On “community safeguarding”: or, cops and vibe hazards

This post is written mostly from the perspective of someone involved in organising in mixed orientation kink events, trans anarchist mutual aid spaces, and trans-centred dyke hookup spaces. I’ve seen the dynamics discussed across a range of those scenes, but when I say “we” in this post it’s mostly talking about trans-led dyke spaces specifically.

What do we mean when we say safeguarding?

Safeguarding can mean a lot of different things. It's a term used in policies and documents for people who are legally responsible for others in some way (teachers, healthcare professionals, social work professionals, cops). It's a vague gesture at making people safe. It's a way of talking about the responsibility of people who have control over the spaces we're in and whether or not they're living up to it: the people who own the venues, run the bars, run the events (sometimes). But it's usually something that's talked about in a way that implies responsibility over.

If you read those policies and documents, they talk about a few different things. There's some best practice stuff: all adults/staff are responsible for safeguarding, it's important to listen carefully and follow the harmed person's lead, don't promise confidentiality, document as soon as possible after a report and minimise someone having to explain what happened over and over again. On an individual level, they say the words "person-centred" a lot. Safeguarding in this context is something that's supposed to maximise decision making about a person by that person. On a wider level, it's about everyone's safety in environments they have minimal control over interacting with.

So the thing is, these are all situations where you often don't really have noncoercive choices in the first place. If you're experiencing harm at school and you're under school leaving age, you can't just leave without risking social services getting involved. If you're disabled and your carer is treating you badly, you might struggle to get support to even make a report in the first place. We've set things up so that there's someone in control who has responsibility and someone who others are responsible for, who experience control expressed over them.

Like, maybe this is because I have a lot of experience in power exchange/authority transfer relationships so I take authority pretty seriously. Maybe it's because I have CPTSD. Maybe it's because I have CPTSD from talking to cops and therapists who didn't care about my experiences. But I can't stand other people acting like they have responsibility over me without my input. I chafe at this in healthcare, and in therapy, and I chafe at it in community settings. I get that I have to deal with this in settings where someone else really does have control: the cops are deciding what happens to my rapist, not me; the psychiatrist I'm seeing at A&E decides whether or not to prescribe me medication, whether or not to section me, and what follow up care I get. But I don't want cops in my communities. I don't want control over me under the guise of responsibility. I want autonomy, and I want autonomy for everyone.

What are we trying to do with community safeguarding?

I think there's what we're trying to do, and then there's what actually arises from the community dynamics I'm most often around. Generally, we're trying to take people seriously: if they say they've experienced harm, we want to listen and believe them and we want people to be able to be in the spaces they're invested in. People causing serious harm complicates this, because the people who have been harmed usually feel unsafe around the people who've hurt them.

The way spaces often try and reach this is the responsibility over approach, where we act like some people have control and some people don't. Generally, this means Organisers have responsibility and attendees don't (or if they have responsibility, it's for reporting to the Organisers only, which reinforces the control Organisers have). If this is the setup, it should be clear that this is the setup, and the Organisers should try and exert that control responsibly: the focus is on keeping the space accessible to people who are marginalised, who fit the groups you're trying to reach/serve, and avoid people being pushed out of the space by harm experienced there or elsewhere.

The problem with responsibility over

This responsibility over approach only makes sense in an environment where you're choosing to keep a hierarchy (even if it's only Organisers vs attendees). We're keeping the structural dynamics of our childhoods, workplaces we're coerced into through capitalism, and other oppressive environments. There's still someone with control, and someone they're responsible for. There's still a cop, and the cop is still deciding what to do with your rapist.

And there are spaces where community happens (but aren't what I mean by "community spaces") where this approach makes sense! Ticketed sex parties or kink events, businesses that are trying to provide a service, community spaces that are heavily facilitated or designed to be safer spaces are all providing a specific thing where the responsibility over approach is pretty helpful. Gatekeeping can be a good thing, if handled responsibly. I run some of these, and I will ban my closest friends or my girlfriends if I need to without a second thought. I'll even tell them it was my decision.

