‘Whisper list’ contains 40 politicians never to accept a drink from, MP claims
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It doesn't require rigid structures. Whisper networks exist in every community. Jo Freeman very famously discussed them in The Tyranny of Structurelessness (https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm).
When I was in university, there was a women's bathroom in one of the buildings that was noted to have a list of alleged rapists (students and professors) written on the walls. The cleaners intentionally never removed it.
Poe's Law, this is totally screwing with my brain, this IS satire right? This is maybe the worst based-on-a-true story I've ever seen, exceptional in the low quality of its writing.
Am I biting the onion here? This is for laughs right?
Oh the humanity!!!!!!!!!!!!
They are actually circulated among victims and their friends, with a lot of validation of repeat offenders. So there is a lot of informal collective information gathering and confirmation.
They are lists of men to avoid dating or not trust them to buy you a drink.
And the lists are a reaction to the difficulty of holding them accountable. Universities have been bad about punishing their students for criminal behaviour, because they want their tuition, don't want to offend their wealthy alumni parents, and have a misguided fear of ruining the lives of relatively young people (even if they are legally adults).
Unfortunately some of the people who get away with abusing their fellow students will go on abusing their colleagues the rest of their lives.
So if you want to keep people from being unfairly put on these anonymous lists, then you need to make these lists unnecessary.
I agree with the utility, practicality and necessity of informal lists. Mocking someone who was falsely included on one of them and made to experience consequences is an ugly thing to do.
We've had centuries of experience on this topic - retaliation should follow from evidence. That evidence should be challenged and held to consistent fair standards. Laughing at people condemned by gossip is unfair.
People have a right to share information with each other about abusive people or places who should be avoided.
The lists could be campus rapists, or bad drunks, toxic places to work, or a list of towns or businesses that aren't safe for black or queer folk to visit.
Most of these informal lists have been around for decades. For some people, these lists help them to avoid some dangerous people or places.
Are there some people in these lists who don't deserve to be? Probably.
But how are you going to regulate it? It's speech after all.
If you aren't mocking someone, I would advise that you contain your enthusiasm to a single exclamation mark.
But anyone who is angered by the existence of these lists because someone might not deserve to be on them.... is worth mocking.
Of all the injustices committed by governments and corporations and even some wealthy people, that ranks pretty low.
That people need to share a secret list of powerful members of parliament who have a history of abusing their colleagues isn't what makes you angry?
We also should not forget that these are political representatives - they should absolutely be held to a higher standard than everyone else. Because if we don't then we either abandon pro-social behavior as a desirable trait or the belief that elections should help to select people who are more capable by any standard.
Hmmm
> if left unchecked
This obviously represents an error on how abuse is handled in these power structures.
What baffles me the most, is that this list in particular is not only shared between staff or subordinates, but concerns colleagues. It seems that women feel that they cannot speak out against such forms of potential abuse because they fear they will get themself axed, even if the alleged abuser is power-wise on the same level.
This is very concerning to hear, but frankly not surprising if you speak with any woman that operates in any kind of hierarchy, be it corporate or otherwise.
But if the person really is a rapist or whatever, they know how to navigate the system because they’ve been spoken out against before - they’ll know exactly how to attack and destroy your reputation.
Game theory leans toward whispering to protect yourself and others without getting destroyed.
This news it very relevant because still in 2022 sexual misconduct by men in positions of power seems to be a huge issue stil.
I mean, doesn’t it say something about the current state of things if the bloody parliament is not safe for women?
I have no illusions about how it is for women to work in sv for all the tech bro companies. Uber had some very public history on this. This topic is unfortunately as relevant as ever.
1) People who have been around a while already know most or all of it, while people new to the scene know none or little of it.
2) It's never whispered all at the same time, but rather one or a few at a time when the circumstance calls for it, kind of like a distributed consensus algorithm gradually coming to consensus. Also, easier to recall parts of the list when in the physical vicinity of people on it.
3) The newbies learn the whole thing gradually, not all at once.
If a name is erroneously omitted from the list then a subsequent incident would presumably re-add the offender.
If a name is incorrectly included on the list (accidentally or maliciously) then there could be a decay function if reports include a timeframe and/or confidence level. For example, if the last report of bad behavior was third-hand and years ago and no one has heard corroborating reports since then then individuals may choose to de-prioritize or drop that name from the lists they transmit.
It may also be the case that the list is not particularly resistant to transmission errors and yet may still be accurate enough to provide value to the people using it.
