Reporting Harassment at a Convention…

Reblogged from Whatever.

If you choose to report, I hope this writing is useful to you. If you’re new to the genre, please be assured that sexual harassment is NOT acceptable business-as-usual. I have had numerous editors tell me that reporting harassment will NOT get you blacklisted, that they WANT the bad apples reported and dealt with, and that this is very important to them, because this kind of thing is bad for everyone and is not okay. The thing is, though, that I’m fifty-two years old, familiar with the field and the world of conventions, moderately well known to many professionals in the field, and relatively well-liked. I’ve got a lot of social credit. And yet even I was nervous and a little in shock when faced with deciding whether or not to report what happened. Even I was thinking, “Oh, God, do I have to? What if this gets really ugly?”

But every time I got that scared feeling in my guts and the sensation of having a target between my shoulder blades, I thought, “How much worse would this be if I were inexperienced, if I were new to the field, if I were a lot younger?” A thousand times worse. So I took a deep breath and squared my shoulders and said, “Hell, yes, use my name.” And while it’s scary to write this now, and while various people are worried that parts of the Internet may fall on my head, I’m going to share the knowledge — because I’m a geek, and that’s what we do.

Read the entire article at Whatever… where the author goes on to give tips on reporting

John Scalzi is all kinds of awesome, and I’m thrilled to see he posted this story on his popular blog. I was first alerted to the awesomeness of Scalzi when he wrote “A Fan Letter to Certain Conservative Politicians” from the POV of a rapist. Pure brilliance. If you haven’t read it, read it now. Seriously.

Next time I heard something from Scalzi was when he responded to the SFF sexism scandal a few weeks back, and I was impressed yet again. He stepped up and took full responsibility as the president of  SFWA. Since my experience with most people have them running away from any sort of accountability and responsibility, even when it’s clearly theirs, Scalzi’s integrity stood out in his response to the offending article. Whether or not it’s related to this issue, his tenure as president has come to an end, and he still shows that same level of integrity so rarely seen in people.