advocates and mediators
So there are at least two important roles that need to be filled when an accusation of a serious wrongdoing comes out.
Firstly, you need people who are capable both of being impartial and of seeming impartial, in order to create confidence that they’re looking into the issue with an absolute commitment to the truth. You need them to be able to avoid getting overwhelmed by the horrifying details of horrifying cases, to listen and pay attention and reason and notice discrepancies. This role is not incompatible with compassion and empathy for people who’ve been through awful things - in fact, it absolutely requires it, because you need to be able to create the conditions under which they feel comfortable sharing complicated stories with you. But it’s incompatible with a lot of ways that many people need compassion and empathy actually demonstrated.
So you also need people who will just see someone who needs it and commit themselves to being the strongest possible advocate for that person. This is formalized in our actual legal system, obviously, but it’s needed in communities too. This is what ‘I believe survivors’ is all about, of course - it’s not a claim that cases should be decided in favor of the person who first files a report, it’s saying ‘I’m taking the role where, if you tell me something awful happened to you, I will be your advocate’. This doesn’t require believing everything someone says, and can still involve a lot of investigation and fact-seeking, but it’s centered on being someone who they don’t regret telling their story.
A community that is all advocates is going to have problems. Being an advocate doesn’t have to make it impossible to figure out the truth, and it’s completely possible to figure out the truth from a neutral position and then become an advocate, but I think it does substantially complicate truth-seeking. And advocates for different people are likely to end up yelling at each other, and this only gets resolved by who has more energy for yelling. And there’s no one to look to for a clear, honest picture of the situation.
But a community that is all mediators is also going to have a lot of problems. I’m seeing a bunch of them right now. People who were experiencing awful abuse confided, tentatively, in others. They said ‘I think he’s mistreating me’. They met people who had seen the failure modes of all-advocate communities, and thought it was just morally right to be a mediator. Those people said ‘hmm, I can really see both sides of this’ or ‘why does it feel like that to you?’. What they needed to hear was ‘well, fuck. do you have a place to go? what can I do to help you get out?’
I think the failure modes of all-advocates situations tend to be really visible. You get giant yelling matches where no one external to the situation can even guess what’s really going on, and where no one ever changes their mind. The failure modes of a community full of mediators are much quieter. They’re people - people in need - saying, quietly, ‘this doesn’t seem right’, and hearing ‘I really see both of your perspectives here’ and not saying anything again.
This formulation conflates two things that are very importantly different. In particular, while it’s always kind of rude to quibble with someone’s terminology while he’s trying to make a substantive point, the use of “advocate” here is really doing a lot to muddy the waters.
If someone comes out and says I’m hurting, I’m in a bad situation, something is very wrong –
– then, yes, you definitely want to have some people around whose immediate response to that is what can we do to help? You want people saying the fact that you’re hurting means that there is a real and serious problem, and we are going to take care of you. You want people saying I see your pain, it’s real, it’s valid, you matter. (And I say this last thing as someone who firmly believes that validation is a chump’s game and that emotional self-sufficiency is critical, but Christ, in-the-middle-of-a-fucking-trauma-episode is not the time to start pushing someone down hard roads towards his best self.) A person in pain may well need to hear those things. A person in pain may well need those offers of care.
And, indeed, you really do not want every single person to respond with are you sure you’re being fair? or what have you done to fix the problem on your end? or let’s pick this situation apart. As you say, that tends to shut down the people who are hurting, which gets you nothing except more hurting.
And if that’s what you mean by “advocate,” then sure, bring on the advocates.
But.
If someone comes out and says this person hurt me, he’s a bad guy, something needs to be done –
– then you really do not want to have a cadre of people around who think it’s their job to say yes, we agree with you automatically because you are in pain, we will take up the cause of Doing Something About the Bad Guy.
The obvious reason is, well, “this just tells unscrupulous people that they can automatically start witch hunts against their enemies by shedding crocodile tears.” The somewhat-less-obvious-but-much-more-important reason is “often, people are in genuine pain, but they assign blame for it in a way that is not accurate or fair.” It’s very natural to want there to be a Bad Guy, especially if someone has in fact been causing you pain somehow. It’s common to feel an inchoate yearning for closure-via-moral-victory. None of which means that there is actually someone who deserves punishment or censure. And if you demand that the deck start stacked when it comes to figuring out whether you actually have a Bad Guy, well, you’ll get the results that you should expect from playing with a stacked deck.
Most of the useful things that you can do for someone in need do not involve “advocacy” in any normal sense of the term. And there should be a much, much higher threshold of confidence required for “I will be an advocate against someone” than for “I will take care of someone in need.”
Maybe I’m reading too much into this. Maybe I’m jumping at rhetorical phantoms that aren’t really there. But this seems worth saying, in case anyone else is seeing the same things that I am.
I realize that this is not the most opportune time to be making this argument.
I’m not even slightly involved – I don’t know any of the relevant people, even as an internet presence – but I am in fact aware that the OP was inspired by a recent incident, and that “maybe we should be very worried about being too quick to start witch hunts” is…not the thought at the top of anyone’s mind right now.
But, well…
When unwise overbroad norms get embedded in the culture or the policy mechanism, it’s likely to happen precisely at moments like this, when it seems so clear that something must be done. The crises pass, the norms remain. And there’s a lot of long-term harm to be done in shading the line between “we should be solicitous of people who are hurting” and “[certain] people should be encouraged to believe accusations without evaluating them.”