Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.
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@surreality said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:
Further, I'm well aware of the emotional sensitivities during and after a traumatic experience, online and off, and don't need a primer on that front.
Sorry. That you're familiar and that I condescended to you. Both.
@kanye-qwest said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:
But it isn't okay, is it? Because if a player is doing this stuff to one person...they are probably doing it to others, too. Like, yes you should strive for comfort and understanding but at the same time the staff's job is to do the best they can for the players. That means protecting them from known shitlord elements.
Then we need to be clear that the actual goal is not to eliminate roadblocks that prevent players from coming forward, and is instead to make things easier for staff to do what they want to do. And I'm actually more okay with that viewpoint than I probably sound; it does have merit. I just think when the conversation shifts from "how can a game make reporting more likely" to "staff needs to take X action no matter what," we need to acknowledge that we're no long talking about nor prioritizing the same things.
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@greenflashlight said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:
I just think when the conversation shifts from "how can a game make reporting more likely" to "staff needs to take X action no matter what," we need to acknowledge that we're no long talking about nor prioritizing the same things.
Eh, no. It's not exactly different priorities and saying that it is is taking away, I think, the fact that @Kanye-Qwest is referring to. In that, if someone is doing something Not Ok to you, then they are probably doing the same thing to multiple people.
I know for a fact that the person that I reported was also doing the same shitty things to a handful of other female players, because they told me, before and later, after the fact.
And honestly, if you don't want anything to happen to the person from your reporting, then you still aren't /reporting/ the behavior. The conversation is still 'how can a game make reporting more likely'. Your conversation is a different one. Your conversation is 'how can I be a supportive friend and just listen to someone's shitty experience', which doesn't require it being staff or not.
#FreeFarfalla
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@meg said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:
And honestly, if you don't want anything to happen to the person from your reporting, then you still aren't /reporting/ the behavior. The conversation is still 'how can a game make reporting more likely'. Your conversation is a different one. Your conversation is 'how can I be a supportive friend and just listen to someone's shitty experience', which doesn't require it being staff or not.
This. I don't think the question is 'how can we help victims come forward and talk about their experiences', it's 'how can we encourage reporting'. They're very different conversations. Frankly, in a staff capacity, someone telling me something while saying they want no action taken regarding it is less than useless. It does not help them. It does not help me. If all that's desired is someone to talk to about what happened, there are several chat-based services on the internet involving people with training as to specifically how to deal with this sort of conversation. If that's what somebody is after, that is what somebody should be doing.
If I am unable to act on what I am told, what is the purpose of telling me? I can't help make things safer for the person telling me. I can't help make things safer for anybody else. I'm not trained to be of actual assistance in these matters, and could actually end up doing real psychological harm by trying to do so. So, seriously: who does it benefit to encourage someone to come to me with things I cannot take action on? It does not even benefit the victim.
ETA: Also, survivor here. So yes, I am allowed to have an opinion on this topic before someone gets into "oh you just couldn't understand" because I do.
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@sunny said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:
@meg said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:
And honestly, if you don't want anything to happen to the person from your reporting, then you still aren't /reporting/ the behavior. The conversation is still 'how can a game make reporting more likely'. Your conversation is a different one. Your conversation is 'how can I be a supportive friend and just listen to someone's shitty experience', which doesn't require it being staff or not.
This. I don't think the question is 'how can we help victims come forward and talk about their experiences', it's 'how can we encourage reporting'. They're very different conversations. Frankly, in a staff capacity, someone telling me something while saying they want no action taken regarding it is less than useless. It does not help them. It does not help me. If all that's desired is someone to talk to about what happened, there are several chat-based services on the internet involving people with training as to specifically how to deal with this sort of conversation. If that's what somebody is after, that is what somebody should be doing.
If I am unable to act on what I am told, what is the purpose of telling me? I can't help make things safer for the person telling me. I can't help make things safer for anybody else. I'm not trained to be of actual assistance in these matters, and could actually end up doing real psychological harm by trying to do so. So, seriously: who does it benefit to encourage someone to come to me with things I cannot take action on? It does not even benefit the victim.