But this approach doesn't give attendees much autonomy. And a lot of the leftist and trans spaces I'm in say they're anarchist spaces with flat hierarchies or that they're Doing Community, which is a kinda specific thing where we're trying to meet people's material needs and structure our spaces so that everyone who is invested in those spaces (that is, showing up and doing stuff to keep the spaces going) has a say, at least in the stuff that affects them directly. Waiting for cops to decide what to do with our rapists doesn't really seem compatible with that to me. Which is where we get to:

Vibe hazards

Generic Organiser hat on for a second. I’m not speaking for any of the orgs I’m involved in here, just stepping into Me the Organiser rather than Me the Community Participant. There’s a few things that banning attendees do, but a really key element that people don’t speak about much is just that it minimises/reduces vibe hazards (as discussed in yr girl’s post on a scene we did).

Alright, let’s say you get a report about a Known Abuser. Known Abuser has multiple documented allegations against them, but they’re all five years old and there’s been nothing new since then. The old allegations come up on social media every so often, and they get shared around your warning networks each time they do. They’re still a known person locally, and there’s local people warning others about them. You’ve had concerned attendees bring up the social media posts they’ve seen. And you have a trusted friend who’s working with Known Abuser, can attest to some material changes they’ve made, their support system, and other significant lifestyle changes. They don’t believe Known Abuser is a risk to attendees. Do you ban them from your event?

Community Cops

As the Doing Community Organiser I’m going to say no. As the Community Cop, I’m going to say yes.

As the Community Cop, I’m not just considering whether or not the allegations seem credible, or whether they’re still likely to hurt people again now. Whilst that’s a (major) part of it, social dynamics are complex, and people will feel less safe if there’s a Known Abuser at your event, and that will affect the experience they have there, even if they don’t recognise or interact with Known Abuser. Known Abuser is a vibe hazard.

Known Abuser’s experience is going to be affected as well: repairing from causing serious damage to people is a traumatic experience in itself, and there’s an ever-present social risk of that coming up at a time or in a way you aren’t prepared for. And if what you’re running is, say, a kink event, people are going to feel very differently about scenes that Known Abuser is involved in than someone they don’t know or even just someone they know and dislike. Known Abuser doing a consensual scene at the event morphs into “Known Abuser is harming people the same way they were before; I didn’t consent to be in a sexual space with them”. If something goes wrong in the scene, Known Abuser doesn’t get any grace. Now it’s “Known Abuser plays recklessly and isn’t prepared for scenes” if they forget the sharps box for their needle scene (something people do occasionally do when I’m sharps DMing; we have a backup for a reason!). People are going to feel less safe and Known Abuser might actually directly be made less socially safe, by virtue of being in an environment where other people aren’t interacting with them in good faith.

To be clear, this is not some covert admission that there’s active predators at the events I run, or that people are unfairly treated differently. I made up the examples here. My point here is that, even in situations where you genuinely believe there’s no safety risk to attendees, there’s still a vibe hazard to attendees, which reduces people’s ability to participate in the space that you’re running. Sometimes that’s a hazard that arises from social dynamics, and sometimes those social dynamics are complicated enough that banning is the choice that best preserves what the event is supposed to be for.

Like, the thing is, cops don’t actually keep us safe. I’m in as much, if not more emotional risk, in the interview where I’m forced to talk to the cop about my rape as when I actually get raped. This dynamic doesn’t magically disappear when we’re holding decision making power over someone else’s abuse or assault. We can use best practices, and we can be trauma informed, but the whole experience is still part of the post-assault narrative that constitutes trauma. The priority here isn’t actually really safety — the cops didn’t stop the rape from happening in the first place, and they aren’t there to make you soup whilst you pace around the living room afterwards to start repairing things. It’s true that putting rapists in prison stops them from being able to rape people outside of prison, at least whilst they’re there, but we’re talking about that in social settings where people think of prison rape as a moral punishment for child abusers and suicide as the moral thing for pedophiles to do. At best, not that many people are asking what happens to the people they’re in prison with, and at worst, they’re perfectly fine with the outcome.

It’s true that banning someone does prevent them from causing harm to people in that same space again. But, speaking as someone who’s seen easily 100+ incident reports it’s actually incredibly rare for violence to happen actually in those spaces. Most of the time, it happens at home — maybe at the hotel after the event, over a long-term relationship, sometimes at private parties, usually in private. Banning people does minimise someone’s ability to get further down the funnel, which can limit their social access, but that just makes them someone else’s problem. It’s not making anyone safer, it’s just shifting the safety risk out of sight.

