.

[4]Woodzicka, J. A. & Ford, T.E. (2010). “A framework for thinking about the (not-so-funny) effects of sexist humor”, Europe’s Journal of Psychology, vol. 6(3), pp. 174-195. [pdf]. Retrieved from here.

[5]Pound, L. B. (2008). Jokes are No Laughing Matter: Disparagement Humor and Social Identity Theory. [Master’s thesis]. Retrieved from here.

[6]Ford, T.E. & Ferguson, M.A. (2004). “Social Consequences of Disparagement Humor: A Prejudiced Norm Theory”, Personality and Social Psychology Review, vol. 8(1), pp. 79-94. [pdf]. Retrieved from here.

[7]Western Carolina University (Nov 7, 2007). “Sexist Humor No Laughing Matter, Psychologist Says”. ScienceDaily. [web]. Retrieved from here.

[8]Ford, T.E., Boxer, C.F., Armstrong, J. & Edel, J.R. (2008). “More Than ‘Just a Joke’: The Prejudice-Releasing Function of Sexist Humor”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 34(2), pp. 159-170. [pdf]. Retrieved from here.

[9]Singletary, S.L., Ruggs, E.N., Hebl, M.R. & Davies, P.G. (2009). Info Sheet: Stereotype Threat: Causes, Effects, & Remedies. [pdf]. Retrieved from here.

[10]LaFrance, M. & Woodzicka, J. A. (1998).”No laughing matter: Women’s verbal and nonverbal reactions to sexist humor”, in Swim, J.K. & Stangor, C. (Editors). Prejudice: The target’s perspective, pp. 61-80. [book chapter]. San Diego, CA, USA: Academic Press. Retrieved from here.

[11]Rasinski, H.M., Geers, A.L. & Czopp, A.M. (2013).”‘I Guess What He Said Wasn’t That Bad’: Dissonance in Nonconfronting Targets of Prejudice”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 39(7), pp. 856-869. [pdf]. Retrieved from here.

[12]Chemaly, S. (Nov 4, 2014). “Still Think Rape Jokes Are Harmless Fun?” Role Reboot. [web]. Retrieved from here.

swadmin Interviews

Interview with Monette Richards

Monette Richards stays plenty busy as a member of Secular Woman’s board of directors (and as our designated tech-savvy member), but last month she represented SW on the road––and pinch-hit as a speaker––at Skepticon 6. Her talk, “Moving Forward,” discussed the place of women in the secular movement, Secular Woman’s founding and goals, and how discussions of harassment and sexism are helping our community grow and learn. Richards took a few minutes to chat about her experience attending the conference and speaking out on behalf of SW’s mission.

JB: What was your impression of Skepticon?

MR: Skepticon was awesome! Lauren and crew did a pretty great job and getting all the details in place. I had no problems signing in, getting our table set up or running the workshop. I don't think the schedule was wavered from, once. They did an excellent job of sticking to the time table and getting all the details right.

But, most importantly, it was fun! The entire event is run with a positive, fun spirit of having a great time––and when the organizers are looking at it that way, the event goers naturally feel it, too.

JB: I loved your talk! (Watch it here.) What was that experience like for you?

MR: I was a last-minute ask to replace someone who couldn't make it. My experience in giving talks prior to this consisted of one workshop I did for a few local groups and during FTBConscience. I had done nothing like this before. And I was on stage at the same event as people whose talks had made me laugh, and cry, and be silent with awe!

I started working on it on the plane. But my weekend was soon filled with people and tabling and beer and more people, and when was I going to write this talk? So, it was short and a little fuzzy and I was more than a little nervous. I have some amazing friends who gave great ideas and pointers and support, though. So it'll be an even more Awesome Talk of Awesome next time!

JB: Was there an experience, conversation, or talk that particularly stuck with you?