ETA: Also, survivor here. So yes, I am allowed to have an opinion on this topic before someone gets into "oh you just couldn't understand" because I do.
This. Like, probably at a glance it sounds like a heartless to say "I don't want to hear about your report unless I can act," but honestly it's true. If you're coming to staff, please help them help you -- and help them help others. Honestly, I would do a lot to help someone keep themselves safe off my game if they were worried about retaliation there, even if it's just trying to help them figure out laws and how to report things and all of that. But it's a little like going to HR with an issue in the workplace. It's generally HR's duty to do their best to protect the source of a complaint, but if it's something that falls within the purview of things they need to act on (for legal reasons), they have to do so. (Which may not involve naming the person who lodged the complaint, but often in situations like that it'll be fairly obvious to the person reported.)
Obviously MU*s aren't in the position of having legal responsibilities to, say, protect their workplace from sexual harassment, but I do think there's a certain level of similarity in that HR is there to protect the company, as staff is there to protect their game.
None of this is to say that it's an easy thing to tell someone "I have to act on this information" when they don't want you to. And honestly, I can't recall having ended up in that position as a staffer -- at least not for anything major. So I think it's a very difficult path to sensitively and empathetically handle these sorts of situations while still needing to move forward with acting on information that someone on your game is doing stuff that necessitates serious discipline to protect the game and the playerbase at large. I unfortunately don't have a magic set of words to easily figure out how to do that.
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To be fair, if someone is expecting the kind of invasive grilling that someone often faces when pressing sexual assault charges, I can see how and why making sure that people know they aren’t volunteering to go under the microscope to the entire community, game, or even staffcorps would be pretty important.
But I need to STFU a bit to pack the table up as show’s closing down in a few — did want to note that and thank @GreenFlashlight for the empathy though while on ye rambly smoke break.
I think this is s good and useful convo to have and it does involve finding ways to address those fears in a compassionate way, just won’t be able to explain if needed until I can resume slackerdom at a real keyboard.
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@sunny said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:
If I am unable to act on what I am told, what is the purpose of telling me? I can't help make things safer for the person telling me. I can't help make things safer for anybody else.
When I'm wearing a staff hat, I make it very clear that if I learn of any plausible, credible claims of harassment, stalking, or making people feel uncomfortable about being on the game, I will investigate and take action. I also make it very clear that I play characters on my game, that other staff have alts on the game, and that I regularly converse with other staff.
Whether the informant wants action taken is not my concern.
My purpose is to protect the game, and not the feelings of any one player. My idea of a safe environment is not an environment where a potential harasser or stalker feels safe.
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@greenflashlight I think there's something getting lost in translation here. It may just be a word choice issue -- it isn't so much something staff wants to do. Staff pretty much never want any of this to happen to start with if they, uh, have souls, more or less.
I can really only speak for myself from this point forward, but I'm pretty sure most people posting have fairly similar takes on the contents of the next paragraph, at least.
Mainly, I don't want to do this. I want this to never even come up on the game in the first place. It still will, in some form or another, because it always does.• I want players on a game I run/headstaff on/have the ability to do something on to know that if they can come to me to ask about something as completely inconsequential to real life as how much damage to take from a dice roll -- somebody trying to mess with the real person is far, far more important than that, even if the issue seems potentially small even to them. I want them to know that it's not my job or at all in my interest to judge their personal life in some fashion if something about it surfaces when they bring an issue to my attention. I want them to know that whatever they convey is not going to become fodder for gossip or rumor-mongering or snickers behind someone's back (and this goes for all parties involved) because that shit is completely beyond unacceptable. I want them to know that I wish the event had not occurred, and that while I cannot make it unhappen, I am going to do what I can to ensure it does not happen again, to them or to anyone else on the game, because of the person who did something inappropriate.