The negatives of this kind of behavior are equal to the supposed benefits
If the list is not at all accurate I doubt it would propagate as well or as long because an entirely inaccurate list provides negative value to its recipients by giving them a false sense of security that will be eventually dispelled when they realize their personal experience does not correlate with the list. I would be more concerned about a list that is sufficiently accurate to ensure continued propagation while still containing harmful inaccuracies.
> The negatives of this kind of behavior are equal to the supposed benefits
Whether the harm caused by inaccurate warnings exceeds the harm avoided by the accurate warnings seems subjective because these harms are different and impact different people. It would also be hard to assess without knowing the actual ratio of accurate to inaccurate warnings.
But regardless of whether these kinds of lists cause net harm overall, individuals will continue to share warnings as long as doing so provides net value to them. Outlawing rumors is something not even totalitarian regimes have managed to do, so the only solution I can think of would be to ensure that the alternate methods of addressing problematic behavior are more attractive to people than resorting to rumors.
What really interests me is that this illustrates how completely staged the public face of a political party is. not really news, but interesting nonetheless.
1. Serial rapists
or 2. Backstabbers adept at using rumours and lies to undermine political rivals?
I suppose how much you trust a list like this depends on whether you incline towards 1 or 2.
Take a man who lusts after power, has power, is used to getting their own way, escaping consequences, trained by experience to be unscrupulous and in an environment where nobody tells the truth so what people say gets ignored. Put them alone in a room alone with a women. There is a very obvious risk. Now I'd hope most men would turn out to be ok, but you don't need to know the people involved to be able to predict that there are serial rapists being created in politics.
3rd time drunk driving? Can't keep your hands to yourself? Money keeps being sent to your personal account? Don't worry, the Whip will sort it out, no one needs to know, and don't forget to vote as you're told tomorrow!
Squeaky clean, honest, principles representative of your constituents who won't vote against what is write for them and the nation when told to? You'll be removed quickly.
No, I expect them to be complete incompetent fools. Most of the time I find out this is not wrong.
You do? There is some nobility in stepping up to be a public servant, but you're still a servant at the end of the day; one that works for a bunch of petulant, out of touch bosses who can't get along to save their lives. Not where I would expect to find the brave and fearless. There may be something to be said about the marketing opportunities that a head of state-type position opens up for such a person, but a general representative without a fancy position in government seems like a strange fit for someone who isn't afraid to take on the world.
Except it is an inverse relationship. You have possibly millions of people, all with conflicting ideas, trying to manage you. If you want to use that analogy, it is more like being a CEO with millions of shareholders who have no distinct profit motive and can't come together and decide, in a unified fashion, what they want out of their company. Although the board of directors is a much closer analog.
> it really is not easy to be one.
Nor is there much upside, except in the most prominent positions providing a branding advantage, which is why it is a strange choice for those who aren't limited by their own hangups. Academically interesting, for those into that kind of thing, but being brave and fearless is often at odds with having a proclivity towards those academic interests, so while it indeed takes a lot of talent, you don't expect bravery and fearlessness to necessarily come along for the ride.
I am not saying that these women are wrong, certainly my oppinnion on politicians is low enough, but the gravity of the situation is astonishing. A government where one group sees another group as potential rapists clearly can not function well.
But this is absolutely endemic in all sorts of workplaces. It's very hard to deal with sexual harassment properly. So people make a personal decision about how much they're prepared to put up with, to step around, in order to have the career they want.
Millions benefit from having a functional government, is this more or less important than a few political careers.
I know after a decade+ of mainstream culture shitting on people for what they do outside of their professional capacity this is going to seem like an odd opinion but doing bad things and/or having moral failings outside of the specifics of work does not preclude being good at one's job.
How do you think all those wife beating cops everyone talks about manage to stay employed? They do their jobs.
All those commies that McCarthy said infiltrated industry, how did they get there? They did their jobs.
Alan Turning's "moral failings" were so bad he was criminally convicted for them yet he did some of the highest quality work in his field.
Etc. etc.
Here you might have to work together with people who you see as either rapist or who allegedly see you as future victims. This has to have an impact. Imagine being asked to work together with someone you believe might wanting to rape you. Can you have a one on one meeting with him? Would you even be willing to have a phone call with him? Even if you can, can you actually still help effectively govern millions of people?
Sure it can. It means dismissing all MPs and everyone potentially implicated from politics.
