Distillations/Constellations #5: feminist (digital) self-defence
What follows contains mentions of anti-Palestinian violence and racism – if you don't feel like reading that right now, I encourage you to close this. I'll be back with another topic in a couple of weeks.
A couple of weeks ago, my child and I went to a pro-Palestine demo here in Berlin. I wrote about some of what happened over on Instagram – in short, a white German man told me (in front of my own child) that he thought it's "better to kill Palestinian children than let them turn out like their parents." I still don't really have words to express how horrendous this is, and if you're already here reading this, I don't think I need to.
A few years ago, I did a Wen-Do feminist-self defence course – a course focused on both physical and verbal self-defence. A woman in my group asked almost every week: "but how would I do this move, if I have a child on each each hand?"
That memory flashed back to me when I was sitting near this man, with my three year old next to me. It's one thing to learn how to physically (or even verbally engage, with the threat of it escalating), but it's a completely different determination if you're responsible for a small child at that time, too.
And that's where the verbal self-defence and the relational safety comes in. For all the awful things that man said, the complete lack of humanity and the cruelty that he had on display – I didn't actually feel that unsafe. And that's primarily because there was someone else wearing a keffiyeh nearby who heard the conversation and who came over to subtly check I was okay.
As a young woman, I was taught that everything was a potential risk. Don't walk alone at night, make sure to put your keys between your fingers in a fist just in case, keep your head down, don't catch anyone's eye if you're by yourself...the list goes on. The consequence of that is that I learned that my safety was my problem – and that other people's safety was not my problem.
My Wen-Do course was one of the first times I was explicitly told the opposite: that if I see something that bothers me, even if it's not happening directly to me, it's still my responsibility to do something about it. Basically, debunking bystander apathy. What I took from that course was that there's many ways to deal with a situation that I'm not a part of. I can check if I've understood it right, I can subtly ask the person in question if they need help (as I was asked), and if needed, I can step in in a myriad of ways – even with humour as a distraction, for example.
active digital bystanders
So, what would our online platforms look like, if those signals and those behaviours were present? If we were able to step in and ask someone if they need support, or to check context – that what looks like a joke actually is one, that someone has what they need to feel safe, that nobody's in trouble?
According to the Bystander Intervention Model – a theory developed in 1970 by Bibb Latané and John Darley – uninvolved bystanders must 1. notice the event, 2. assess a situation as threatening, 3. perceive that they are personally responsible for intervening, 4. determine how to help, and 5. make the decision to intervene. This approach seems to be widely taught in lots of places, as a way of fighting against in-person violence – although Lauren Chief Elk and Shaadi Devereaux do note that 'bystander intervention is less a weapon in the fight against sexual assault, and more an evolved form of victim blaming'.
If we put very real critiques of the individualistic approach of bystander intervention to the side for just a moment: What does that kind of intervention look like in digital spaces? Given the large-scale of our social networks online, how might someone understand that they are personally responsible to intervene?
And to what extent is that willingness to intervene, culturally specific? This article looked at student bystander interventions by Portuguese and Brazilian college students, with some interesting cultural takeaways. The authors include an analysis on individualism and collectivism within the different societies, noting that various intercultural studies have indeed shown different levels of bystander intervention, and showing that "intercultural studies have the potential to...provide an empirical basis for anti-(cyber)bullying programs in different cultural contexts."
a human-scale network
It reminds me of artist Darius Kazemi's efforts to build a human-scale social network, and his guides on how to run a small social network site for friends, which I love. In particular, the emphasis on how running a social network is "social first and technical second" and keeping the number of people on the network small – both for technical reasons, but also to enable 'hyper-specific norms' where people can model the behaviour they want to see and watch it spread.
Last year doing some research, I found some resources that call specifically for more active intervention in the face of cyberbullying. 'How to go from being a bystander to an upstander', or encouraging what's called in German 'digitale Zivilcourage' – digital civil courage. Along similar lines, Glitch, a fantastic non-profit in the UK, call for digital citizenship: "individuals engaging positively, critically and competently in all digital spaces."
To go back briefly to Elk and Devereaux' critique of the Bystander Intervention Model, too: if we're thinking about a structural approach to violence on social platforms, the onus is primarily on those designing and owning the platform. What if there were a way of flagging help – not just reporting accounts, but to fellow users? Or amplifying calls for support and intervention, making it clear that not only do such behaviours violate platform policies, but they also violate accepted social norms on a specific platform?
For me though, it comes back to this: my safety is your safety. I'm not free till we're all free. This feels easier and more tangible when there are fewer people in a group, or when you recognise or personally know people – but the large scale social networks that we've become accustomed to seem to be at odds with that kind of approach. I wonder what our digital spaces could look like that start from relational safety as a first principle, instead of as an afterthought.