A lot of what you've described hints at some things that aren't necessarily said outright, but are reasonable fears: "Will this feed the rumor mill? Are people going to be mocking me about this? Are people going to think this is my fault because I agreed to A but not to B, and they'll think if I didn't want B, too, I should never have said yes to A in the first place? Sally told me not to talk to Joe, and so did Jane; will this just get blown off with 'you were warned and should have known better'? Joe said he knows the rules better than I do... maybe he does... maybe I don't have a leg to stand on here, will they just tell me to fuck off and that I'm the one who is causing a problem? I still can't believe I let Joe talk me into trying that, I told him no after I didn't like it, but how can I even say what we tried, it's so embarrassing!" ...and the list just goes on and on and on, and everybody -- EVERYBODY -- has that voice in their head sometimes. It isn't just abuse survivors, it isn't just assault survivors, it isn't just people who have been sexually harassed, it isn't just people who have been raped, it really, truly, absolutely is damned near everyone. The context might be different, but we've all been there, with that self-critic turned up to maximum volume, trying to 'be realistic with ourselves' about what's likely to follow.
What we're actually doing there isn't actually being realistic, though. We're instead conjuring up a bunch of worst-case scenarios, and usually trying to figure out what to do if one of those problems arises. This is a real survival mechanism and it's hardwired to help us survive when a rapid-fire fight-or-flight sort of scenario actually arises, or we recognize that we may be entering a potential conflict or risky situation.
Having just come out of a traumatic situation doesn't help matters; the fear volume is amplified, and it can push this survival mechanism (that would ideally help us prepare for a potentially difficult task ahead) into a major stumbling block. It makes the potentially difficult task seem like a damned-near impossible conflict instead, when it... actually isn't. It's still a potentially difficult task, and while that's not fun to confront, it's not a damned-near impossible conflict.
It is very difficult to not essentially get in one's own way like this sometimes.
This is not to say there have not been, or are not, completely shitty staffers who behave in the ways that would make the catalogue of fears described above more realistic. And do not mistake me here: I am not of a mind to judge a player who comes to me with a concern, but holy shit am I wearing my Side-Eye-McJudgypants face when I think about staff (or even 'friends') who fuck up in the ways that'd make any one of those fears a reality.
So, uh, tl;dr, yeah, it's what staff 'wants', but only in the sense that it's what all sane participants in the hobby (including the person who makes a report) want: an environment free of creepy asshats who are incapable of empathy and wouldn't know a boundary if it was an electrified fence they were actively peeing on at the time.
• ...and it always does because these jerks are everywhere. Some places kick them off quickly, and that means they're always looking for somewhere new to try the same tricks before they probably get booted off of there, too.
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Does The Clique still exist?
See, I'm all for protecting the game, protecting people. I'm all for the first state one takes when hearing a complaint should be believing it. I'm all for believing not just the complaint, but the second hand report of an issue.
I brought this up before and was told I was the reason why a person didn't want to trust staff to report an issue, but that doesn't make it any less real.
I know for a fact that a regular tactic of The Clique used to be to file false complaints against someone that went against them. Pillowfort would decide on an enemy and organize around destroying that enemy.
This isn't denial, this isn't shaming, this isn't minimizing the real abuse people can have. But its real and the awareness of it has to also be a part of how we address these situations.
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I kind of think the term 'first offense' is a misnomer, as far as these games go. Unless a staffer is totally unfamiliar with someone, pretty much everyone has at least some kind of pattern of behavior that can be established really easily. Like, I might not have RP'd with Bob, but if Bob talks in public about how a lot of women irl make false claims, refers how he posts on the redpill, says he gets into fights irl all the time because people can't handle how alpha he is, is consistently confrontational... I mean, if someone that has never caused a problem before said, 'Bob made me uncomfortable', I don't think asking for a log is really all that necessary, Bob is gone.
I mean, maybe that's unfair and all, but if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and makes constant microaggressions that perpetuate a culture were harassment can flourish like a duck, then just get rid of the damned duck.
