Update Oct 21: I echo the sentiments Angela expressed here!
The WordPress Incident Response Team is a close-knit group, and I have difficulty believing they would make such a change without public discussion. To my alarm, team members also seem to be voluntarily resigning. And never before, were changes (or anything about Code of Conduct, really) published on /News. – Angela Jin “On Community Code of Conducts“
There was a WordPress Code of Conduct rule change (archive link) that made me raise an eyebrow this morning and I wanted to share some broad thoughts on it. My perspective is formed not only as a former member of the global WordPress Incident Response Team, but also as a survivor of sexual violence (which is an alarmingly common experience for women).
Despite how folks may feel interacting within the greater WordPress community, the WordPress IRT always had a very collaborative internal culture. Over the couple years I was involved, we had a handful of healthy, productive internal debates about big-picture challenges like:
- Requirements for entry to the team & best way to train them
- When/what to escalate – and to whom
- Anonymizing case details in files
- What to do when a party publicizes an IRT report
- If/when we should publish anything more specific than our end-of-year summaries
- Code of Conduct applicability in online spaces
- How to respond when our course of action is ignored by the reported party
- How to respond when our request for no-contact is ignored
- What makes one a member of the WordPress community
Although the IRT has been mocked as not “real” work by some and folks might expect more from us when it comes to things like preemptive intervention and deescalation (which I might agree with), we were – and they still are – doing important work. Some of these debates will surely be ongoing within the team and I really hope that collaborative environment remains despite the abnormally high turnover this team is experiencing.
Power Dynamics
Rarely are disputes between two parties on even playing field. By that I mean that very often one party holds power or authority above the other. This could be true power – in the case of someone being in a position of authority directly over another (Meetup/WordCamp organizer, speaker, boss), “soft” power – in the case of someone having more social clout, followers, reach, or a combination of both types of power. These forms of power, of course, negatively impact those in gender and racial minorities, and in the Global South at a disproportionate rate.
In every reported incident, it’s important to recognize any imbalance of power, as it may inform the actions of the parties or the degree of trust they have in the process.
Why might someone publicize their abuse?
As an aside, I naively thought society had already reckoned with this question, and learned from the #MeToo movement, but it must not have had the impact I hoped it had, or our collective memory might just be shit I guess.
History has proven time and again that powerful people are often believed over people that aren’t in power, very often women – look no further than Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nassar, Jimmy Savile, Johnny Depp. There’s a very common (and misogynist) misconception that women, broadly, are constantly seeking “attention” and will go to extreme measures to get it – whether that attention is positive or negative. However those who have been victimized are often deeply negatively harmed by the attention that comes with being a survivor of abuse.
These factors lead to a silencing effect, where victims feel that the risks of sharing about their abuse outweigh the benefits of sharing it. (Precisely why this is the first time I’ve publicly mentioned that I’ve been victimized and precisely why I won’t share any further details about it.)
A way that many victims reclaim their power and their voice is to publicize their abuse, as we saw with the #MeToo movement. Although that movement fell short of enacting any meaningful societal/structural changes, publicizing stories of abuse does a few things:
- Ensures it isn’t “swept under the rug” by authority figures
- Allows victims to have some relief of the burden of holding it in
- Helps victims find each other
- Encourages others to share their similar stories
- It’s in the general public’s interest
For more in-depth exploration:
- Victim/Suspect
- Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture–And What We Can Do about It
by Kate Harding)
While these may seem like extreme cases, it’s important to remember that these abuses happened over a period of time, not in a single day. Each and every violation that one of these women brought to an authority figure over long stretches of time was hand waved away, until the problem and pattern became too big to ignore.
Who are we protecting and why?
When it comes to protecting community members and ensuring a collaborative and healthy community, the IRT prefers to work on cases as privately as possible. Public pressure adds an uncomfortable dynamic to the already time-consuming and emotionally taxing work of this largely volunteer-based team.
However, I can personally understand why someone would want to publicize their (allegations of) abuse. My primary motivation for being cautious whenever discussing possible repercussions for publicizing IRT reports/findings was to avoid disincentivizing the sharing of reports. In my opinion, if someone wouldn’t otherwise report to the IRT unless they also make it public, so be it. (And probably others remaining in the team would agree with this.)
This extends to my attitude towards the sharing of private conversations. Generally, in most circumstances this is in bad taste. People shouldn’t announce that someone is quitting their (very public) job before that person gets to announce it, for example. However I could imagine a sweeping rule like this harming people within WordPress.
Trust
Regardless of how positively I feel about the IRT, I could understand if folks are questioning what authority this team even has and if they always make the right decision, or be concerned about turnover/transparency about the turnover – and these are valid things to question! There will certainly be unforseen cases where, although it might be an inconvenience to the IRT, it’s broadly helpful for the public good to shed light on a private conversation. Or cases where one feels unsafe approaching the IRT (whether warranted or not).
I worry that this new rule could enable abuse to happen in private at a time when the public trust of the IRT could potentially be in flux due to turnover or other factors.
Since I’ve left the team, I have no knowledge of how widely this new change was debated/discussed – or if there was some sort of cross-collab with the Marketing team on this, as this announcement didn’t come from the IRT itself. But I wanted to publicly encourage caution with this new rule.
It is good and healthy to question structural makeups within communities and I hope the spirit of debate continues within the IRT and ultimately spreads to the WordPress community more broadly.
PS: The very fact that I had a friend send me this with concerns of overreach might also indicate that this rule/announcement itself could erode trust in the IRT, and I think that’s worth considering as well.
PPS: I wonder how this would intersect with whistleblower/labor laws…
One thought on “Code of Conduct & Confidentiality”
Comments are closed.