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Title: For your safety and security…
Author: Anonymous
Date: October 5, 2014
Language: en
Topics: safer spaces, accountability
Source: Retrieved on October 15, 2014 from http://anarchistnews.org/content/your-safety-and-security%E2%80%A6

Anonymous

For your safety and security…

“This safe space policy is designed to ensure that meetings take place

in a considerate and relevant manner, without participants being

undermined for discriminatory reasons.  If someone violates these

agreements three times, they will be asked to leave the space. The

three-strike policy can be bypassed if a serious infraction of these

agreements happens, to the extent that someone feels unsafe. Examples of

serious infractions include, but are not limited to, harassment,

bullying, theft, sexual harassment, sexual assault and threatening or

violent behaviour.”

Safer Spaces Policy for National Campaign against Fees and Cuts

“We want to emphasise frank communication whilst always prioritising the

stated needs of those experiencing oppressive behaviour. No one should

criticise others for how they respond to oppression – anger and violence

can be completely valid responses. Immediate ejection from the social

centre may be the right thing to do if people feel immediately unsafe.

[…] Lively discussion is great but no matter how passionate you are, it

isn’t OK to talk over others or raise your voice aggressively at

others.”

Safer Spaces Policy for House of Brag, The London Queer Social Centre

“Our staff are entitled to work in a pleasant environment without fear

of verbal abuse, attack or harassment. Lewisham Homes will take the

strongest possible action against any intimidating or abusive behaviour

that may result in a criminal prosecution or you losing your home.”

Notice in Lewisham Homes office

Light a candle

The term ‘safer spaces’ is increasingly used as a short-hand for a

loosely interconnected set of concepts and practices developed to

challenge oppressive power dynamics within radical collectives. The

historical roots of these ways of thinking and doing politics lie

primarily (though not exclusively) in feminist struggles against rape,

and LGBT struggles against queer- and trans*-phobic violence. I know

more about the former of these than the latter, and this is just one

example of my limitations. What I’m presenting here is not supposed to

be a comprehensive or definitive account of safer spaces politics. It is

based on my own experiences of the lefty political ‘scene’ in London,

and on experiences recounted to me by others. Still, I hope it will

resonate with enough people for it to count as an analysis of some

general tendencies in the politics I am talking about.

Safer spaces politics is, among other things, a radical response to rape

culture. It recognises that we live in a society in which rape and

sexual abuse is not prohibited, but regulated. Whether coercive sex

counts as rape is not a question of the victim’s experience but a

question of property ownership, with all the racism that entails.

Transgressing any of the contradictory norms of gendered propriety –

engaging in ‘inappropriate behaviour’ – makes you a slut and asking for

it, or frigid and needing it. Conversely, ‘perverts’ are incarcerated,

occasionally for violating a human being, but more importantly for

violating the rules of who owns what, and what business is to be

conducted where. Many survivors* say they feel raped again and again, at

the police station, in the court room, if it ever gets there, but

equally by family and so-called friends: forced to repeat the intimate

details of their violation, offering up their trauma to the masculine

face of Authority, interrogated, disbelieved, and blamed. No wonder so

many of us never speak out at all.

The characteristic ways in which safer spaces politics seeks to

challenge this culture of oppressive violence are:

accountability processes/panels, and mandates for the exclusion of

people on the grounds that they have been judged ‘unsafe’ or make others

‘feel unsafe’

less formal campaigns, which often operate through rumours/spreading

the word about people judged ‘unsafe’, resulting in social exclusion or

expulsion from spaces without an ‘official’ accountability process

use of trigger warnings, and a particular theoretical vocabulary to

talk about traumatic experience

the idea of safety as a goal of overriding importance to oppressed

people

concepts like silencing, apologism, victim-blaming, tone policing, and

derailing, which have been developed specifically by the safer spaces

movement

more mainstream or institutional concepts like

appropriateness/inappropriateness of conduct or ‘behaviours’ (often

plural), harassment, abuse, abuser/perpetrator, vulnerability

maxims like ‘believe the victim’ and ‘do not engage with the

perpetrator’ (these being treated as two sides of the same coin).

However, from within the same broad project of challenging violence

against women and others perceived as disruptive to the hetero- and

cis-sexist patriarchy, the effectiveness and political direction of

various aspects of the safer spaces approach are disputed.

