The following piece is part of a series of articles and essays on sexual assault and harassment in WashU’s social justice and activist community. This piece contains discussion of sexual violence.
Harassing while woke
In a movement dedicated to resistance, “no” is generally not a well-received word. Activists push petitions; shout chants; occupy rooms, streets, and buildings, until someone responds. Persistence and aggression lay the foundation of action. Shaming is a tactic. And boundaries are made to be pushed.
Overlap between the public performance of activism and private life is a huge issue in our community. Harassing while woke is embedded in the routine of recruitment, protest, and care in social justice. From the outside, it is often difficult to tell the difference between responsible aggression in activism and arguably abusive practices. The difference between an activist harassing administration to get what they want and harassing a member of our community to get what they want are the inherent power dynamics. In a community explicitly opposed to hierarchy, activism has a very clear hierarchy. Name recognition, reputation, and associated organizations place activists in different stratas of power. The power structures of the activist community are what make harassment a common and unaddressed issue.
Targeted and isolating recruitment tactics can mask predatory behavior, especially when the activists recruiting tend to hold more social capital in the social justice community than the people they are recruiting. Harassment could look like 10 messages in a row; pulling someone aside to talk about a cause again and again; publicly pressuring someone to join a group until they crack. Harassment doesn’t accept no as an answer and neither does productive activism.
It can feel shameful: if you say no to an activist, you say no to their cause. Discomfort could look like resistance to a new idea rather than an uneasiness toward the person presenting it. Harassers can intentionally use that to shame individuals into both supporting their causes and engaging in further interactions. Activist issues and events can be exploited to attract someone to a specific place at a specific time, and the pressure of participation can make someone feel as if they have to go.
Harassment can look like escalation: moments where the aggressive energy of activism can overlap with sexual or romantic advances. The high-emotion zeal of activism can make flirting in spaces of social justice intimidating and uncomfortable. The aggression of activism can make flirting targeted and hostile in a space that invites, if not requires, emotional vulnerability.
Most importantly, harassment is a moment, a person, and a community. The energy of activism is not comfortable; that’s the very point of it. It is the responsibility of individuals to constantly check how their own behavior is affecting others in these heated issues, stressful environments, and intense actions. It is also the responsibility of a community to recognize that harassment is not accidental. The power structures a community has placed around individuals and ideas make harassment not only possible but an accepted symptom of a greater cause. There are activists who are infamous for their extensive history of harassing others; there are also activists who have been able to get away with predatory behaviors, either because their social capital excuses them or because the targets of their harassment feel they can’t confront their perpetrators.
Harassing while woke does not look like one thing. It could just as easily be an uncomfortable advance coded as sexual liberation by activist rhetoric as it could be a person who will not stop communicating with, confronting, and calling out an individual(s). It could be a public scene and it could be a private message. It could be infrequent, unsettling moments or it could be a constant, anxiety producing presence.
Harassment in activism, as sexual assault in the social justice community, is not exceptional; it is part of the ongoing complacency towards real abuse in order to build a figurative foundation for anti-violence. Harassment chips away at the power structures in society as harassment builds up the power structures in the activist community. Power in activism rewards the ability to control, mobilize, and gather people into one room. Harassment affects who is in the room, and who is in the room comfortably. And hierarchy dictates who is speaking. The entire production of social justice is tiered by harassment; and these tiers continue to uphold the cycle of harassment in our community.