Posts about abuse in the BDSM Scene are making their way through the blogosphere, and they’re predictably heated thanks to certain facets of domist rape culture present there. The first comment was from a self-identified 28 year old female bottom, who said:

wow…traumatized?? i think [Kitty] likes the attention and its some fetish thing to her

More than 90 comments followed. And then came General Disarray’s mighty smack-down on all these horribly callous sentiments:

We are – it’s inevitable – going to be uniquely attractive as a community to a subset of predators. I don’t think I need to go in to the reasons why - they should be self-evident. Additionally, many people who enter the scene do not do so as fully mature people secure in themselves. For many people, entering the scene will be the start of a voyage of discovery, a road that they start down vulnerable and unsure of themselves. The combination those two factors is bad.

We as a community need to be prepared to aggressively deal with predators, even in (especially in) situations where the people they are preying on are not capable of dealing with predators adequately on their own. If we aren’t, we are failing in a very significant way. I’m not saying that we hold direct responsibility for people who are assaulted, raped, etc - we don’t - but we’re still failing in an absolutely inexcusable way.

I am not worried about my personal safety – since I’m a guy, it’s pretty unlikely that I’ll be in a situation that I physically cannot escape from, and thanks to my background and support structures I feel comfortable in saying that if anything of this nature does happen to me, I’ll be able to string up my attacker in front of the community, and, if necessary, in front of a judge.

But I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect everyone to be able to say the same thing – but that’s frankly besides the point. Even if it were reasonable to expect everyone to do the same thing (and it’s not, but that’s beyond my scope here) from a practical standpoint we have to realize that not everyone is going to do so. As a community (and especially as a community where so many newcomers will be young and just beginning to come in to themselves) we have a moral mandate to, to the greatest extent possible, safeguard our members from predation. It doesn’t matter if those who are preyed upon are often unusually vulnerable members of our community – that’s almost inherent in predation. It certainly doesn’t exculpate us from our responsibility to ensure as best we can that it happens as little as possible.

If you respond to a thread like this with suggestions that [survivors] should have been more self-aware then please, GTFO. I can guarantee that the vast majority of potential victims in the community are painfully aware of that status. If anyone truly isn’t, then it’s unfortunate but that problem can be addressed in a productive way – say, by running a self-defense course, or helping to produce literature that explains options to [survivors], or even literature that explains options to not-yet-victims. Bringing it up on a thread like this is worse than useless. Regardless of whether or not you intend it as victim-blaming, it’ll sure feel like that to anyone wandering by who has been victimized or is vulnerable – your intentionality doesn’t matter two shits.

I’m sure someone somewhere is reading this and thinking “But Disarray, we’re doing all we can do! Now it’s up to victims to speak out and call the cops, etc!” And that’s fucking horseshit. For an easy example of what we could be doing better – why don’t DM’s regularly receive abuse response training? Even when I lived in the middle of buttfuck nowhere in Pennsylvania there were half a dozen organizations that offered, for free, such training within an hour’s drive. I’m sure there are more here – the Bay Area is generally more progressive than Amish country.

For an even easier example take a look at the first reply to this thread. If you were an eighteen year old sub new to the scene that had had a ‘problem’ with a long-established community member, how comfortable do you think you would feel bringing it up after reading a reply like that? This thread after that point should have been a steady stream of people going WTF are you talking about, but it wasn’t. It took nine replies before someone challenged the first reply – and even then, the person doing so was the person who wrote the article in the first place. The fact that there has been an ongoing argument on this thread is emblematic of the problem in the first place.

There is also a practical consideration that I don’t think has been explicitly discussed here that I find worth mentioning – if this is our response when people are victimized, we will continue to be scorned by most of society. And frankly, if this is our first response in incidents like this, we probably deserve it.

(I changed two instances of the word “victims” to “survivor” because when speaking of someone who has experienced assault and is still living, “survivor” seems more apt than “victim.”)

There’s only one more thing I have to add to this, which is the following: I’m signal-boosting/cross-posting this outside of FetLife because stuff like this is important enough to break every self-protective, liability-limiting rule over. And if speaking up means breaking The Rules, let’s fucking break them.