In terms of ‘big names’, queer theorist/activist Jack Halberstam and

political philosopher Wendy Brown have raised critical questions about

elements of the safer spaces project, asking how they relate to the

dominant neoliberal project and state power. Last year a book came out

by Christine Hanhardt called Safe Space: Gay Neighbourhood History and

the Politics of Violence. Focusing on LGBT movements in New York and San

Francisco from the 60s onwards, it looks at the complex relation between

campaigns against queer- and trans*-phobic violence and calls for ‘safe

space’, on the one hand, and urban policing and gentrification on the

other. The book is particularly concerned with the splits between

different LGBT experiences depending on who, for reasons of class and

race, benefitted from the growing recognition of LGBT people as subjects

vulnerable to violence, and who, for reasons of class and race,

continues to be constructed as a threat to safety and targeted for

removal from newly claimed LGBT areas.

What the ‘big names’ have to say, though, is unimportant compared with

the discussions which are taking place all the time, in a multitude of

forms, as we fight to live and organise together. For example, there are

arguments over whether ostracism or safer spaces policies are working to

erode hierarchies within political groups, and over how trauma should be

understood. There is also disagreement over how safer spaces practices

and language are to be applied or interpreted in particular cases. For

example, while I don’t believe there’s any feminist who would deny that

victim-blaming is crucial to upholding the violent hierarchy of gender,

there are still disagreements among feminists about whether the actions

of a particular person or group amount to victim-blaming, and what the

response should be.

Which side are you on?

The different ‘sides’ in these arguments do not map onto a division of

people into good and evil, into those who want to challenge oppression

and those who want to hold onto their privileges by oppressing others.

So, to start with, there are people of all genders on both sides.

Actually, it’s worth trying to be more specific. In my experience, it is

primarily white women by whom or on whose behalf accountability

processes, whether formal or informal, have been instigated, and the

issue has usually been some kind of sexually inappropriate behaviour.

Disputes over whether particular kinds of language or imagery are

oppressive have also generated exclusions. For example, a person I know

was excluded from some queer spaces for disagreeing with a decision to

exclude a DIY feminist band on the grounds that the vagina image on

their logo was trans*phobic. In this dispute there were trans* people on

both sides. Another example: a comrade of mine with a long history of

severe mental health problems has told me she feels upset and excluded

by the decision of the AFem2014 organisers to include in their safer

spaces policy an instruction to ‘Avoid ableist language… e.g. “nutter”,

“mental”…’ She is worried that ruling these words intrinsically ableist

and hence unacceptable, regardless of context, erases an important

history of activism by disabled people who have proudly called

themselves ‘nutters’, using humour and the long-practiced (albeit often

precarious) strategy by oppressed groups of reclaiming derogatory

language to overcome suffering and confront stigma. She is united with

the organisers on the need to confront ableism while disagreeing over

what counts as ableist.

The most vocal supporters of accountability processes have been people

of all genders, and the targets of these processes have been people of

all genders. In quite a few cases, the named ‘perpetrator’ is a white

cis-man, but the people who come to be most strongly denounced, as

apologists or victim-blamers, are women, and it is at them that the most

hatred is directed. Women who are, or have been, the lovers of men named

as unsafe or inappropriate are often primary targets. Meanwhile, being a

safer spaces ‘bulldog’ can provide an outlet for white men whose

dominating voices might otherwise be viewed with suspicion. This is a

dynamic that deserves some attention.

Racism is mentioned on every safer spaces policy, and racism, including

its gendered and sexualised forms, is ubiquitous within radical

collectives. However, accountability processes have not, in my

experience, been pursued on behalf of individual people suffering racist

oppression. Christine Hanhardt’s arguments in the Safe Space history

mentioned earlier suggest that this may have to do with racialised

constructions of who is dangerous, and who is vulnerable and in need of

protection. Charges of racism have been brought against groups such as

the AWL on the basis of public statements which were identified

(rightly, in my opinion) as racist. However, in disputes over whether

individuals should be driven off campus on the basis of membership of

these groups, there have been people who have directly experienced

racist oppression on both sides.