On the whole, I think when we’re trying to Do Community, we can do better.

No Cops in Community

Personally, I'm going to anarchist spaces and mutual aid spaces to get away from cops. I don't want some random Organiser I've never met to decide they're responsible for me and start making decisions about my safety without my input. I want full decision making about myself, as long as it doesn't constrain the ability of the space to be what everyone else needs it to be too.

As an Organiser in anarchist spaces, I don’t consider it my job to be responsible for other people’s safety. I consider it my responsibility to facilitate the conversations they need to participate in the space, but I don’t actually get to decide what that is on behalf of others. I don’t know their histories, I don’t know what this is bringing up for them, I don’t know what they need. There’s no single correct approach or correct outcome, and if I’m going into these conversations with my own outcomes in mind, I’m not really listening to the people who’ve actually been affected. If some Organiser expresses responsibility over me and decides that they should ban my abusive ex because I might get triggered if we’re in the same space, they’re actually far more likely to trigger my CPTSD and cause a flare up than if I did unexpectedly run into my abusive ex while making tea at the community event. That Organiser isn’t demonstrating any care for me, and their actions aren’t about my safeguarding (though that’s the line that would get used).

Often, the “is this person welcome in our space” conversation really just comes down to optics and virtue-signaling; places that actually practice non-carceral values often get labeled as spaces that “protect abusers”. People who aren’t involved are still going to have feelings about whether or not Known Abuser is allowed to go to the event they’ve never actually been to, and very often this is more about their feelings about their own trauma than it is about this specific instance. They often talk about it to their friends, or on social media, but not to figure out how they feel or what this is bringing up for them.

This isn't safeguarding; this is gossip

The kinds of conversations around events and safeguarding tend to follow a particular pattern: they’re talking about a recent (or recently revived) allegation, linking them to specific people, events or spaces, talking about whether or not they’ve been banned. If someone saw a Known Abuser at an event a year ago, that event must know about it and be intentionally harboring them. If the Organiser’s girlfriend’s ex meta got coffee with them, the whole polycule is protecting them.

This is just gossip.

It comes from real hurt and fear, but it isn’t actually trying to change anything material. There haven't been any structural changes and there's nothing to influence things going any differently next time. We haven’t even really done any care for one another. There’s a difference between, say, retweeting an allegation and calling it safeguarding because we’re “warning people”, and taking someone who’s recently been hurt aside and saying hey, what do you need? Can I cook? Do you need a lift to therapy? Cash for the extra Ubers if you’re too scared to take public transport right now?

Harm happens for reasons. Whilst everyone's accountable for their own actions and their own behaviour, if we keep seeing the same kinds of harm in the same kinds of situations happen in our communities, we should probably try and figure out why that's happening and what we can do to change things and support people better.

Even if we're doing the responsibility over approach and you told an event and they banned your rapist, random person #12 throwing in their two cents on your rape on social media three weeks after people figured out they were banned from the sex party could be a fucking horrible experience and an irresponsible way to try and do safeguarding. The thing that makes a traumatic experience traumatic is often how people respond around you afterwards and how much your autonomy is affected. Imagine someone who's just found out about abuse you experienced linking you to someone else's post about it, because they only had third hand details and wanted to warn you. Imagine five, or ten, or twenty people doing that. If the goal of safeguarding is to take people seriously, this approach fails. Instead, it treats other people's trauma as gossip fodder, or an opportunity to show how safe you yourself are, or an opportunity to virtue signal how good your opinions on safeguarding are. Doing safeguarding badly causes as much harm, or possibly more, than not doing safeguarding at all.

We also tend to scapegoat people in the process. That might be for a good reason — a lot of the harm caused in our communities can be very serious, and if we're committed to not going to the actual cops about it, we want other ways to prevent other people from getting hurt. But when we treat someone's trauma as gossip, we also treat everyone involved with that trauma as disposable. We haven't stopped to ask whether there are reasons for why this happened. We haven't asked if those same reasons could contribute to us doing the same thing (and later being the subject of this cycle ourselves). We haven't asked if people will respond differently next time or if we've actually made anyone any safer.

So what's the alternative?

We need a mutual responsibility approach. I think to get there, we need to really reckon with the fact that we can't ever actually be safe, and that feeling safe isn't the same thing as being set up well to have positive experiences.

