EA - How my community successfully reduced sexual misconduct by titotal

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: How my community successfully reduced sexual misconduct, published by titotal on March 11, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.[Content warning: this post contains discussions of sexual misconduct, including assault]In response to the recent articles about sexual misconduct in EA and Rationalism, a lot of discussion has ended up being about around whether the level of misconduct is “worse than average”. I think this is focusing on the wrong thing. EA is a movement that should be striving for excellence. Merely being “average” is not good enough. What matters most is whether EA is the best it could reasonably be, and if not, what changes can be made to fix that.One thing that might help with this is a discussion of success stories. How have other communities and workplaces managed to “beat the average” on this issue? Or substantially improved from a bad place? For this reason I’m going to relay an anecdotal success story below. If you have your own or know of others, I highly encourage you to share it as well.Many, many, years ago, I joined a society for a particular hobby (unrelated to EA), and was active in the society for many, many years. For the sake of anonymity, I’m going to pretend it was the “boardgame club”. It was a large club, with dozens of people showing up each week. The demographics were fairly similar to EA, with a lot of STEM people, a male majority (although it wasn’t that overwhelming), and an openness to unconventional lifestyles such as kink and polyamory.Now, the activity in question wasn’t sexual in nature, but there were a lot of members who were meeting up at the activity meetups for casual and group sex. Over time, this meant that the society gained a reputation as “the club you go to if you want to get laid easily”. Most members, like me, were just there for the boardgames and the friends, but a reasonable amount of people came there for the sex.As it turns out, along with the sex came an acute problem with sexual misconduct, ranging from pushing boundaries on newcomers, to harassment, to sexual assault. I was in the club for several years before I realised this, when one of my friends relayed to me that another one of my friends had sexually assaulted a different friend.One lesson I took from this is that it’s very hard to know the level of sexual misconduct in a place if you aren’t a target. If I was asked to estimate the “base rate” of assault in my community before these revelations, I would have falsely thought it was low. These encounters can be traumatic to recount, and the victims can never be sure who to trust or what the consequences will be for speaking out. I’d like to think I was trustworthy, but how was the victim meant to know that?Eventually enough reports came out that the club leaders were forced to respond. Several policies were implemented, both officially and unofficially.Kick people out.Nobody has a democratic right to be in boardgame club.I think I once saw someone mention “beyond reasonable doubt” when it comes to misconduct allegations. That standard of evidence is extremely high because the accused will be thrown into jail and deprived of their rights. The punishment of “no longer being in boardgame club” does not warrant the same level of evidence. And the costs of keeping a missing stair around are very, very high.Everyone that was accused of assault was banned from the club. Members that engaged in more minor offenses were warned, and kicked out if they didn’t change. To my knowledge, no innocent people were kicked out by mistake (false accusations are rare). I think this made the community a much more pleasant place.2. Protect the newcomersWhen you attend a society for the first time, you do not know what the community norms are. You don’t know if there are avenues to report misconduct. You don’t...