There are also survivors of sexual violence on both sides

(unsurprisingly, given how common this is). There are people who have

had all sorts of traumatic experiences on both sides, whether or not

they want to speak about this in the psychiatric vocabulary of PTSD.

There are people who have experienced or are experiencing mental health

problems on both sides, although again, people have all sorts of

different relations to the language of ‘mental health’.

This means, just to spell it out, that it is often happening that people

who have been raped are being publicly denounced as rape apologists,

even told they ‘love rape’.

It is often happening that people experiencing serious mental health

problems are being thrown out of political and social spaces because

their presence is claimed to be triggering to others. In some cases,

people have suffered mental breakdowns as a direct result of campaigns

against them in the name of safer spaces. There has been at least one

suicide attempt, and this is hardly surprising, really, given that the

punishment which ostracism is intended to inflict is social death. If a

person makes every space they enter unsafe, where on Earth are they

supposed to go? So to put it bluntly, no side can have a monopoly on

trauma, or to use a less loaded term, on suffering.

Of course, it’s a sad symptom of the state we’ve got to that I’m even

talking about ‘sides’ here at all. It’s because I’m hoping that we can

break down these ‘sides’ and open up a more free and nuanced discussion

that I’m writing about this, rather than just hiding in a corner – which

I know is what a lot of people feel like doing when ‘safer spaces’ comes

up, because the whole issue has become, frankly, terrifying. There are

more and more people scared to be involved in political organising,

scared to go to social events, look on facebook or twitter, for fear

that they may be excluded or denounced in the name of safer spaces, or

for fear of being reminded of previous, deeply upsetting – some might

even say ‘traumatic’ – experiences of exclusion or denunciation. This is

not just misogynist rape apologist evil-doers crying into their glass of

privilege: boohoo I hurt too. That is a caricature which ignores the

reality I have just been describing.

Cast out the rotten apples

On the other hand, it is also true that all the people who have been

outed as ‘unsafe’ really are that. They are all, to some extent,

misogynist. They have all treated others badly, and they are all, to

some extent, complicit in rape culture among other shit things. But

then, this is true of absolutely everyone, including the people

enforcing safer spaces. This is not to say that everyone is as bad as

everyone else, that we’re all guilty so we can’t make any judgements

anymore. Actually, I think we need to be making more judgements, more

complex and nuanced judgements, and resisting the tendency to think

(hope) that the world is going to divide neatly into victims and

perpetrators. There is a serious question whether actions undertaken in

the course of enforcing safer spaces are okay even though, in other

contexts, they would be understood as straightforwardly abusive – for

example, as has happened, men calling women ‘scum’ on twitter, or

shouting over them when they try to speak. Before we even get to that

issue though, there is the fact that, in most of the formal and informal

accountability processes I have witnessed, it has been the case that at

least some of the people enforcing safer spaces have at some point in

the past done something similar, something comparably oppressive or

hurtful or stupid, to what the person being excluded in the name of

safety has done.

Obviously, this is gross hypocrisy, but that’s not the main problem with

it. To say that someone is hypocritical – that they do not practise what

they preach – is not yet to say what should be changed, the practice or

the preaching. Where what is being preached, though, is social ostracism

on ostensibly principled grounds, simple hypocrisy becomes something

else. An example is made of someone who, sure, is far from perfect, but

in many cases (not all cases, but many) is not so much worse than anyone

else. Though the denunciation of the example, the forcible excision of

the unsafe tumour in the communal body, everyone else attempts thereby

to purify themselves. This is the definition of scapegoating. The

process never ends, though, because it disavows (despite paying constant

lip service to) the oppressive tendencies in all of us, rather than

honestly confronting them. The communal body, unsurprisingly, remains

ill, so yet another tumour must be identified and the accountability

surgeon called again. The taboo spreads, farcically at times. Someone

can be labelled a rape apologist for being friends with someone who

refused to disinvite from their party someone who once shared a kebab

with someone who was sighted on campus with someone who… The result of

all this is that people are so scared of becoming the next scapegoat

that they cannot confront their own faults openly, or can do so only

superficially and with ever-increasing bad faith.