MR: I didn't get to see a lot of the talks as I was tabling in the vendor room (selling the coolest shirts ever). However, I had two huge takeaways from the whole weekend. The first was the inner conversation sparked by Greta Christina's talk. The whole time she was emphasizing self-care being more important than some item, proposed bill, or wrongdoing, I kept nodding my head while saying, "Yes, but…" So, I know I have a lot of work to do there, a lot of work on myself. I have to convince myself to take some time to remember how to relax, again. And that way, I'll have even more fun making even more friends and having an even greater time at the next one!

The second was my reconfirming that we have a lot of amazing people involved in this movement. I have known this. But, it is re-enforced every time I go to a conference. While speakers are wonderful and their talks are important, it's what happens in between that make the most difference. Networking, making new friends and reconnecting with online friends are the real reasons I go.

 

 

Elsa Roberts Article

Street Harassment: An Inconvenient Truth?

First article for Secular Woman's Sexual Assault Awareness Month series

by Shanna Wells

“Hey baby, shake that thing.” “Mmmm, I like ‘em that size.” “Ugh, you’re a dog!” “Nice ass!”

For women, the simple act of walking down the street can become an exercise in navigating a minefield of unwanted comments. According to Author Deborah Tuerkheimer, “street harassment occurs when a woman in a public place is intruded on by a man's words, noises, or gestures. In so doing, he asserts his right to comment on her body or other feature of her person, defining her as object and himself as subject with power over her” (1).

According to one study, 87 percent of American women between the ages of 18-64 had been harassed by a male stranger, and over one half of them experienced “extreme” harassment, including being touched, grabbed, rubbed, brushed or followed by a strange man on the street or other public place (2).

The right of men to control the female body is a cornerstone of patriarchy. Street harassment “frightens women and reinforces fears of rape and other acts of sexual terrorism” (3). It is a human rights violation in that it restricts the free movement of women in public spaces.

For years, women have tolerated street harassment as a fact of life. But recently, a number of organizations have developed to address the issue. www.stopstreetharassment.org is a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending gender-based street harassment worldwide. The website provides strategies for women to address street harassment directly and to train bystanders, men, and boys as advocates against this form of sexual terrorism.

According to ihollaback.org, Street harassment is one of the most pervasive forms of gender-based violence and one of the least legislated against. It is rarely reported, and it’s culturally accepted as “the price you pay” for being a woman or for being gay or gender non-conforming. With the now common prevalence of cell phones, Hollaback encourages women to use the cameras on their phones to document cases of street harassment and share their stories on the Hollaback website. According to a study Hollaback completed in conjunction with the Workers Institute at Cornell, “Taking action generally has a positive influence on a target’s emotional response to the experience of street harassment. Targets who chose to take action, whether while experiencing street harassment or afterwards (e.g., taking a photo of the harasser, reporting harassment to officials), appeared to experience less negative emotional impact than those who did not” (4). Of course, the decision to take action against street harassment must be left to each individual woman, as safety should be her first priority.

Street harassment is a clear a violation of women’s human rights. Fortunately, there are now organizations working toward its eradication. To see what you can do to help wipe out street harassment, visit www.stopstreetharassment.org or www.ihollaback.org.

1. Street Harassment as Sexual Subordination: The Phenomenology of Gender-Specific Harm, Fall, 1997, 12 Wisconsin Women's Law .Journal 167.

2. Oxygen/Markle Pulse Poll, “Harassment of Women on the Street Is Rampant; 87% of American Women Report Being Harassed on the Street By a Male Stranger,” June 22, 2000.

3. Thompson, Deborah. “‘The Woman in the Street:’ Reclaiming the Public Space from Sexual Harassment.” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 6 (1994): 313 – 348.

4. “The Experience of Being Targets of Street Harassment in NYC: Preliminary Findings from a Qualitative Study of a Sample of 223 Voices who Hollaback!”,http://www.ihollaback.org/fact-sheet-the-experience-of-being-targets-of-street-harassment-in-nyc/