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On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof
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I propose an informal poll.
How many people here have reported sexual harassment to a mod? Were you asked for receipts? If so, once receipts were given, was any action taken, or was the behavior excused as lacking sufficient evidence to moderate/you being too sensitive?
I’ll start. Yes, yes, and nothing happened.
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@GF Yes, yes, I was blamed for not telling them sooner.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
@GF No. (as in, was subject to sexual harassment, but never reported it)
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@Pavel said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
@GF Yes, yes, I was blamed for not telling them sooner.
I should add to this that I was playing a male character, it was the early 2000s, and the harassment came from another person playing a male character. So I don’t know how much a part homophobia played in the admin’s thinking.
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@GF I’ve once been hit on aggressively, including SUDDEN NUDE PHOTOS, but I didn’t Feel harassed so I didn’t act on anything. People who get it a lot probably would have felt harassed, though.
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@GF Yes, no, and yes. But it was on Arx and the person I was reporting told on himself rather quickly when they contacted him about it. He was banned the same night I reported.
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I have gotten extremely lucky, in that I just ghost people when they start to get creepish in a way I am not comfortable with. I should maybe re-evaluate that going forward.
But in a weird twist, I reported myself on one occasion, because I done fucked up and accidently stepped over a line*. Which could be why nothing really happened to me beyond some stuff getting retconned and me feeling so bad about it that I didn’t RP for a couple months after the fact.
(* proof that affirmative consent in advance is important, because this was literally the first time that I didn’t ask about something that I didn’t even consider weird… between characters who had done much weirder things together. But also regularly asking for affirmative consent was evidence that this was me being a dumb thot, and not predatory.)
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@GF Y. Combination Y/N, sometimes I’ve reported it, sometimes I haven’t. In every instance, I was asked for logs. The range of reactions I’ve gotten when I have, and I will use specific examples only:
1 - “We’ve made a note for our records, and told the player they’re not allowed to contact you.”
2 - Absolute silence, zero.
3 - “Block them.”
4 - One place did kick that MFer out almost immediately, so good on them, but I had also been on that game longer and he had committed the High Crime of acting weird in public, so I think admin didn’t have to dig really deep for that one.This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s representative.
Weirdly, when I reflect on instances of harassment, and maybe this is just the price of being female and on the internet, it takes a second for things to register as harassment. Like, I am so dead to this shit. Annoyed. Fatigued. Put off by it. But also dead to it. I’m not even that fucking friendly. I’m not what you’d call a “soft target”. And yet, this has to be a FRACTION of the times I’ve been harassed on a game.
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I do find a lot less weird shit (not none) when I explicitly put “FTB” in my +nfo/+info/+finger or when I play a dude.
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@GF I’m so desensitized to the odd, awkward, or vaguely insinuating messages I receive from random people on games like these that I forget reporting harassment is a thing I can do. I know this doesn’t answer your question exactly but idk maybe offers some insight.
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@Artemis The poll is mostly about whether providing logs produces positive results, but I totally get what you and Pax are saying. I have to remind myself that it’s okay to notice and get mad at being harassed.
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@GF I haven’t reported anything of this type. Everyone has their own definition of what applies and rarely does one person know what another person’s definition is. So I’ve encountered it occasionally, but never to the point where I felt I needed staff intervention.
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Yes. No. “They’re new, they’ll be gone in two weeks.” I’m a male btw.
I noted it down on a lesson on what not to do. Which to be fair I’m doing with a lot of the examples I see here. It’s the weirdest thing, the common sense to actually take something like this seriously doesn’t seem to be very bloody common.
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@Hobbie said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
Yes. No. “They’re new, they’ll be gone in two weeks.” I’m a male btw.
I noted it down on a lesson on what not to do. Which to be fair I’m doing with a lot of the examples I see here. It’s the weirdest thing, the common sense to actually take something like this seriously doesn’t seem to be very bloody common.
There are four main reasons I’ve found why taking action on such things isn’t common:
- They just don’t believe you or care
- They believe you’re overreacting, or misreading a situation
- The person you’re accusing is popular/important/a key contributor,
or - They’ve done the same kind of thing and don’t want to think that they’re a sexual harasser too.