Please believe me

I have emphasised that those who are critical of safer spaces, or who

are targeted in the name of safer spaces are often survivors of sexual

violence themselves, or suffering mental health problems. I am not

saying, though, that therefore they are necessarily or automatically

right, and what has happened to them is necessarily or automatically

wrong. Quite the opposite. Survivors do not agree, so to hold up some

survivors as unquestionable authorities just means that other survivors

cannot have their perspectives listened to. Unfortunately, this is what

is sometimes happening at the moment.

To really be listened to, to have your experience acknowledged, to be

taken seriously and supported when you try to articulate your trauma –

that can in itself be profoundly transformative. A commitment to this is

a basic requirement for radical politics. The maxim ‘believe the victim’

expresses this commitment. It poses a direct challenge to rape culture,

and I do not for a moment suggest that we should not stick to it. The

problem, though, is that it is not always so clear what sticking to it

means.

Here’s the first issue: believe the victim about what? As I have already

said, it is absolutely necessary to acknowledge someone’s trauma, to

take seriously their articulations of their own experience. Perhaps

people do occasionally lie about these things, fabricate trauma for

ulterior ends or whatever, but that possibility is nowhere near as

significant as the problem of people having their experiences dismissed.

The fact that I should be taken seriously when I speak of my trauma,

though, obviously doesn’t mean that I should be treated as correct about

everything (and nobody would claim this), so what is it that I am

supposed to be believed about?

One common view is that I should be treated as correct if I call someone

out as an abuser and that I should be treated as at least presumptively

correct about what should be done to or about that person, for example:

that person should be excluded from spaces, or subject to an

accountability hearing, or made to undergo therapy. You could call this

the ‘weaker’ interpretation of the maxim. There is also a stronger

interpretation, which is only rarely explicitly defended but still

implicitly relied upon in many arguments over safer spaces. This is the

view that I should be treated as an authority on the topic of abuse,

trauma, and oppression in general. Being treated as an authority here

means that anyone who disagrees with me is taken to deserve labels like

‘misogynist’ or ‘rape apologist’. This is because my authority derives

from my status as someone who has experienced abuse so disagreeing with

me (disputing my authority) is seen as amounting to an attack on my

experience (the source of my authority).

Treating survivors as automatic authorities in some general sense is

obviously contradictory, though, for the simple reason already given

that survivors do not agree. Yet what about the weaker version of the

maxim? Is it really true that any questioning of my interpretation of

what happened in the particular case(s) where I was traumatised, and of

my opinion on what should be done, amounts to disrespecting my

experience? A look at right-wing calls for ‘victim-led justice’ should

raise concerns about this interpretation as well. We all agree that it

is possible to respect the trauma of someone whose child has been killed

without supporting their call for the drunk driver responsible to be

imprisoned for life. I have chosen this example simply because the

driver might be culpable without being an embodiment of evil, and

without the proposed punishment being a good thing. Of course I am not

saying that demanding someone be excluded from a social space is

equivalent to calling for them to be incarcerated by the state. The

point is just this: if you recognise the possibility of respecting the

trauma of the person calling for the driver’s lifelong imprisonment

without supporting that call, you have to recognise that agreeing

totally with a victim’s interpretation and proposed solutions cannot be

a necessary condition of respecting them and their traumatic experience.

We need to be able to raise and frankly discuss what respect for

experience and acknowledgement of trauma might mean, starting from the

premise that we do not yet have all the answers.

There is a second problem, though, which applies equally to weaker and

stronger interpretations of the maxim: ‘believe the victim’ cannot

function as an instruction at all until you have decided who the victim

is. We could interpret it as meaning: you should believe any claim of

the form ‘I am a victim’, or ‘So-and-so abused me’. However, this leads

directly into a contradiction. Suppose you have two people (just to keep

it simple) each saying that they are victimized and naming the other

person as the perpetrator, or abuser, or to blame for their trauma. This

is not some hypothetical scenario invented for the sake of argument.

Cases like this are not at all rare, especially (though not only) when

intimate relationships end. In these cases, ‘believe the victim’ gives

absolutely no guidance about what to do. Nevertheless there is still a

tendency for it to be invoked, and the way in which it operates is

troubling.

