It's a weird day

[drwex]

It's a weird day when multiple people take the time to thank me for being the voice of reason. You all who know me can stop laughing now. Any minute. I'll wait.

I've been posting a good deal in both sunspiral's LJ and shadesong's LJ. I'm glad to be able to have discussions with both of them. This is where I stand:

- Judah is a self-admitted abuser and has a restraining order against him for domestic violence and other related offenses. As such, I do not want him at my house and I am probably not comfortable going to other parties where he is welcome. That might change in the future; or, maybe not. I'm in new territory here and the Magic 8 Ball is cloudy.

- My comfort is about me and my loved ones. It's not a standard for other private individuals to follow. I am not the boss of you (unless you're one of my kids and they have some vehement objections to my Boss status anyway).

- When I go to a party I expect to follow the hosts' rules. When people come to my parties I'd like them to follow my rules, which are often summarized as "don't piss off the hosts." Part of why Judah is not welcome is because I'm so angry at what he did. I want him to be banned from other events where I might attend because I have my visceral, fist-clenching furious reaction to imagining someone doing to my loved ones what he did to Shira.

- I recognize that my response to the situation is seated in a position of vast privilege, including white, able, cis-male, wealth privilege. I also don't know what to do with that, except try to keep it in mind when I write or speak.

- There are people I like, love, and respect, on all sides of this debate. I am struggling to understand how these people I respect have reasoned to the positions they hold. I think we have now a large rift in the circle of people I like and if people do not understand each other there is no hope for dialog. Because this is all about me, I feel like I want to understand all the sides first.

- I am currently using the theoretical basis of framing ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences) ) to think about this. I believe we have a framing problem, not a Rashomon problem. In Rashomon, every witness tells their own version of events, and no two of them agree on all the facts. In this situation I think pretty much everyone agrees on the facts, but is using different framings to interpret those facts.

- I have a long and friendly relationship with Scott & Rachel. I have a much shorter acquaintanceship with Shira and even less so with Adam but I'd like to think that Shira and I are at least on friendly terms.

- I am intensely sad that this situation has now become a conflict between these households when I think that conflict was entirely avoidable. I see people responding to perceived attacks on each of these people, being protective of the people they love. I understand that, deeply. I continue to believe that this level of self- and other-protectiveness is preventing many people from recognizing the framing differences.

- We accuse each other of lies, deceptions, exaggerations, denials, etc. But I think these things are all distractions from the core issues. I care about how you treat the people who commit these violent acts; how you treat the people who are the victims of these acts; how you treat the people who have to deal with the consequences of these acts; and how you treat the people who are trying to navigate these unknown and shark-infested waters. I reject any formulation that says, "It's simple, just XYZ." It's not simple.

- I would like to be able to focus on the problems that having Judah in the social circle brings and how we can deal with that. Unfortunately the grounds have shifted and people are choosing up sides in a wholly unnecessary war. Perhaps I'm falling into a geek fallacy, but I also see this as an important test case. If we cannot find a way to work with each other - despite our different frameworks - to deal with an abuser and social gatherings then we have a pretty deep problem.

Comments

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

I ain't laughing. You have had a particularly sober and judicious response to the whole thing. I appreciate it.

Right now, one part I find particularly troubling is the finegrpointing and accusations of lying. As near as I can tell, it starts with three words in a text message. Even when people are in close proximity and hear each other actually speaking--meaning they can hear tone--we can be separated by a common language. The person speaking might mean one thing but the listener hears another. At least in person it can be sorted out quickly and clearly, though it takes more words. It's a helluva lot worse with texts. They almost require brevity and you cannot hear the voice.

The one thing I want to beg of the people involved in the... well, it's become a feud, hasn't it? *sigh* I want to beg them to understand that I don't think anybody was saying a deliberate and knowing untruth, or distortion of truth. This goes back to what you mentioned about framing.

I like all of the primary people arguing. As such I am sad that they are arguing in the first place.

[sparr0.livejournal.com]

Hi. I don't know if we know each other, but I want to ask if you have some information that is missing from retellings of these events:

Do you have the information to clarify the timeline, re the host's party policies on bringing police to their house and the victim's message(s?) indicating that the police would be coming to the party?

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this and trying to be a voice of moderation. And for clearly listening. I didn't have the strength to wade in too deeply, so every comment on those threads that made sense to me was a breath of fresh air.

[(Anonymous)]

No one has yet really said this, perhaps because with the current polarization and intensity of emotion this could be seem as minimizing the importance of protecting our community from sexual predators and sexual aggression. It is not intended as such at all, but as a reminder that the situation is complicated. Feeling it is critically important to protect one's guests from police aggression does *not* mean someone does not feel it is not important to also protect ones guests from sexual predators and sexual aggression, only that they see police aggression as an additional very real danger.

I should also note that while I do not know Scott at all well enough to have any real insight into what his thought process is, my sense is very much that he was trying prevent what he saw as a very dangerous situation (the police).

I like to think we know better than to say that some forms of trauma are more legitimate than others. (After all rape was once considered not be be real trauma in the way that being in battle was. We know better now.)