The stuff that matters is:

• We get to make decisions about our involvement in spaces that match up with what everyone else needs it to be too (like, you don't get to go to the non-sex play party and start fucking because some people need the non-sexual space and it's against the rules; you don't get to go to the sex-positive play party and dismiss the people who fuck as "not real kinksters" because that's a dick move)

• Everyone has routes to Doing Community; that is, getting their material needs met by other people and getting to interact with other people as peers

• We get to be taken seriously if something goes wrong, and that means we are listened to and our autonomy is prioritised.

• People are invested in the spaces they're in, not just attending them. That means that if something goes wrong, we're working on finding ways to make those spaces more suitable for the people who are invested in them

What does this mean for events?

Which events? Your friendly anarchist events that feed people should probably find ways to make sure everyone invested in those events gets fed, even if someone has been seriously harmed. Your events in public spaces where they don't control attendance have pretty much the same risk profile as that public space does the rest of the time; you might just see your abusive ex at the munch and they might be having a good time talking to other people. Your private sex parties are run the same way your private house parties are: you ask the host whether they're going to invite your abusive ex and you decide whether or not to go based on that. Your ticketed kink events are probably taking the responsibility over approach, which means you've agreed you don't get control over safeguarding, so you also don't get to go and post on Fetlife about whether or not someone else's unnamed rapist is banned from unnamed kink events. You do get to DM the events you go to and ask whether or not someone you've been warned about is going, but only inasmuch as you're deciding whether or not to go to that event, because once you do you've agreed to give over control.

What does this mean when someone hurts you?

First off, we need to be honest with ourselves about the harm caused and what our impulses are. Being hurt can feel the same across minor disagreements all the way up to outright assault, and we don’t always know what we need in the moment. Building networks and social spaces where people are caring for each other helps with this, though; ideally, you’ll have people helping care for you, and the person who hurt you will too. Making sure everyone’s needs are met gives us the baseline we need to have those conversations where we get to make decisions about the things that affect us directly.

Pulling it off

Actually taking this approach is hard. These problems arise from a lot of things we can't easily change: we've generally all been brought up within capitalism, with authority figures constantly present, and it's hard to shift to a way of doing things that focuses on agency over control. There's other structural issues: people are causing harm arising out of things like trauma; financial insecurity; homelessness; being socialised online because we're all trans; being socialised weird because we're all trans; because we've learned not to do x thing but don't understand why and the impulse behind it was never addressed so we just do similar, stranger things instead; because our parents sucked at communication and we overcorrected in a different way; because our first experiences on a given scene were with people who didn't know how to treat people well either. It makes sense that we default to doing stuff that makes us feel safe because everything else is a lot harder to tackle.

But there’s a difference between doing stuff that makes us feel safe and doing stuff that sets us up well for dealing with serious problems. Sometimes we want a break from the world to go fuck at the sex party, and we don’t want our abusers there — and that’s fair enough! I’m not saying we shouldn’t have any spaces with ban lists, or that the responsibility over approach isn’t worth doing or doesn’t have useful applications. I just think it’s important to be honest that it doesn’t make us safe. The closest thing we can get to that is setting ourselves up well to deal with the shit that’s already happened to us, our feelings about that now, the experiences that are yet to happen, and to take care of other people whilst they’re going through it, too.

A fairly reasonable criticism of this post would be that it doesn’t offer much in the way of practical alternatives. I just don’t think any of this is all that complicated. It is hard, though. It’s hard to really listen to our friends when we’re too stressed to sympathise with their problems, or when we’re having a really good time and want to excitedly talk about whatever’s going on with us, let alone when they’re talking about sexual violence and we’re getting triggered about our own experiences. It’s hard to make sure everyone is housed and fed and has HRT and clean clothes and can reliably shower and has people who listen to them and check in with them. It’s especially hard to do that if people think you’re evil for housing or getting coffee with someone who’s seriously hurt other people.

Giving a rapist a bowl of soup isn’t safeguarding, but neither is posting on social media or protecting the vibes and reputation of an event. I want my rapist to be fed and housed, and I want yours to be, too. I don’t know for sure if that means people will be better able to get their needs met, listen to each other, and start work on the problems that left us here, but I think we have a much better shot that way than by arguing about whether people or events are Safe.