Double-edged words

What has happened in several cases I know of is that the person who gets

to claim the title of ‘victim’ – the person who, according to the

directive, must be believed – is the person with the confidence, the

social power, and the inclination to go public with their accusation. In

these cases, as so often, social power is bound up with language. The

person who gets to be the victim, in these cases, is often the person

who is more comfortable wielding the language accepted within the safer

spaces movement for talking about victimhood. It is the person who is

most vocal, who gets in there first to say: ‘that’s my abuser’, ‘I’m

triggered’, ‘I feel unsafe’. Mastery of an in-group language generates a

kind of immunity from criticism. Having been called out as a

perpetrator, the other person is not supposed to be ‘engaged with’, and

anyone who comes to their defence is liable to be labelled an apologist,

a derailer, a misogynist, defending an abuser, etc. It is treated as

‘problematic’ even to ask for that person’s perspective on the

accusation against them, except in the context of a confrontation or

accountability hearing, in which their status as a ‘perpetrator’ who

needs to be ‘held responsible’ is taken for granted.

Yet all sorts of possibilities are excluded by fiat when ‘believe the

victim’ is interpreted and acted upon in this way: the possibility that

both people are traumatised, or (and this is not incompatible) that both

have been, perhaps in different ways, abusive to each other, or that one

person suffered trauma even though the other person did not do anything

particularly heinous, or even that one person has been consistently

abusive and the accusations they are making against the other person are

a continuation of this abuse. It is also possible, and in some cases

definitely true, that the named perpetrator has done something terrible

and is genuinely dangerous. But to act as though this is true in every

case is to ignore the operations of social power. We seriously need to

ask whether being au fait with a certain discourse, as well as both

wanting and feeling able to throw your intimate experiences onto the

very public mercies of the accountability mill, necessarily corresponds

to being the most wronged.

It is really important not to take this point out of context, as often

happens in these discussions. The tendency to take phrases or sentences

out of context is perhaps understandable given the distressing subject

matter, but context really does matter here. When I ask ‘who gets to

claim the title of victim?’ I am not saying that survivors are grabbing

after social prestige. I am talking specifically about cases where there

are two people, each of whom feels they have been abused by the other.

In several cases I know of, the people involved were both queer women. I

am saying we need to think about the role of social power in determining

whose narrative carries the day.

On the other hand, the features of safer spaces language which enable it

to function as an instrument of power in this way are some of the very

features which have enabled it to fight established forms of power with

some success. Dominant society (for want of a better word) enforces

further trauma on those who experience oppression with its patriarchally

inflected demands that we ‘prove’ our abuse. In response, the feminist

and queer liberation movements out of which safer spaces politics

emerges have contributed to the development of a language for disclosure

which makes it easier to indicate the harm that we have suffered without

tearing ourselves up once again for the benefit of those who stand in

incredulous judgement over us. Thanks in part to these movements we now

have words like ‘abuse’ and ‘sexual harassment’ to draw on to gesture

towards our ill-treatment. The requirement that we trawl through all the

gory and distressing details can be counteracted by appealing to the

theory of triggering, according to which we may be incapable of speaking

about our trauma without incurring further harm. The vagueness of words

like ‘abuse’, the fact that they lack any precision, any indicators of

scale or context, helps make disclosures of some kinds of trauma easier.

It helps us to reject the patriarchal understanding of sexual assault,

according to which it only counts as ‘real’ rape if some racist news

item can be spun out of it.

The difficulty is, though, that this same vagueness – this ability to

convey condemnation without any need to bother about the details – makes

these words amenable to misuse as instruments of in-group power. For

example, if I simply tell you that so-and-so abused me, I haven’t yet

said much at all about what happened, except that I had a bad experience

and judge them to have done something wrong, to be culpable for my bad

experience. I am not lying about this. But I haven’t yet said what they

did, or how or why or in what context. I haven’t even really described,

with any richness, depth, or detail, how I felt about what they did. If

I then decline to provide further information about what happened on the

grounds that it is too triggering, that may be perfectly understandable,

and I certainly should not be forced to. On the basis of this kind of

almost contentless disclosure, though, it can be difficult for you to

form any well-grounded beliefs about what actually happened and how to

react to it. To insist that you are morally obliged to instantly and

without question place the accused into the generic category of

‘abuser’, along with Martin Smith and the murderer of Sarah Payne, is to

insist on belief being detached from any aspiration to track the

contours of what the world is like. Certainly, patriarchal assumptions

about what counts as a ‘well-grounded’ belief should be rejected, and

our understanding of what constitutes a patriarchal assumption

constantly deepened. There must be no questions asked about lengths of

skirts, for example. But this does not itself settle the issue of what

to believe and what to do.

