After reflections

Writing publicly about something private

Hello. A month or so ago, I put out a post on my experience with workplace sexual harassment, detailing the resulting investigation and my takeaways. You may want to read the TL;DR on that post before this one, or what I write below won’t make much sense. Of course, you can also just be a little confused the whole time. Sometimes that’s fun.

Anyways, due to my personality trait of being “very bad at not reading the internet,” I think I saw most of the public online response. There was a much more involved and engaged reaction than I anticipated, both on and offline. I have some reflections. This post is not a careful, well-edited follow up. It is a personal, broad, conversational, tender collection of thoughts, which I wrote three hours into a plane ride after watching The Running Man for the second time and running out of things to do.

The separation of human and story

When you put out a story for general consumption, that story will be discussed with and without you. This makes complete sense, but it is painful.

There is no such thing as an airtight case

When I first experienced sexual harassment, I did not think to myself, “I believe that this occurrence was workplace harassment under the UK legal definition and I will now pursue recourse.” There wasn’t even a clear point when I “experienced” it.

Real experiences are not cases. When I first learned about the document, I just felt ashamed that I was someone who had experienced a rape that could be written in a document. I was ashamed that I’d ever been raped. I was embarrassed that I hadn’t immediately flown home to Canada after it happened, so that nothing else could happen to me. So I could be with my dad and sister and partner. But I had the police investigation. And I was too scared to get on a plane. And I felt frozen.

When it happened, I was living in a shared house in Oxford with two roommates who also worked from CEA’s Oxford office. Part of why the document’s author knew so much was that he’d come from London temporarily and was staying in our attic, working from the office during my medical leave and subsequent return to work. I didn’t include this in the original post because the facts were already convoluted enough and the preamble doesn’t matter. But apparently, it does to some people. A very small minority seemed to develop a fictitious image of me running around the office, writing out my rape on any whiteboard I could find, which a colleague rightly complained about and I cried harassment. Every time I saw this, I can’t describe how much it hurt. I had to fight the urge to write out a three-year explanation of everything that had exactly happened leading up to the harassment. But I can’t, because it is not appropriate to do so, and more importantly, I shouldn’t have to. The precursor details are mostly smoke and mirrors. I believe the document was retaliatory, but whenever I discuss intention with EAs online, I get annihilated. So I don’t try, and thus, I don’t provide much of the context for why I believe this.

Look, life is complicated and abuse is rarely straightforward. I’ve been reading about abuse dynamics for a long time, including both ends of the spectrum: when claims of abuse are ignored and when claims of abuse are misplaced or weaponized. One thing this has helped me understand is that abusers are just people. Often they are also nice and funny and smart, and sometimes very kind, and you can feel very attached to them. People who commit abuse are not in a secret, monstrous category, such that surely your friend couldn’t do it. Your colleague couldn’t do it. Alas, the world isn’t a binary creation of “abusers” and “not abusers.” This isn’t something I can pedantically disclaim every time I discuss abuse. At a point, people just have to have better models.

But many do not have models of abuse; and so, when it’s done by someone they know, they unintentionally minimise it. This makes it incredibly difficult to find help. The burden of proof goes way up. And I used to take that quite literally. I believed that with diligence, careful reasoning, immense energy, extreme emotional regulation, and work, that burden could be met.

It never is. Even in the rare instances where your experience is legitimately litigated, the litigation doesn’t ever end. There is no universally airtight case, no point where everyone agrees that something bad happened to you. Not for any victims. Not for even the most disgusting, unspeakable, unimaginable crimes. There are people who justify rape, murder, mass murder, and so on. At a point, there are simply fundamental disagreements about morality that rely on assumptions that cannot be proven or disproven in a blog post, a workplace investigation, a court case, or a calm conversation. I thought I had an airtight case, and then some people started arguing the UK definition of sexual harassment with me. There’s nothing I can do at that point.

When I first realised this, I felt immensely sad and scared and angry. It starts to feel like nothing is in your control. I spent a lot of time blaming myself for instances of abuse, largely because it actually made me feel safer. I can control me, and so if it’s my fault, I just have to change and then nothing will happen to me again. The idea that you can just be targeted and there’s nothing you can do about it sounds much worse, at least at first. But if you sit with it long enough, the idea settles. It just means that you can be abused and there is no final verdict on “what happened.” What led to it.

It’s finding a way to settle on a word or a story of what happened to you that you believe. Not changing the facts, but the story. Was it okay, not okay, why did it happen? Does it all go back to your childhood? Does it go back to three weeks ago? An hour before? These are subjective questions that you get to answer, for yourself. And you can find people who make you feel safe and seen and who hear your answer in their bones. You can do that.

The perfect victim

Unfortunately, people still want perfect victims. We turn on victims very easily. But also, sexual violence is very common. The world contains a lot of victims and very few perfect people.

