On comrades, creeps, and doing my community safety homework

[bloodygranuaile]

 In October, the DADS team held a workshop with Shawna Potter, author of Making Spaces Safer: A Guide to Giving Harassment the Boot Wherever You Work, Play, and Gather, that was a follow-up to the excellent bystander intervention training we did with Calling All Crows the month before. We got some actionable ideas from it (the first and easiest being to repurpose Prommunism's "Be a Comrade, Not a Creep" posters and start putting them up at more stuff) and I also miiiight have bought both the full-length book and the cute little pocket guide version. Since we are trying to put together an internal priority proposal on anti-harassment and inclusivity for next year, I figured this would be a good thing to read over Thanksgiving break.

 

After a very slow start in which I attempted to read it while sick and drinking mint tea in front of a fire, and therefore succeeded only in taking multiple very cozy naps instead, I did read the entire book (it's not very long) over the Thanksgiving break. A lot of it was at least somewhat familiar territory for me, as I am not especially new to the harassment discourse at large, so I found the stats about violence and harassment, the arguments for why having anti-harassment policies is important, and other theory/background/justification stuff to be pretty good summaries of material that I, personally, didn't really need a retread of, but which would probably be great for people who haven't spent a lot of time on the fourth-wave feminist internet. What really made this book super valuable, in my opinion, was the concrete suggestions for taking action--sample anti-harassment policies; breakdowns of how to talk about creating and enforcing anti-harassment policies with staff, audiences, bystanders, guests, and other parties; walk-throughs of restorative justice plans; posters; checklists; scripts; the lot. There are a lot of short case studies of stories shared by folks in the punk and activist scenes in Baltimore, where Potter is based, and sometimes in other places. While the book is very much grounded in Potter's main milieu of the music scene, the policies are pretty easily adaptable to any kind of scene where you get a whole bunch of people in one place.

 

I definitely feel more prepared to help draft this proposal, and I expect everyone in BDSA to vote for it, yes?