Policy vs. Politics

The term ‘well-known’ stands out in enforcement discourse: so-and-so is

a well-known trans*-misogynist, a well-known rape apologist, a

well-known unsafe person. I suspect that the repetition of this term –

which is interestingly ambiguous between a belief being justified and a

belief being held by lots of people – masks an uncomfortable (hence

suppressed) awareness of the fact that knowledge is often precisely what

is lacking. It seems that, in practice, uncertainty about the basis for

belief is being compensated for by extreme decisiveness about what to do

– the kind of decisiveness that a policy provides. I mean here not only

actual safer spaces policies but the ‘policy’ of enforcing the kind of

rules which feature on safer spaces policies, whether or not there is an

actual piece of paper stuck on any particular wall. The policy provides

a sense of decisiveness and legitimacy while masking the exercises of

judgement and operations of power which are necessarily a part of its

implementation.

Take, for example, the policy quoted at the start from House of Brag,

which I chose because it is more thoughtful than many safer spaces

policies (the NCAFC offering lying at the other end of the spectrum). It

states that violence on the part of those experiencing oppressive

behaviour cannot be criticised. It also states that it is never okay to

raise your voice or talk over someone. Both of these statements come, at

least in part, from a good place. But the fact is that whether someone

is experiencing oppressive behaviour and therefore privy to the

exemption from the broader policy of enforced civility (colonial

overtones intended) is often precisely the contested issue. And

contesting an issue does sometimes involve raising your voice. Yet if

someone feels ‘immediately unsafe’ then ‘immediate expulsion’ (by

force?) may be the answer. Presumably someone might feel immediately

unsafe if someone is being angry and violent towards them. But, as the

policy itself acknowledges, a person being angry and violent may not be

in the wrong. They may be responding to bullying, to oppression, to less

overt but more damaging forms of threat and victimisation from the other

person. If so, then according to the policy, they should not be open to

criticism at all, never mind immediate expulsion.

The fact is that the policy does not specify any course of action, and

it simply comes down to the political judgement of those involved. This

is not in itself a bad thing. Of course we need to make political

judgements, and weigh considerations which may pull in different

directions. The contradictions are there in reality, and the policy

reflects them rather than creating them. The problem, though, is that in

appearing to give an actually applicable formula for how to be ‘right

on’, and therefore appearing to relieving us of (at least some of) the

burden of judgement, the contradictory policy makes whatever line of

action is pursued in its name appear to be based on some kind of

communally decided (hence legitimate) law, and any criticisms of that

line of action appear as a (legitimately punishable) crime against the

community.

Going off the rails

My worry, then, is that maxims like ‘believe the victim’ and its

corollary ‘don’t engage with the perpetrator’ are operating in ways

which go against their original radical intentions. I’m just not sure

that women, or survivors of all genders, or people suffering oppression,

are always being listened to and respected more as a result or their

application. It seems, rather, that we are listened to and respected

more only when we make certain kinds of claims, in a certain language,

and have certain friends.

This is all very ironic, of course, because the whole point of safer

spaces is supposed to be to make things more inclusive, to challenge

power imbalances, bullying and silencing within political groups. To say

the road to hell is paved with good intentions, though, does not really

capture the situation. For the fact is that we were already in hell. The

hierarchical systems of gender, race, and capital, and the violence

which constructs and perpetuates them: that is hell. Rape culture is

hell, and rape culture persists within radical collectives. The safer

spaces movement has challenged rape culture. Yet it has also labelled a

‘rape apologist’ and a ‘well-known misogynist’ the first person to ever

really listen and believe me when I told them about my experiences of

being forced into sex.

As with every revolutionary movement, the safer spaces movement carries

the marks of what it fights against. It inevitably contains

contradictory moments, impulses, tendencies, whatever you want to call

them. It fights power but also becomes an instrument of power; it fights

abuse but also becomes an instrument of abuse. Like I said, this is the

nature of all revolutionary movements. Saying that the safer spaces

movement is contradictory does not amount to an attack on all that it

has achieved and aims to achieve, or to a demand that it be jettisoned.

