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> A process of "we assume the first person to come to us is completely correct and honest" would be severely vulnerable to abuse. At the bar/club I work at, we

by 6623 7y ago

> A process of "we assume the first person to come to us is completely correct and honest" would be severely vulnerable to abuse. At the bar/club I work at, we're using exactly this process and have had just one occasion where we weren't sure about the intentions of the person reporting an incident. But we've had good experiences overall. We believe in letting the person who had a bad experience be in control of what happens, because (likely) they've just felt unable to control what was happening (to them). This also avoids the whole he said/she said, that's bound to happen in situations like this. Though if they want someone to leave, it can be tricky throwing them out because that person will claim that they're being wronged. Telling them about the background to our policy helps, if not, they will usually (verbally or physically) lash out and justify throwing them out on their own.

jlokier 7y ago
I was going to ask, how do you avoid creating another victim in this model? But I guess the idea is you don't avoid it, instead you rely on the tendancy that it works out in the right direction enough times, and the injustice of an innocent being thrown out isn't the end of the world? In my life experience, admittedly not in a bar, but some of it in another social organisation, I've seen hundreds of complaints where one person says someone else's behaviour is seriously unacceptable and bad, where it turns out the person saying it is engaged in unacceptable behaviour themselves. Sometimes the same type of behaviour. There, the sanctions are more severe: People may be thrown out for weeks or months or permanently, and it is more public, so the harm to the person socially is much greater than being thrown out of a club one night. It is one of the difficulties I have with some styles of codes of conduct: I've directly witnessed advocates and code-writers engaging in precisely the behaviours they say should result in sanctions, seemingly oblivious to the fact they themselves are serious offenders, and when it's brought to their attention, rather than deal with it, they play it down applied to themselves and their friends, seemingly oblivious to the effects visible hypocrisy from a "core group" has on a community where the less in-group people get contradictory messages about what to do to fit in.

by 6623 7y ago

jlokier 7y ago

I was going to ask, how do you avoid creating another victim in this model? But I guess the idea is you don't avoid it, instead you rely on the tendancy that it works out in the right direction enough times, and the injustice of an innocent being thrown out isn't the end of the world? In my life experience, admittedly not in a bar, but some of it in another social organisation, I've seen hundreds of complaints where one person says someone else's behaviour is seriously unacceptable and bad, where it turns out the person saying it is engaged in unacceptable behaviour themselves. Sometimes the same type of behaviour. There, the sanctions are more severe: People may be thrown out for weeks or months or permanently, and it is more public, so the harm to the person socially is much greater than being thrown out of a club one night. It is one of the difficulties I have with some styles of codes of conduct: I've directly witnessed advocates and code-writers engaging in precisely the behaviours they say should result in sanctions, seemingly oblivious to the fact they themselves are serious offenders, and when it's brought to their attention, rather than deal with it, they play it down applied to themselves and their friends, seemingly oblivious to the effects visible hypocrisy from a "core group" has on a community where the less in-group people get contradictory messages about what to do to fit in.