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Yes, yes. On most games, nothing happened. Sometimes I was turned into persona non grata if not overtly so. On the rare few it was dealt with immediately. (I genuinely don’t report red flags though, the one exception has been Arx, where I feel comfortable enough with staff either way that I don’t feel like I need to wait until it’s horrible to say anything, I can just ping with a “hey this happened and it felt weird, i don’t expect action or even a report back, just wanted you to know”. For a long time it was the only game I felt okay doing that on. Now I don’t play on any game that I don’t.)
Hell, I’ve had the yes/yes/nothing was done in RL when reporting both domestic violence and stalking to the police in the 90s. So i’m not terribly surprised to see similar behavior in folks who grew up in that era, and am pleased at some of the changes that you do see.
I can’t think of a single game I played in the 90s/00s that was safe to report any kind of issues to staff, especially if it involved “active” or “popular” players. I’ve even been disbelieved by friends (but not necessarily gotten blowback). I believe that was a pretty much universal experience during that era. 10s-current seem to be a much more mixed bag.
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@GF said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
@Artemis The poll is mostly about whether providing logs produces positive results, but I totally get what you and Pax are saying. I have to remind myself that it’s okay to notice and get mad at being harassed.
What do you mean by “positive results”? The range on that is wide, as is what constitutes being harassed. Whether you were satisfied by the resulting action is an altogether different story than whether the staffer took action or whether there were positive results.
The topic is such a delicate clusterfuck.
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I agree with @Polk that most staffers require logs in a weird form of jurisprudence, which ironically makes the apathy towards sexual victimisation all too realistic.
But I’d wager that most (not all, obviously) people posting here who ask for logs aren’t asking for proof so much as they are asking for context. We aren’t on the game in question, we aren’t privy to those conversations, and we don’t know who they’re talking about. So if someone comes asking for solace or advice or whatever it is, we want context.
I’m not saying it’s right to ask for logs, just that it’s understandable and from a different perspective than the one people most attribute.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
My desired approach when dealing with this problem is that logs are helpful but optional, because as proof it’s unreliable since text on a page is so hilariously easy to alter. But, true or not, having them for reference answers one burning question straight away when running an investigation.
“What am I looking for?”
It’s not impossible, and it’s not even hard to investigate a potential harassment case without them, but context is for kings. Logs of interaction provide a pattern to look for, then when you’re checking behaviour, you cross-reference it against what you have. If it matches, you can rule out #1 and #2 in @Pavel’s list of reasons pretty much immediately.
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@Hobbie Quite agree.
And from my perspective, being a middle-aged(ish) man, some interactions won’t register to me as sexually harassing when it’s aimed at anyone who isn’t a middle-aged man. Not because I can’t tell good from bad or that I don’t understand harassment, but because I don’t have the relevant life experience to understand that X thing is harassing from this person’s perspective.
So when one is actively investigating, logs are less important than understanding what the person did, and you can get that just by asking the reporter.
And all of this is only appropriate for a “do I get this person off my game” investigation, not part of any attempt to mediate the problem or downplay things.
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The place that didn’t ask for logs dealt with the issue immediately; I submitted my complaint, and things were handled all behind closed doors and then the guy was gone. This place has established for me that I am allowed to require safety of a game that I play on, so I no longer play on games that I’m not safe on.
Historically, I have submitted complaints relating to sexual harassment (of varying degrees), been asked for receipts, provided them, and was then raked across the coals in some fashion as a result. This is the default reaction. Usually I was just “too sensitive” and since the text COULD be interpreted another way…but at least one time I was a “known TS hound” so it wasn’t a problem that somebody was pestering me for TS.
I have had false (non-sexual) complaints made about me in very public fashion, and they were done alongside false sexually-related complaints made about someone else. This person was not believed in either set of complaints, due to their own behavior.
I have also had false (non-sexual) complaints made about me that stuck for a long time. It sucked. It sucked a whole lot. I would still rather see the community err on the side of believing victims, even knowing that the Spiders of the world (and their disciples) are out there. As much as it sucked, I was not harmed by exclusion.