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@ixokai said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:
I know for a fact that a regular tactic of The Clique used to be to file false complaints against someone that went against them. Pillowfort would decide on an enemy and organize around destroying that enemy.
I can believe someone and still perform an investigation into the claims.
What I remember of the Pillowfort is that they never really raised anything substantial. I recall them reporting VASpider and her husband to me when I was staffing at Denver by Night, and I remember that my investigation turned up nothing. I dug a little bit, and there was nothing there. At all. They may have gotten better at it.
Anyhow, as I said in another post, you can believe and still look for what's really going on. I can believe something happened that made someone feel uncomfortable, and the next moment dig into why that happened.
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@surreality said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:
@greenflashlight I think there's something getting lost in translation here. It may just be a word choice issue -- it isn't so much something staff wants to do.
Maybe. Let me stop and define my terms, since I admittedly have pretty weird definitions.
I read something once that always stuck with me: "The ends don't justify the means. The ends determine the means." That sentiment really changed my worldview, and to give an example relevant to this discussion, I consider 'want' a pretty useless word that I no longer treat with much respect in my personal usage. Whether you--and I'm just using 'you' as a stand-in for the hypothetical staff--want to do a thing is intensely irrelevant to me in the face of whether or not you did it, because I don't know a way to measure what you want to do except by watching your actions. If you start an investigation against my will, then I'm forced to assume an investigation is the thing you want rather than to respect my wishes, since in this example they're mutually exclusive and you didn't choose another path toward your goal of chasing your prey. The accused is the end you're pursuing, and I'm the path you're stepping on to get there.
I guess the next definition is my goal in dealing with victims. I perceive harassment mostly as a violation of personal sovereignty; as a theft of personal boundaries. My goal is to heal that breach by allowing boundaries to be reestablished under the victim's control. If I have to choose between letting a predator go and violating the trust of an already damaged victim, I'll let the predator go every time, because the idea of hurting the victim more in order to buy safety for the next person is abhorrent to me. I don't believe in buying a third party's safety with a victim's pain. In my personal hierarchy of sins, that kind of betrayal is in the top three. It offends me on the deepest level.
I think that the way to get a victim's cooperation is to earn their trust by giving them back the power their attacker took. If you become their friend, then they will be willing to align their goals with yours if they can; to use a personal example, I never would have told the staff of United Heroes one word about my harassment if it hadn't been for my friend Prototart needing me to (not that it ended up doing any good, but I had to try).
But I don't know. Maybe this is all just me, and none of it makes any sense to you. Maybe I'm the only person who thinks the victim should be prioritized over the criminal; I've never really believed in solving moral quandaries by numbers, so maybe I'm the odd duck out. If so, just let me know, and I'll concede I have nothing to contribute to the conversation you want to have.
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@greenflashlight said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:
I guess the next definition is my goal in dealing with victims. I perceive harassment mostly as a violation of personal sovereignty; as a theft of personal boundaries. My goal is to heal that breach by allowing boundaries to be reestablished under the victim's control. If I have to choose between letting a predator go and violating the trust of an already damaged victim, I'll let the predator go every time, because the idea of hurting the victim more in order to buy safety for the next person is abhorrent to me. I don't believe in buying a third party's safety with a victim's pain. In my personal hierarchy of sins, that kind of betrayal is in the top three. It offends me on the deepest level.
This is so completely abhorrent to me I barely have words. This is how you get not one victim but dozens.
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@greenflashlight I would not say I'm appalled or anything, but this does seem to be sort of missing the forest for the trees.
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I mean like, I totally agree that you should minimize and guard against re-traumatizing the victim.
But "start an investigation against my will" being an issue? Its like, okay, staff suspects there's someone toxic on the game, so they should just wait until such a time that someone wants to come up with an official complaint?
I thought the whole consensus we had before on topics about harassment, etc, was that staff should be MORE proactive with rooting out and kicking these abusers off the game?