>which doesn't happen for many reasons
Which doesn't happen for personal reasons. Clearly the women in question prefer to risk a small chance of sexual violence over potential career implications. For their personal consideration it is clearly the right choice, avoid the people in question and almost certainly you will be fine.
But what is missing here is that these people hold very significant amounts of power and responsibility. Without a doubt their duty as politicians is first and foremost towards a functional government.
I don't want to get into victim blaming but these are our representatives. If they can't / won't come forward. How can they expect others to. How can they expect to change the culture in the rest of the country?
But then trying to make this all add up just calls into question the very existence of this list. Are you really saying there's no one in parliament willing to name names? It just smells of one mp making things up for her own agenda.
Besides, Westminster runs on bullying; MPs aren't quite party employees, so they have to use extremely underhand coercive control to keep people in line. See Gavin Williamson.
For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Pincher_scandal : as chief whip, he would be the person you'd have to report misconduct to! And it was apparently "widely known" that he was prone to sexually harassing other men before he got that job.
Any examples?
Plus any politician you ask would say they're willing to take the hard decisions. So we should hold them to that.
And if it's at the point where there's a circulated list of 40 names that no one is willing to do anything about. Don't mention the list at all! Mentioning the list is corrosive without doing anything about the problem. If a judge announced 10% of judges were bent, but wouldn't name names, what do you think that would do to the justice system?
Ultimately the list can be announced on the floor, there's vulnerable people outside of Westminster that might want to talk to their, and trust their MP. They have the right to know the contents of the list. If there truly is a list, and it's accurate, it needs more than a report to the chief whip to fix it, as the Chris pincher thing shows.
Is this true? If you pass along a warning to friends/coworkers does this obligate you to make a public accusation because other people have a right to that information?
Personally I think the confidence threshold for making a public accusation against an individual should be substantially higher than the confidence threshold for passing along private warnings or mentioning the existence of such warnings.
And given the number of public accusations against politicians I don't find it particularly surprising that there are additional accusations that have not been made public. To use your metaphor, if 5% of judges have been publicly accused of corruption, would it surprise you to learn that there are rumors (but no public accusations) against an additional 5%?
Somebody presumably experienced the alleged behaviour first hand. They could make the accusation.
I made reference to Jimmy saville in my first post. He got away with paedophilia for decades because no one would publicly call him out on it.
Further it's unfair to the accused. If you make a public accusation, they can at least respond to it. There could be innocent people who have no idea what is being said about them behind their back.
I don't think morally there's a higher confidence threshold. If you think someone did something, enough to spread the rumour, then everybody should know, if you aren't that confident, perhaps you shouldn't be spreading the rumour at all. I suppose legally it makes you less exposed to libel, but an MP on the floor isn't exposed to such risks.
The point of my metaphor was that you need to trust judges. If 10% of unnamed judges are bent, then you can reasonably question any decision of the judiciary. The judges need to be named and investigated. And in the meantime you can at least have some faith in the remaining 90%.
What am I to think of my MP now? Should I recommend people contact him? Should I contact him, not knowing whether he's on the list or not? How should I interpret him not doing anything, like seemingly all the other MPs? How many of these Mps sit on select committees dealing with abuse etc? How many of these MPs are drafting laws on abuse? If one of those laws gets watered down, is that because there's a good reason or because it was drafted by a rapist?
Ultimately I don't think public naming and shaming in the first instance is optimal, but if there is a list, then there is a severe failure somewhere, and existing processes aren't fit for purpose. If MPs actually want to sort this out amongst themselves in the investigation phase, that, I think would be best. In the absence of that, publicly announcing the names is the best option.
I agree.
> He got away with paedophilia for decades because no one would publicly call him out on it.
His victims made allegations against him as far back as 1963 and were told by the police to "forget about it", "move on", and that they "could be arrested for making such allegations" [1] and he did in fact take legal action against the people who "publicly called him out". A member of the Sex Pistols brought it up during a BBC interview in the 1970s and that part was cut. A stand-up comedian apparently had a bit about him being a pedophile in the 1980s and the recordings were suppressed out of fear of being sued. Given the protection being afforded him by the BBC, police, and English libel law, what more did you expect people to try?
> The judges need to be named and investigated.
Absolutely. But establishing processes to do so is the responsibility of the judiciary, not the victims.
