This isn’t precisely goth, but it’s an important topic in any community.<\/p>\n
Fan conventions sometimes have problems with sexual harassment. Unfortunately all too often in these situations, complaints are overlooked or dismissed; sometimes the convention doesn’t have a complaint procedure in place at all. The targets of harassment are often told that it’s “their fault,” especially if they’re dressed in a costume that could be construed as provocative. Sometimes they’re so upset that they just want to forget it ever happened. This is the kind of thing that predators count on.<\/p>\n
Author Elise Matthesen was recently “creeped upon” at SF convention WisCon by an influential editor (she’s circumspect about identifying him but someone with knowledge of the incident names him as James Frenkel<\/a> and I’m more than happy to boost the signal). She decided to not<\/em> let it slide and reported it to both the con management and his employer. She writes about her experience here<\/a> and includes a guide to reporting harassment for others who might find themselves in a similar situation.<\/p>\n She notes specifically that she might have been much more reluctant to make a formal complaint if she’d been younger and less sure of her professional footing, fearing that an editor might be able to make things difficult for a new writer. She also learned that hers was not the first complaint about Frenkel, but it was the first formal<\/em> one, and that made an enormous difference. The whole piece is worth a read, as are the comments.<\/p>\n Harassment is never<\/em> the fault of the harassed, and reporting it is important for shutting it down. For other resources, see Cosplay is NOT Consent<\/a> (Facebook<\/a>), the Con Anti-Harassment Project<\/a>, and Jim C. Hines’ resource list<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This isn’t precisely goth, but it’s an important topic in any community. Fan conventions sometimes have problems with sexual harassment. Unfortunately all too often in these situations, complaints are overlooked or dismissed; sometimes the convention doesn’t have a complaint procedure in place at all. The targets of harassment are often told that it’s “their fault,” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19067"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19067\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19114,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19067\/revisions\/19114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}