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As a game owner, I'd think the atmosphere and safety of the /game/ is the prime concern, since players come and go. (Also it's my experience that when a situation gets to the point of a ban or boot being needed, the player who was on the receiving end of the unwelcome behavior probably will have the game ruined for them for awhile anyway. Usually it takes repetitive times for someone to even make a report, instead of just leaving.)
It's irresponsible in the extreme to allow a harassing, boundary violating player to remain on game just because the victim says don't ban them "because of me." Well, it's not because of them. It's because the actions of the other person show untrustworthiness and poor judgement and you don't feel that you want that individual on your game.
Sometimes people say that, when really what they want is to be told very firmly that it's not their fault.
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@greenflashlight said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:
I consider 'want' a pretty useless word that I no longer treat with much respect in my personal usage.
Here's the thing: want is a useful word. It has a real purpose.
You speak a lot about what you don't want. I mean, the obvious thing here is semantic and basic logic; without want there's no don't want. The less obvious, but I think perhaps more important thing, is that boundaries can be expressed very effectively with the word want.
Example:
I don't want an investigation of this.
vs.
I want this problem to stop in a way that does not expose me to further discomfort, risk, or personal violation. I want to feel secure, comfortable, and respected here, and I want to heal.Again, I'm not inclined to speak for anybody else here, but I'm pretty sure the folks who are or have been staff here would agree that we can't do much with the former. We can do a hell of a lot with the latter.
If you start an investigation against my will, then I'm forced to assume an investigation is the thing you want rather than to respect my wishes, since in this example they're mutually exclusive and you didn't choose another path toward your goal of chasing your prey.
No, you aren't actually forced to see it that way. You're actively making the choice to see it that way, and that is actually something you have to personally own.
The presentation of staff as predator in this instance is somewhat disturbing, though.
The accused is the end you're pursuing, and I'm the path you're stepping on to get there.
Except, to staff (by which I consistently mean 'staff who give a fuck and have an actual soul', not the lunatics with wizbits out there), this is not the case at all. Not by a mile.
The end they are pursuing is a game that is not a free-range hunting ground for predators.
The path they are pursuing is putting boot to predator ass when those predators are identified and slamming the door behind them, not grinding that boot to your neck to force evidence out of you to identify quarry on which they can then predate.
I say this as respectfully as I can: if this really is how you perceive the matter, yes, the coping mechanism of just stepping away from the entire game is probably the best course of action for you personally.
I perceive harassment mostly as a violation of personal sovereignty; as a theft of personal boundaries. My goal is to heal that breach by allowing boundaries to be reestablished under the victim's control.
Here's the thing: staff can help you with that. They can't do it for you, and there's a difference between helping and doing it for you that's important. Now, it's going to depend on the staff, and on what policies they have about such things, but many games allow for this.
Many games have things that allow someone to block pages or @mail from other players to stop private OOC communication from that person, and that's something a player can do entirely on their own to stop unwanted communication from someone.
And that is possible whether or not someone has tried 'Hey, not cool, knock that off.' From what I remember of your case, you did take the 'hey, knock that off' step, which is laudable, because it is setting a boundary. Not everyone does that, and while I don't consider it a required step nor do I think it should be a required step, it's a good one to take. (That you did this suggests you're not just leaving this all up to staff to do for you, pretty much, and that's awesome on a number of levels.)
Now, there's a reason the 'knock it off' or 'leave me alone' step is awesome -- and I think it's a way that might be especially helpful to you from what you're describing here.
While there's argument sometimes about how it gets implemented or managed, many games have what's known as a 'no contact' clause. It's basically a formal statement that (generic) you and somebody else will not knowingly communicate IC or OOC on a game.
