I think ⓐ is an example where trust is given because they mother knows the guy and has a relationship with a guy but the trust isn’t warranted.
In situations like this our system I is trained to trust and it takes hard system II thinking to acknowledge the problem and respond well to the incident.
The problem is further exacerbated because people treat their stereotypical idea’s of how an unsafe person looks as if it would be real knowledge.
This overall conversation is a good example. The guidelines around risk of abuse suggest that having a good support network reduces risk. At the same time you have a person who is afraid of strangers and who thinks minimizing the amount of trusted adult relationships helps to reduce the risk of abuse and they argue their opinion.
An intelligent psychopath doesn’t give up the kind of red flags that result in most neurotypical people distrusting them.
I am not saying the filters are flawless, just that not using them at all is a fallacy of grey.
Having a way to filter people is useful for many reasons but at least in our Berlin community we don’t lack processes to do that. Both our weekly Dojo and our new biweekly Circling event isn’t simply open to everybody and participating at one of the open meetups doesn’t automatically qualify a person.
Alicorn also wrote in the OP about having resident- and guest-vetting plans.
More centrally I don’t think you should plan in a way that assumes that your filtering process actually keeps out every problematic person. Open sharing of information is important.
The way the girl in ⓒ would have been helped is when she shared her issues with friends who talked her through it.
I agree that evaluation of other people needs to be an ongoing process. Sometimes people change. Or some people behave differently to different kinds of people, so it’s possible that the original evaluator just happened to be one of those towards whom this person feels no hostility.
But I’d still say that new people are a much higher risk, simply because when crappy people are expelled from one community, they are looking for another one, so they are statistically overrepresented among the newcomers. (A similar effect to how software companies, when doing job interviews, mostly find crappy programmers. Because the good ones already have a good job somewhere, but the crappy ones remain endlessly in circulation. If there are 10 competent programmes in the city and 1 crappy one, and 10 software companies, it’s possible that each of those companies will interview the crappy guy, and reject him, and then one of the competent guys, and keep him; so even if the crappy guy is only 9% of the population, for each software company he makes 50% of the interviewees.)
I agree that evaluation of other people needs to be an ongoing process. Sometimes people change. Or some people behave differently to different kinds of people, so it’s possible that the original evaluator just happened to be one of those towards whom this person feels no hostility.
Quite a lot of psychopaths do manage to make a good first impression and have charisma they aren’t simply crappy people. Still they might misbehave when they believe that it doesn’t have negative consequences for them.
I think ⓐ is an example where trust is given because they mother knows the guy and has a relationship with a guy but the trust isn’t warranted.
In situations like this our system I is trained to trust and it takes hard system II thinking to acknowledge the problem and respond well to the incident.
The problem is further exacerbated because people treat their stereotypical idea’s of how an unsafe person looks as if it would be real knowledge.
This overall conversation is a good example. The guidelines around risk of abuse suggest that having a good support network reduces risk. At the same time you have a person who is afraid of strangers and who thinks minimizing the amount of trusted adult relationships helps to reduce the risk of abuse and they argue their opinion.
An intelligent psychopath doesn’t give up the kind of red flags that result in most neurotypical people distrusting them.
Having a way to filter people is useful for many reasons but at least in our Berlin community we don’t lack processes to do that. Both our weekly Dojo and our new biweekly Circling event isn’t simply open to everybody and participating at one of the open meetups doesn’t automatically qualify a person.
Alicorn also wrote in the OP about having resident- and guest-vetting plans.
More centrally I don’t think you should plan in a way that assumes that your filtering process actually keeps out every problematic person. Open sharing of information is important. The way the girl in ⓒ would have been helped is when she shared her issues with friends who talked her through it.
I agree that evaluation of other people needs to be an ongoing process. Sometimes people change. Or some people behave differently to different kinds of people, so it’s possible that the original evaluator just happened to be one of those towards whom this person feels no hostility.
But I’d still say that new people are a much higher risk, simply because when crappy people are expelled from one community, they are looking for another one, so they are statistically overrepresented among the newcomers. (A similar effect to how software companies, when doing job interviews, mostly find crappy programmers. Because the good ones already have a good job somewhere, but the crappy ones remain endlessly in circulation. If there are 10 competent programmes in the city and 1 crappy one, and 10 software companies, it’s possible that each of those companies will interview the crappy guy, and reject him, and then one of the competent guys, and keep him; so even if the crappy guy is only 9% of the population, for each software company he makes 50% of the interviewees.)
Quite a lot of psychopaths do manage to make a good first impression and have charisma they aren’t simply crappy people. Still they might misbehave when they believe that it doesn’t have negative consequences for them.