We say “human interaction is complex,” but we don’t apply this logic to victims. We want perpetrators to be given grace, but victims must both-sides their own abuse. They must wait. Maintain confidentiality, relinquish control. They must be measured. They cannot be sharp or mean. They cannot do anything that could in any capacity be construed as vindictive or punitive. They cannot get a single fact wrong.

I spent literal months working on my post. I combed through documents and Slack screenshots. I started documenting timelines early on because that’s what my ISVA¹ told me to do for my criminal case, and I thought I might as well do it for my workplace investigation too. And because one of my coping mechanisms is the act of organising, I was happy to spend a lot of time making folders and documents and google sheets. And she was right, because you have to answer a lot of questions, repeatedly: “When did you first learn about the document? When did you hear more details? Did you talk to anyone about it? If so, when? You were moved to a different office, when? You didn’t report right away, why? You requested access to the document, when? You requested [y] information, when? You received a response, when?” And so on.

This is not really how memory works. Most of us don’t know specific and small details about any particular thing that happens, neatly attached to a mental date, in completion and reliably, while under pressure. You have to be a good speaker. You have to be a good writer. You have to be smart. You have to be factual. You can’t speculate. You can’t give too much detail and you can’t give too little. You have to be so perfect. It’s impossible.

My case couldn’t convince everyone and who even does two independent workplace investigations? It took an insane amount of time and energy, and it hurt. I believe I did it because of some combination of my personality and the particular point I was at in my life, and both of those things are just neutral. There’s no reason a victim should need that particular personality or to be at that particular point to get some kind of justice. It’s sad. I would do it over again every single time, if for no other reason than to be able to make this point “credibly”. I think it’s a very important point.

I regretted using the word coward

Many people, maybe most, still equate “harasser” with “evil person.” And I think they may also equate “coward” with something similarly categorical and damning. I wish I’d used something else, because I don’t personally use coward to mean anything close to that.

I just think it’s very easy not to be brave. When it comes to interpersonal dynamics, it is very easy to get uncomfortable and retreat. Find the exit route. “Yikes, this is complicated, let’s just agree to disagree.” “Yikes, you’re using the word rape a lot and that makes me blush, but it’s not supposed to make me blush, so now I’m kind of in a shame feedback loop. Maybe this conversation will end soon. Though, I obviously really hope you’re okay. But genuinely, please, when will this conversation end? No I don’t have any follow up questions, thank you.” I think cowardice is like that. Is it bad? In the sense that I don’t think it’s good, yes. But I don’t think it’s evil.

You heard it here first: I kind of think humans are complex. People are vast, but some have issues and personalities that cause them to be repeatedly abusive towards others. Others have issues and personalities that cause them to repeatedly shy away from facing potential abuse head on. For example, maybe they grew up in a repressed environment and never had to talk about something like this before. Maybe they have no HR experience and are really kind and earnest, but it turns out their organization is way more of a disaster than the recruiting pitch admitted and they’re behind on all their OKRs.

And quite frankly, you can have many positive traits and be sexist. Sexist doesn’t mean evil. It means prejudiced or biased against women in some particular way (or any gender, but we’ll say women for our purposes). And prejudiced doesn’t have to mean “thinks women are worse across the board.” It could be much more subtle. It’s probably something like “assumes women are less of a legal risk and acts accordingly,” or “subconsciously minimises the experiences that women are most likely to have, such as sexual assault or harassment, relative to their actual reported severity, partly because women’s self-reported levels of distress are consistently discounted.” These prejudices don’t happen because people are evil. It’s because society has sexism baked into it and you absorb it over a lifetime and it’s hard to unlearn.

I am certain I’ve been sexist before. I think I used to systematically hold my women friends to a higher standard with respect to emotional intelligence. I was more forgiving of men when it came to interpersonal qualms. It took a long time to inspect that, reflect, and undo. Literally years.

Responsibility and mouldy bread

One thing that really bothers me about how severely mishandled my case was: I’m a product of the EA community-building strategy. In my undergrad, I was targeted with community building efforts and then encouraged to start a university group, which I did, and I’ve been in the community ever since. I was 19. I was 23 when I moved to Oxford, all by myself, where I didn’t have any family, to work out of CEA’s Oxford office. It was encouraged. It actually came with a salary bonus.

I am an adult with agency, same as I was at 19 and 23. I understand that. But I don’t think it’s so simple. If you explicitly try to community build with young adults, if you encourage people to relocate, and then you fail in your basic legal obligation to protect them, that points at a bigger problem.

CEA, and perhaps EA more broadly, is very happy to log impact points. Bobby went to an EAGx and did CEA’s bootcamp, and then two years later he’s working at METR, and that’s a win for CEA. That’s a causation and it goes in the funding application. But I participated in university group building and then joined CEA’s Events Team and then experienced sexual harassment at CEA which was mishandled, leading eventually to a settlement agreement and my feeling like I absolutely had to quit. Does CEA claim that trajectory too, in the same way?