But, and this is the point I want to make, if it is to remain

revolutionary rather than sliding into authoritarianism, it must allow

for internal dissent – that is, genuine political disagreements about

safer spaces concepts and practices in general and about what is to be

done in particular cases.

The difficulty, of course, is that what is to count as ‘internal

dissent’, as opposed to attack by the forces of reaction, is usually

exactly the contested issue. Who is ‘with’ us? Who are ‘we’? I don’t

have answers to these questions, and anyway it’s not just up to me. I

would not want to define the rules of a collective, even if I could. I

just think we need to acknowledge that these are difficult political

questions, and that some (though by no means all) of what is happening

at the moment in the name of safer spaces is not pushing towards the

best answers.

I imagine someone might object that pointing to the complexity of an

issue is a common derailing strategy. To say how complicated or

difficult an issue is can be a way of stalling attempts to do something

about it, thereby upholding the status quo. For example, a standard

response to calls for a boycott of the Israeli state is to say ‘oh, but

the Israel-Palestine situation is so complex – we can’t possibly take

sides’. This response refuses to recognise the power dynamics of the

situation and the urgent need for action. However, the fact that claims

of complexity are sometimes used for this purpose does not mean,

obviously, that there are no complex issues, or that we should pretend

that all political questions have simple answers. On the contrary,

saying ‘it’s more complicated than that’ might be a necessary part of

responding to those who think that the actions of the Israeli state are

automatically justified because Jewish people suffer oppression, or

because Israel is a victim of attacks, or because some opposition to

Israel definitely is anti-Semitic. Claims of complexity are neither

inherently good nor bad politically – it surely depends on whether the

‘simple’ narrative they are ‘complicating’ is true or not, and what

consequences sticking to it is having.

Solidarity forever

It is worth analysing further why the question of what solidarity

demands is so fraught. We know all too well that just because someone

says they’re a feminist doesn’t mean that what they are doing is

actually helping to dismantle patriarchy. When the Bolsheviks began

shooting their own fellow-revolutionaries for departing from the party

line, they were motivated, at least in part, by the sincere belief that

those who did not adhere totally to the programme were, whether

wittingly or unwittingly, contributing to the ever-imminent danger of

counter-revolution. Defeat by counter-revolutionary forces would mean,

literally, the massacre of the revolutionary movement, and the loss of

all that had been gained. The people they shot called themselves

revolutionaries, but the people doing the shooting called them tools of

the bourgeoisie. Apologists, if you will. Pre-revolutionary Russia was

hell, and the Bolsheviks thought they had found the only path out. No

wonder any tarrying by the wayside, any perceived attempts at derailing

the process, marked you out as a devil. But the more people they

denounced, the more their road led nowhere. Or rather, we all know where

it led. I do not say this in order to delegitimise the concepts of

‘apologism’ or ‘derailing’, which certainly are rightly applied in many

cases (and there really were White agents among the Russian

revolutionaries), but to highlight the problem when any disagreement is

taken to warrant the application of these labels, no matter what the

politics of the disagreement.

I imagine that using the example of the Bolsheviks seems quite over the

top, so I should explain what I’m doing with it. I’m certainly not

saying that what is being done in the name of safer spaces is remotely

comparable in its horror to the actions of the Bolsheviks. I’m not

saying that advocates of safer spaces are ‘secretly’ Leninists, or

anything like that. I’ve chosen it as an example, firstly, because I’m

sure everyone I’m addressing is in no doubt that what the Bolsheviks did

was not good politics, to put it mildly. On the other hand, I want to

show that their authoritarianism was actually not so obviously wrong

from where they were standing, in that it was a response to an objective

situation which made that ruthlessness appear necessary to some people

who did not have purely malevolent intentions. I want to bring out the

logic of the position, and to use that as an object of comparison in

trying to understand how it can come to seem as though, out of a

commitment to feminism, you might be morally required to treat your

fellow-oppressed with such callousness. There is a problem with the

logic, though. It did not follow from the horrors of Russian tsarism

that if you were a committed revolutionary then you had to be committed

to every aspect of the Bolshevik programme. And it does not follow from

the horrors of rape culture that if you are committed to challenging

oppression and sexual violence then you must be committed to every

aspect of safer spaces politics as currently articulated and applied.

