Member-only story
Community safety is everyone’s concern, but…
Kink organizers should be held to a higher standard.
Between the attacks on consent and tolerance against it now coming from within (with the Paradox of Tolerance being entirely lost on these people) and a Christofascist regime without that won’t stop at regulating the bodies of women and trans people, defending and promoting safer communities and consent frameworks is a moral imperative.
So whose responsibility is it to protect you from harm in the community? Everyone’s, including yours. You are also responsible for protecting everyone else. What that looks like to you depends on your abilities, but doing nothing is not an option. If you see something, say something. We only have each other.
But if you’re a host/organizer, you need to ACTUALLY ACT on such a report of harm instead of deflecting responsibility with flowery rhetoric, or worse — doubling down. It doesn’t mean that you have to go straight to banning every accused person. Nobody expects you to be judge, jury, and executioner of a person’s reputation, especially if there’s flimsy evidence.
However, if a report is credible and you do nothing, I promise you that you will NOT want to live with the guilt if the person seeking intervention gets hurt again or the person accused hurts someone else, especially if it’s at your event. At the end of the day, citing “personal responsibility” is victim blaming. If you could have prevented it, you should have. Enabling missing stairs is reprehensible.
And if you are OK with it, you shouldn’t even be an organizer. Victim blaming comes from either callousness or projection, and neither trait is something anyone should want in any kind of leader. You should be shunned, as well.