EA is not CEA, and CEA is not EA. This is true of any organisation or individual within the ecosystem. But bread is not mould and mould is not bread, and yet bread can be mouldy. We might say “just eat around the mould bits,” but we wouldn’t say the bread is perfectly good. We wouldn’t say the mould is completely separate, completely unentangled. Lots of conflicting things are true. I dearly respect my former colleagues and much of the work, and the organisation failed, and CEA’s only public comment on that failure was confusing and bad, and thus I don’t respect the organisation. The whole thing is just sad.

Support

I received so much support after the post and I am forever grateful. But I have to stress to victims that this was not my experience prior to posting. If you’re a victim and you’re feeling profoundly let down, there’s nothing wrong with you. I felt so alone for more than a year. Sometimes, I worry that victims will see the outpouring of online support and think, “I’m not getting anything close to this. I guess what happened to me isn’t that bad. Or maybe I just suck.” Please remember: it wasn’t like that for so long. It rarely is.

Resilience and doing better

Two months or so after I was raped, I was still pretty shell shocked. I wasn’t doing much of anything. I was lying in bed and watching a lot of TV. Everything made me exhausted: laundry, walking, sending a text. I napped a lot. My partner found a UK therapist online who specialised in sexual violence. She emailed the therapist, who called me.

“Hi, your partner told me what happened. You can hang up if you want, but honestly, I’m just calling to check if you’re okay.”

We talked for thirty minutes. She’s been my therapist ever since. She is the very best therapist I have ever had. She is funny and sharp and incredibly careful, and she doesn’t just want me to talk endlessly. She relies on real treatment plans. And she cares.

We once talked about resilience. She explained that the research shows resilience isn’t so strongly correlated with our own personalities. The number one predictor of recovery trajectory is actually quality of social support. Do you have people you can talk to? Do they respond well? Do you have a stable home environment? How is your working environment? Are you able to engage in regular socialising? Do you generally feel safe with the people around you?

I got a few worried messages after the post, which I sincerely appreciate. I am doing much better these days, truly. But it’s because of the people around me. I’m very lucky. And it hurts, because a lot of people don’t get that.

Social support is much more than just, “are people nice to you?” The most important thing that helped me recover was being able to talk to people who had meaningful and deeply intelligent understandings of gender dynamics, abuse, rape, and trauma. My therapist, my partner, and a few dear friends. When I spoke, they understood the very depths of what I was saying. I don’t think sexual violence is simple. My rape felt like a nuclear bomb going off, and there were so many aftershocks, and I had to fight to re-order my mind in the fallout. But “fighting” just meant painstakingly and slowly thinking and reflecting for months and months until I had somewhat rebuilt a sense of grounding, self, and understanding that protected me against rape culture and didn’t leave me completely frozen. It was beyond cognitively demanding. I offloaded a lot of it to the people around me. They protected me fiercely. And others, I tried to keep updated. Or get help from, for other things. But, some people weren’t equipped for that. And that would be completely fine; except that, they should have been. Either because it was their job, or because they kept trying to get involved. Some took advantage of how absolutely vulnerable I was. Some do not stay away from vulnerable people, even when they really should. Some seek them out.

This is why I want to encourage people to step up so badly. Especially if it’s their literal job. We have to take care of each other. I don’t know how else victims can heal. When I was still at CEA, my therapist recommended delaying any particular trauma processing treatment because my environment was too triggering. Therapy isn’t a magical wand. If you’re in a toxic environment, what is your therapist supposed to do?

“I have to see my sexual harasser every day and it keeps making me think of what they did, and it also makes me think of my rape, and I just feel nauseous all the time.”

“Yeah, that’s obviously bad.”

What else is there to say? There are ways to cope better or worse, but at the end of the day you have to leave. And victims can’t always. It makes me so sad. My therapist has many clients who can’t get out.

I am much better now, because I had the resources to get better.

Do I have closure now?

This question has been posed to me many times since the post. I don’t think there is a point where you feel definitive finality. I feel a lot of things, and they change all the time.

But the post was incredibly important for me and my ability to emotionally process what had happened. For approximately two years, I felt a profound and chronic loss of agency. I wanted to be heard in a lot of ways that I was not, and it hurts more than I can ever truly explain. But it’s okay now. In part, because I at least got to decide how I felt and what I thought about it. And I believe I did so carefully and thoughtfully, grounded in real thinking. But eventually, you do reach subjective claims and you have to give yourself permission to make them.

I wanted to write something that was mine. Not litigated, reviewed, and debated. Just mine, from my own mind and no one else’s. I wrote it and then my partner read it and then we cried and I posted it. That’s what I wanted.

1. Independent Sexual Violence Advisor