EA - Share the burden by 2ndRichter

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Share the burden, published by 2ndRichter on March 11, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.My argument: let’s distribute the burden of correcting and preventing sexual misconduct through collective effort, not letting the burdens and costs fall overwhelmingly on those who have experienced it.CW: sexual assault/harassmentI work at CEA but write this in an individual capacity. Views expressed here are my own, not CEA's.I encourage you to reach out to me individually on Twitter (@emmalrichter) if you want to discuss what I raise in this post. I’d love to engage with the variety of potential responses to what I’ve written and would love to know why you upvote or downvote it.Intro and ContextSome of you already know that I’m a survivor. I was sexually assaulted, harassed, or abused in independent situations at the ages of 16, 17, 18, and 20. I am intentionally open and vocal about what I’ve gone through, including a PTSD diagnosis a few years ago.Recent events in the EA community have reminded me that the mistreatment of people through sexual or romantic means occurs here (as it does everywhere). Last week at EAG, I received a Swapcard message that proposed a non-platonic interaction under the guise of professional interaction. I went to an afterparty where someone I had just met—literally introduced to me moments before—put their hand on the small of my back and grabbed and held onto my arm multiple times. These might seem like minor annoyances, but I have heard and experienced that these kinds of small moments happen often to women in EA. These kinds of experiences undermine my own feelings of comfort and value in the community.This might be anecdata, as some people say, and I know obtaining robust data on these issues has its own challenges. Nonetheless, my experience and those of other women in EA indicate that there’s enough of a problem to consider doing more.I’m writing this post for a few reasons:I want to draw attention to the suffering of women here in the community.I want to convey the costs placed on survivors seeking justice and trying to prevent further harm to others.I want to share just how taxing it can be for survivors to work on these problems on their own, both due to the inherent pain of reliving experiences and the arduousness of most justice processes.Above all, I want to make this request of our community: let’s distribute the burden of correcting and preventing sexual misconduct as fairly as we can, not letting the burdens and costs fall overwhelmingly on those who have experienced it. They have suffered so much already—they have suffered enough. I hope we can be as agentic and proactive in this domain as we strive to be in other areas of study and work.Here are sub-arguments that I’ll explore below:Before placing the burden of explanation on the survivor, we can employ other methods to learn about this constellation of social issues. We can listen to survivors more effectively and incorporate the feedback of those who want to share while also finding other resources to chart paths forward.Good intentions can still lead to negative outcomes. This can apply to both bystanders who refrain from engaging with the subject out of the intention of not making things worse and might also apply to those who perpetrate harmful behaviors (as I discuss in my own experience further down).Why write about the meta-level attitude and approach when I could have written something proposing object-level solutions?Because how we approach finding object-level solutions will affect the quality of those solutions—particularly for those who are most affected by these problems. I don’t feel informed enough to propose institutional reforms or particular policies (though I intend to reflect on these questions and research them). I do feel informed enough t...