Since I’ve been slating Leninists I may as well make it clear that

liberals are at least as bad. They go on about ‘reasonable debate’ and

‘tolerating dissent’ but they actually exclude serious challenges to the

status quo from the sphere of the political, by labelling them

unreasonable, mindless, violent, criminal. Your dissent is permitted, as

long a you behave appropriately, as long as you do not engage in

behaviours which would cause a person of reasonable firmness present at

the scene to fear for his or her personal safety. (Public Order Act

1986)

Radical collectives are premised on the rejection of the liberal

conception of politics. We recognise that the liberal concept of

‘reasonableness’ is a mask for the white, bourgeois man, and that those

voices dismissed as irrational, as hysterical, are precisely the voices

of the oppressed. The perpetual danger of utopian projects, though, is

that they replicate what they set out to oppose. The politics of safer

spaces has done a lot to challenge oppression, but in the process it has

codified a series of prohibitions on opinions or actions which are

labelled ‘unsafe’, and a prescription that anyone accused of being

unsafe be excluded from the sphere of political engagement. The liberal

demand that you go about your dissent in a ‘reasonable’ manner seems

worryingly to be mirrored in the demand that you go about your dissent

in a way that does not make anyone feel ‘unsafe’. In both cases, some

genuine political disagreements are being excluded from political

spaces, being transformed into an apparently prior moral issue of

whether you are conducting yourself in a permissible manner.

To raise this concern is not to say that no-one, and no opinion, should

ever be excluded. Of course we need to distinguish between cops and

comrades, and not all those who police our oppression wear a uniform.

Equally, the idea that we can simply ‘not act’ is a liberal illusion –

so-called ‘non-intervention’ just upholds existing power relations, and

does not provide a solution. However, anyone committed to revolutionary

change must believe that it is legitimate, and even necessary, to oppose

existing wrongs without being able to provide a fully worked-out

alternative. (This is partly because our ways of thinking are so shaped

by oppressive power structures that we cannot totally transcend them

when we imagine alternatives, and partly because alternatives need to be

collectively determined in the course of transformative struggle, not

decided on by a small group in advance and then imposed upon others.)

There is no straight and narrow path of righteousness out of this

double-bind, only the constant struggle against what we hate, and

against becoming what we hate. But recognising that we are in a

double-bind seems more promising, as well as more honest, than sticking

to the line that we just aren’t ostracising hard enough.

The oppressive social relations we struggle against are inevitably

reflected in us, individually and collectively. We are scarred, and our

relations with each other are scarred, though obviously we are not all

scarred in the same way. To fight and organise, together, against the

world as it is, we must fight to be together in ways which challenge and

subvert, rather than perpetuate, the modes of domination, exploitation

and violence which create us as subjects. All I have been trying to show

is that it is not so obvious that every aspect of safer spaces politics

is taking this fight forwards – not so obvious as to justify the

assumption that any opposition warrants hatred and denunciation by all

right-thinking radicals. On the other hand, maybe the incidents of

bullying and scapegoating, the ‘miscarriages of justice’, which I have

pointed out are not indicative of any general problem with the politics

of safer spaces, or with its conception of justice. Perhaps they are

just examples of safer spaces practices and language being abused,

unfortunate lapses in an otherwise healthy project. If this is the case,

though, then that means more than ever that dissent needs to be

understood as not necessarily reactionary or victim-blaming or

misogynist. Otherwise there is no mechanism for preventing the abuse

when it does happen, and there is no way for those who suffer from it to

speak out.

- There are plenty of problems with using the term ‘survivor’ to

describe people who have experienced sexual violence against them, for

some do not feel themselves to have ‘survived’. This may be because they

feel that in some crucial ways they did not continue to live after those

experiences, or because the abuse is ongoing, or conversely because they

feel that the experiences did not threaten their existence in the first

place, and they do not want to define themselves in terms of them. I’ve

used the word, despite these problems, because there are at least as

many problems with other words. I use the word ‘victim’ where I am

discussing victim-blaming and the maxim ‘believe the victim’, and also

when what is at issue is a person’s suffering a particular wrong, rather

than their having survived past wrongs.