So there are at least two important roles that need to be filled when an accusation of a serious wrongdoing comes out.

Firstly, you need people who are capable both of being impartial and of seeming impartial, in order to create confidence that they’re looking into the issue with an absolute commitment to the truth. You need them to be able to avoid getting overwhelmed by the horrifying details of horrifying cases, to listen and pay attention and reason and notice discrepancies. This role is not incompatible with compassion and empathy for people who’ve been through awful things - in fact, it absolutely requires it, because you need to be able to create the conditions under which they feel comfortable sharing complicated stories with you. But it’s incompatible with a lot of ways that many people need compassion and empathy actually demonstrated.

So you also need people who will just see someone who needs it and commit themselves to being the strongest possible advocate for that person. This is formalized in our actual legal system, obviously, but it’s needed in communities too. This is what ‘I believe survivors’ is all about, of course - it’s not a claim that cases should be decided in favor of the person who first files a report, it’s saying ‘I’m taking the role where, if you tell me something awful happened to you, I will be your advocate’. This doesn’t require believing everything someone says, and can still involve a lot of investigation and fact-seeking, but it’s centered on being someone who they don’t regret telling their story.

A community that is all advocates is going to have problems. Being an advocate doesn’t have to make it impossible to figure out the truth, and it’s completely possible to figure out the truth from a neutral position and then become an advocate, but I think it does substantially complicate truth-seeking. And advocates for different people are likely to end up yelling at each other, and this only gets resolved by who has more energy for yelling. And there’s no one to look to for a clear, honest picture of the situation.

But a community that is all mediators is also going to have a lot of problems. I’m seeing a bunch of them right now. People who were experiencing awful abuse confided, tentatively, in others. They said ‘I think he’s mistreating me’. They met people who had seen the failure modes of all-advocate communities, and thought it was just morally right to be a mediator. Those people said ‘hmm, I can really see both sides of this’ or ‘why does it feel like that to you?’. What they needed to hear was ‘well, fuck. do you have a place to go? what can I do to help you get out?’



I think the failure modes of all-advocates situations tend to be really visible. You get giant yelling matches where no one external to the situation can even guess what’s really going on, and where no one ever changes their mind. The failure modes of a community full of mediators are much quieter. They’re people - people in need - saying, quietly, ‘this doesn’t seem right’, and hearing ‘I really see both of your perspectives here’ and not saying anything again.