This is something you can ask for from staff, and here's the thing about it: when it comes right down to it, you don't often need any elaborate reason or evidence. "I don't want to interact with Bob, he makes me uncomfortable," doesn't require any more than that. And most games, you don't even need that. "I don't want to interact with Bob, he's a jerk," or "I want a no-contact with Bob, he was awful to me on another game entirely and made me completely miserable" works equally well, same with plain ol' "I don't want to interact with Bob <no reason provided>." There's no investigation there whatsoever, staff's just going to slam the wall down for you and help you enforce it as needed.
You can choose to explain, "I was talking to Bob and asked him to stop doing X; he wouldn't stop, so I'm asking for no contact with Bob" if you want to. If you want to be super awesome, you can send a log of sending a page to Bob to that end and whatever, if anything, his response was.
There's no prying and no invasion there. There's no stepping on your neck.
Is it possible that Bob gets banned over that? Sure. For all you know, you're the third person that day asking for the same thing, possibly for the same reason. He's banned for his cumulative impact on the game, though, not because of your request.
If I have to choose between letting a predator go and violating the trust of an already damaged victim, I'll let the predator go every time, because the idea of hurting the victim more in order to buy safety for the next person is abhorrent to me. I don't believe in buying a third party's safety with a victim's pain. In my personal hierarchy of sins, that kind of betrayal is in the top three. It offends me on the deepest level.
@ixokai addressed this well, so I'm not going to repeat what he said.
One of the core principles of being a member of staff is that all players on the game are important. All of them matter, no matter who they are, what they do, what they've done, what's been done to them.
Ultimately, the target is not even more important than even the accused -- as they both have some rights, even if one is given the benefit of the doubt. (That's what an investigation is actually about, if one exists. More about that in a sec.)
What you are asking here is to make the target, based solely on their word, more important than literally every single participant on the game combined. They are now the most important person on the game, full stop; their needs and wants are placed above every single other individual present. Not just any given staff member, but all the staff. Not just any other player, all the players. Everyone.
You are asking someone to demonstrate a stunning measure of favoritism to someone based solely on their word that something -- that they do not wish to speak about, be questioned about, or provide evidence of any kind to support -- occurred, and put their wishes and well-being above those of everyone else.
No.
No, that's a mile past the ethical line.
I think that the way to get a victim's cooperation is to earn their trust by giving them back the power their attacker took.
This is not possible. I don't mean 'it's not staff's responsibility to do this ever', even though this is also true, I mean this is not actually possible.
Nobody can give that back to you.
You have to take it back yourself, claim it, own it.
That's the only way it works.
Staff can help you defend that line if someone tries to cross it again, but they can't give you that.
If you become their friend, then they will be willing to align their goals with yours if they can; to use a personal example, I never would have told the staff of United Heroes one word about my harassment if it hadn't been for my friend Prototart needing me to (not that it ended up doing any good, but I had to try).
Staff isn't there to be your friend, though. That's what your friends are for. I mean, you may have a friend who is also staff, but it's not staff's job to be besties with everyone -- that is a gross violation of their boundaries, and you're not entitled to be someone's bestie just for doing the equivalent of showing up at their front door.
Maybe I'm the only person who thinks the victim should be prioritized over the criminal
What you're missing is that the target is being prioritized over the predator. One remains welcome in the community, while the other is excised from it. The target is simply not being prioritized over the entire community as a whole in every way, which is staff's core responsibility.
There are reasonable arguments to have about 'by the numbers' approaches that go the other way, too, and people have seen damage done because of this. For instance, if the predator is an active scene runner, 'the numbers' suggest not getting rid of the predator at all, but kicking the target to the curb if they are not as 'by the numbers' generative of activity as the predator.
Again, maybe I'm speaking too broadly, but I can't imagine any of the people speaking up in this thread giving the first fuck about how much activity a predator is generating for the game if they're identified as a predator and thus are a danger to the game's community that should be removed.
So there are some objectionable 'by the numbers' arguments people have had over time, most of which boil down to the above, but 'ignore the well-being of everyone to focus on one person's needs above all others and allow an abusive party to freely abuse others' is just not one of them.