And I imagine most of us know that sometimes people have encounters with the police that are highly traumatic. Sometimes the traumatized person is doing nothing illegal whatsoever. Sometimes they are, but being within the law does not necessarily mean one has nothing to fear from the police. We all know this (and I would hope also know not to engage in the victim blaming of whether someone deserved to be the recipient of police violence). I doubt anyone I know would say that PTSD in the wake of some of these encounters is not a sad reality.

The police increasingly cannot be assumed to embody lawful good. This becomes more and more true the less visible privilege one has. I look like who most police officers think they are defending, and I know I have that privilege. Not everyone does.

Summoning the police is huge, potentially traumatic and even the thought is seriously triggery for lots of people. With good reason. The above might remind us of why.

[Adding to the anonymous posting, because this does not feel like a safe thing to say right now.]

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's at all weird that you're being seen as the voice of reason, since I perceive you that way. Perhaps this is because I know you mostly from LJ?

Thank you for trying to defuse the situation and to keep people talking to one another.

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

ceo strongly suggested that I come over here and not just read your post, but read all the comments. I admit that when I first saw the sheer number of them, I was a bit overwhelmed.

And now I am very grateful for ceo for sending me over here, because now I've been able to read and by totally blown away. I'm amazed and impressed by the thoughtful exchanges, by the bravery in speaking up and asking for clarification, and by the respectful behavior and especially the respectful disagreement that I've seen in these threads. I'm learning a lot here. Most especially I'm learning from you, drwex; add my voice to the chorus that wants to give you a medal for your efforts here.


You all who know me can stop laughing now. Any minute. I'll wait.

I thought that I knew you and indeed have thought so for many years. I'm not surprised that you've been able to achieve what has been achieved so far. And I am not laughing.

oh hey a LJ post about this with anon posting

[(Anonymous)]

so, shadesong doesn't owe anybody anything, at all, but if there were court transcripts or court summaries or RO or whatever available, I could definitely hit some assholes over the head with them who refuse to accept that Judah actually admitted to anything in court etc. Maybe those are publicly available but I can't figure out where. again, not owed to anyone, but if it was something she was comfortable putting out there and able to, it might be cool?

...this all sucks.

[(Anonymous)]

I have, as they say, no dog in this fight, but as several of my LJ friends are involved, have been following the kerfuffle for several days. I appreciate points made by people on both "sides" of this discussion (I use the quote quite deliberately, as I actually think the framing of the argument is, as you say, what puts people in different spaces, and they really aren't nearly as far apart in their thinking as either of them thinks they are.). Anyway, as I am an attorney, I tend to look at things through a legal lens, and there are a couple of things that I find troubling from a legal standpoint:

1. A restraining order is designed to protect the survivor, yes. However, at least where I practice law, the survivor is told by the judge that he/she is not to deliberately place the subject of the restraining order in danger of violation -- in other words, yes, the subject of the RO should leave if he/she should happen to find him/herself in the same space as the survivor, but the survivor should not deliberately go places with the specific intent of running into the subject and making him/her leave. Which is what seemed to be about to happen here.

Yes, I recognize that Shira was concerned that Judah would pick up another potential victim at the party, but protecting people other than the particular survivor who has the RO is not what the RO is designed to do. Whether or not Judah was intending to run Shira down by going to the party, we don't know, but, as she was not there, he was not actually in violation of the RO at the time and would not have been had Shira stayed home (and, as she did stay home and not go to the party, Judah was at no time actually in violation of the RO, whatever his intentions may have been at the time).

This is not to say that the hosts of the party don't have their own legal issues here, they do.

2. If one is hosting a large party, and one possesses the knowledge that a party guest may pose a threat to others (ie: may assault, sexually or otherwise) another party guest, whether on the party premises or not, there is a potential legal liability to allowing said person on the property without proper warning to the other guests. Put more simply, the party hosts were aware that Judah had raped and later assaulted Shira (whether they believed it or not is irrelevant, as credible evidence existed). As such, they were put on notice that someone who was potentially violent was on their premises. If Judah had indeed picked up someone at their party and later assaulted that person in any way, the potential exists for a civil suit against the party hosts for failing to warn the guests of the danger that they knew Judah posed. There is some evidence that the party hosts had previously stated that rapists would be banned from their party, which, if true, makes a lawsuit of this nature even more likely, as such a statement gives potential victims a false sense of security.

While I understand the party hosts' distrust of the police (no one who has worked in criminal defense would fail to understand that), and understand their misreading of the text "police to follow," adding a rule to their list of party guidelines that the police are not to be called unless someone's life is in danger (a subject that is inherently subjective) puts party guests at yet another disadvantage, discouraging them from availing themselves of aid. Again, this could be a further legal liability. For example, a person pressing a lawsuit would say, "Not only did they not share their knowledge of this other party guest's propensity to violence, they prevented me from contacting help."

I would suggest that the party hosts need to think about this not only in terms of what hurts their guests, but what places them in legal danger.

Again, I have no dog in this fight, but there are legal issues at play that it appears no one is discussing.

[blimix.livejournal.com]

Let me add my voice to those thanking you for posting this. A (presumed) mutual friend/acquaintance linked me here. Possibly inspired by your post, I offered her a different framing (http://blimix.livejournal.com/112269.html) of the situation. (Not an especially conciliatory one, I'm afraid: I have all the reserved tact of Dr. Temperance Brennan. But it might still be of interest.)