Agreements and Policies #9

9: Policies around Violence and Abuse

by Raven

As I’ve said, these policies are getting trickier and less fun as we go into the harder and harder ones.  These are the policies you don’t want to ever have to use, but if the situation comes up, having them in place will make things a lot easier than not having them.  If you are in a really difficult situation, that’s definitely not the time you want to have to create a policy to deal with it.

Even talking about violence and abuse in your group may prove difficult.  Some folks are going to want to have a black and white blanket policy such as if someone uses violence or abuses another person, they will be immediately expelled.  Other folks may want something that looks at the context of the particular situation, or that gives someone a second chance.  It’s true that even when you have a blanket policy, if a situation occurs where everyone decides in this instance the person should be given another chance or this situation is different and merits doing something different, that can usually be worked out anyway.  However, if one person disagrees in the actual situation and you are using consensus, you may need to default to the blanket policy even if everyone else disagrees in this case.

And even the terms violence and abuse can be tricky.  I know of a case where a community’s agreement to nonviolence was invoked because of consensual BDSM that was occurring.  There were folks that argued that this was still violence.  And what constitutes abuse can be even vaguer.  A good place to start is to decide what your community means by the words ‘violence’ and ‘abuse’, and then move on to how you want to deal with these situations.

And, of course, you are not going to be able to write something that will cover every eventuality.  One suggestion is to come up with a basic agreed upon policy but also have an agreed upon procedure for exceptions. (For example, if two or more people disagree that the policy should be invoked, then the community will use another outlined procedure.)

I certainly hope that your community never has to use a policy like this, but if something does occur that someone reports or calls violence or abuse, it’s better to have a policy in place that you can say, “We agreed on this,” then to have to come up with something new under very, very difficult circumstances.

Next we’ll talk about policies that deal with what happens if a member is sick, disabled, or dies.