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Sounds like we aren't talking about the same things, then. Sorry to waste your time on a derail.
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@greenflashlight No need for apologies, it's just... you can't exactly demonize someone for not making you more important than the safety of an entire community this way to someone who is responsible for always being mindful of the community as a whole.
As for the counseling aspects, @Sunny is dead on -- this is for friends and/or professionals. This is not staff's responsibility nor can it be. Recognition of this is not 'just using you again to pursue what they want', also.
People should be mindful to not engage in revictimization, but that doesn't mean making that person more important than everything else in their realm of responsibility, taking on a personal counseling/advisory/friend bond role in their life whether they want to or not out of obligation, or provide aid that is not in another human being's ability to provide are the answer.
I'll be blunt: I've been raped more than once. I've been creeped on on games to a legendary degree, enough so that we all joke about how I must be wearing a big neon 'creepers, inquire within!' sign. I've been stalked RL and online. Somebody tried to actually murder me and almost succeeded -- the list goes on and its contents are not pretty. Not once even in any of those circumstances have I ever imagined I am entitled to any of the things you are suggesting are simply due/owed someone because of any of those things happening to them, either when they happened, or now, even when the 'someone' was me.
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@greenflashlight said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:
Sounds like we aren't talking about the same things, then. Sorry to waste your time on a derail.
Hey, now. Some of us who disagree with you are hearing you.
Having worked in a prosecutor's office, I understand the concept of victim agency, and restoring the victim to power in a situation. Bringing a case against a victim's will is an important consideration. If the victim refuses to testify, for example, a prosecutor's office generally won't bring the case to trial unless there is sufficient corroborating evidence that it can prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the assault occurred without the victim's testimony.
That said, I'm not a prosecutor when I'm running a game: I'm dictator for life. I'm not going to shy away from that, and that characterization is absolutely true, no matter how someone gussies it up. I cannot deny that many people will not report because of victim agency concerns, and this is a valid concern; however, I lean towards moving to act because I don't want a wolf among the sheep, picking them off while I twiddle my thumbs. This has happened to me before, and I won't let it happen again.
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@tnp
Yep, it's a cultural thing. So the best thing players and staffers can do would be to focus on combatting that culture at large, then supporting different personality types on the ground. Combatting the culture can mean positively reinforcing a culture that is counter to it, being steadfast about enforcing their culture, make sure policy supports this culture, and iterating for improvement. I don't think there's a handy guide for this yet. I don't think there ever will be because every person is different. I think this is more about developing skills as players and staffers over time to create better cultures in the face of that. I realize that doesn't sound helpful or concrete, but this really is something people need to doggedly and iteratively improve on. I can't stress iteration enough here. Conditions will constantly be changing and so will the stakes.Make sure everyone is aligned. Create a culture of responsibility and support. Be realistic about your obstacles. You will have to deal with players who never want to get anyone else in trouble no matter what has happened to them. You'll have players who don't want to 'cause problems' for staff. You'll have all these other great (as in interesting problems to solve and dig into) conundrums that @surreality originally posted. To cut through those, empathy, listening, firmness, and graciousness are needed to succeed. Possibly a lot more, and not just by the people directly involved.
Most of all, be real with yourself. Invite criticism. Listen. Demonstrate a pattern of collecting feedback publicly, addressing, changing, following up. This builds trust and accountability with players. It also keeps people in check. And anyone can do this, not just staffers.
If something is let go, you need to follow up. You need to provide context. It's not enough to just say, "My word stands," or, "My door is open." It's hard work, but anything short of this usually breeds more problems than results.
I would suggest that the job of a player relations wiz would be to establish and foster this kind of culture. To encourage other staffers to hold each other accountable to this culture, and ultimately, to get the culture to be self-reinforcing. It is the hardest job/role on a MU and if you don't have someone formally dedicated to it, no matter how small the game is, you're missing out. I don't think this person should hold all the power. It's probably more effective if they do not have major conflicts of interest.