The same is true in other organizations. My experience has been that the vast majority of people default to using the proper channels to resolve issues. It's only after the proper channels have been exhausted or have previously demonstrated their ineffectiveness that individuals resort to things like private warnings and rumors. So if you find that a large number of people in an organization or society are instead choosing to pass along private warnings (for sexual assault, abusive managers, toxic projects, illegal behavior, insider trading, bribery, etc) instead of reporting these things through the proper channels then the most likely explanation is that they are responding rationally to a failed organization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Watson_(Labour_politician)...
This is not unusual. A lot of large organizations have a ladies' whisper network where they tell each other where the "missing stairs" are; those men it is unsafe to be left alone with.
Edit: it may be possible to reassemble the list from existing allegations; https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10726693/More-50-MP... / https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/may/18/list-of-sexu...
It's disgraceful that there's such a cover-up about it. To clean up the systems and make it a safe environment, one needs to know the perpetrators. Also, who says all on the list are actually perpetrators? Theoretically, there could be a harmless person on the list that was put by an opponent to destroy them.
Thats exactly why you dont leak the list. Furthermore, making the list public increases the incitaments for adding innocents to it.
An anonymous leak of an unwritten list is meaningless. I could say I'm actually an MP and the most frequent name to come up is jll29, and what could you do to stop that?
Having false positives in a public accusation would be a disaster for everyone involved.
Additionally, a list that is private creates far less incentive for any malicious/spurious additions.
A private list seems far more practical, sadly.
And I really don't agree with the sentiment that a few false positives are OK in situations like this where lets face it accusation = guilt. We don't operate like that in any other areas of criminality and for good reason.
We've been through months of "evidence=impunity". Partygate. Braverman getting sacked over a "but her emails" incident of deliberately leaking classified material and then getting reinstated six days later. Gavin Williamson. And much of the misconduct isn't actually illegal! It's just misconduct and intra-party bullying.
The problem is there's no "adults outside the room" you can call on to make a determination. It's only a political system, a set of interlocking popularity contests.
It's all fun and games, until you end up on the false-positive list. You get blackballed all the time, you career stops, you can't get things through, just because someone thought something and spread rumors, you don't know why, and can't do nothing about it.
Given that it is impossible to outlaw rumors it is ultimately up to those in power to ensure that reporting misconduct via the proper channels is more effective than relying on private lists. Given how many people feel unsafe with members of Parliament it is unsurprising that they resort to alternatives to keep themselves safe.
No, it's rape and sexual abuse.
No more fun and games for you... and good luck proving you're not a rapist or a sexual abuser, since it's an unofficial unwritten list, spread by word of mouth.
I do not get the impression that any women would trust you with access to any such list, or would rely on you for such information.
Mainly because you seem extremely worried about ending up on such a list, and do not appear in any way to be concerned about the women trying to protect themselves.
If someone did something, they should be punished... we live in an era, where everyone carries a camera with a microphone in their pocket, and proving stuff is easy now. Noone should have the power to silently fuck with someone, because they want a promotion, that the falsely accused would otherwise get.
His lawyer was filmed trying to take of his pants on a bed in a hotel room with a woman he believed was an underage girl and nothing happened.
I certainly won’t shame these women for talking to each other about what men to avoid.
What do you think will change if they do?
Sadly, in those place it is easy to be put in a "she said/he said" situation, and since you're not in the public eye, nobody will really care, especially not the policeman who took the second rape complaint, and your lawyer will only tell you to log the complaint to the police and that she will follow up and call you once she found a third or fourth occurence (that's crazy to me that two complaints is not enough btw).
I can understand however, that in a society where the truth is seen as a negative, why more than a person and their potential bestie is needed to testify against anyone for anything major.
More so when the laws against perjury are more often used in a dishonest way to take the truth and silence it. We have a serious problem with honesty.
Let's say Bob thinks Charles is an asshole, so he goes to Charles's house and beats him up. Charles has no CCTV in his home. The police can see he's been beaten up, but the only thing identifying Bob is Charles's testimony. Bob says it wasn't him, he was at home watching TV.
Is it just for Bob to be convicted?
No.
If Bob beat the shit out of Charles there should be a mountain of circumstantial evidence pointing in that direction. Witness testimony is just the cherry on top.
Like what?
Neighbours didn't see anything. Bob and Charles once had a minor dispute over one parking in front of the other's house. The cops didn't check for DNA or fingerprints. Bob's claim he was watching TV would fit with his normal habits, he is a film lover.
Of course.