Over this last year several women found the heart to speak up publicly against various forms of abuse against men who were part of the Scala community.
Recently their voices were joined by another one, the charge in her case was one of cyberstalking.
While badly understood, the impact of cyberstalking can be supremely stressful, inflicting a variety of psychological harm on the victim — a subject in which the sciences and humanities can agree. (Short et al, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24875706)
A well-known person (who is not the subject of this inquiry, but mentioned for context) regularly engages in behaviour consistent with many aspects of cyberstalking, primarily in his case the collection and archival of communication, which has been abused out-of-context multiple times to threaten, intimitate, and hurt people.
Sadly, cyberstalking is often not taking seriously because it’s objective boundaries are unclear — a fact which perpetrators can and do abuse to escape both reprimand and justice.
On a phenomenologically basis the dictionary or legal definition is besides the point. What matters — and should matter to us — is the lived experience of each woman, which we need to carefully and attentively take into consideration.
Above everything else, we need to take her voice seriously, something I am sure we can all agree on.
In the victim’s case (which I won’t name on account of not having her permission to do so), she has made the distressing impact of her stalker’s behaviour very clear.
Yet, just days after this incident a changeset to the Scala’s COC were proposed by a member of the Scala Center, administrator of this message board, and employee of Lightbend: https://github.com/scala/scala-lang/pull/1303
The proposed changeset was to:
- no longer disavow the threat or posting of public information which personally identifies individuals (while ignoring that such information is incomplete and can easily be twisted by selection)
- remove the definition of ‘doxing’
This not only demonstrates that she was not taken seriously, but worse, serves to muddy the waters right around the matter which led to her trauma.
The close proximity to the recent events suggest no coincidence, but either extraordinary ignorance, or worse. In either case, any such change would have lead to harm to victims of cyberstalking.
The purpose of this letter is to
a) raise awareness about cyberstalking and it’s impact
b) ask the Scala Center to use it’s influence to ensure that it’s resources are not used to harm cyberstalking victims, or even enable their abusers.
I’m aware that the Scala Center’s influence ends at a certain point, and at this junction I’m inviting the wider community to help: Be aware, reflective and call out instances of cyberstalking when you encounter them.
This letter is pseudonymous for obvious reasons, but it’s authors have been writing Scala in numerous functions for nearly a decade.