Human Rights Tribunal chair feeds jerks on the Internet

Harassment of women online is so common that the phrase “online while female” is sometimes used (a play on the phrase “driving while black”).

A woman online is considered a target for harassing behaviours such as threats and ridicule. The goal of the harasser is to tell women that they either have to repeat what men believe or they’ll be silenced, or to exercise power over women through threats and sexualized language, or to tell them they aren’t welcome in professional life by denigrating their skills and achievements.

While one would believe that most fair-minded people would ignore this conduct, the reality is this is not the case. Employers don’t want to take a chance on someone who’s been harassed online for fear of attracting that negative attention their way. Many women will gang up with the harasser to target the person being harassed, because they want to identify with a more powerful group and divert negative attention away from themselves. Many more people will stay silent and avoid getting involved.

The results are much different for the harasser, of course, because normally they stay anonymous, and even if their friends know who they are, they are more likely to get a pat on the back for their aggression than they are to be criticized.

In my case, the person harassing me clearly worked at the Vancouver Courier. I met with the publisher, now retired, who was very polite. She claimed that the reporters didn’t know who was responsible for the anonymous blog. I didn’t really believe her, because as soon as the anonymous bully left a post, they were all over it commenting. She gave me a book about the history of Vancouver. She Googled me and told me she could only see good things, such as my bio and articles I’d written. However, she was sitting on the other side of the desk, so I couldn’t see her screen. She told me that in time, the result would be buried and I shouldn’t worry about it.

However, I thought about it for about a week, and called back. I still thought that it was clear that it was Courier employees involved, the behaviour was unethical for journalists to engage in and the newspaper should do something about it.

However, by this time the nice publisher had retired and Dee Dhaliwal had taken over. All she did was argue with me and insist that she wasn’t going to do anything about it. Her level of hostility clearly indicated that she knew it was her employees involved and instead of dealing with it she was trying to silence and intimidate me.

At first I thought it was the editor because he never returns his phone calls and doesn’t appear to have too much to do. In fact, you’re not even allowed to leave him messages. That’s right: you’re not worthy to have your voicemail ignored and must submit to having your email ignored.

However, having been exposed to a number of articles by Mike Howell, I’m more inclined to attribute it to him. The reason is that the anonymous blog and Howell’s articles for the Courier are written in the same style, which is an unusual style for a journalist covering city hall – first person with a strong helping of sanctimonious judging.

My experience covering City Hall is that if you want to have real stories you should maintain an air of objectivity so you don’t burn bridges. If you do burn your bridges, all you are left with is, well, the ability to sit in meetings and judge sanctimoniously.

I decided it was a waste of time to focus on his sanctimonious judging and decided to take up yoga instead. The world is a much happier place when you don’t read what aggressive men have to say about you or anyone else for that matter.

However, I also realized that I have to get this story out there, because the role of the Human Rights Tribunal in creating this unhealthy situation cannot be understated. By lying about my case and diminishing me as an editor and journalist, the chair of the Human Rights Tribunal, Bernd Walter, fed the jerks-on-the-Internet beast and should be held accountable. These are our tax dollars that are going to an organization that cannot even tell the truth about women at work.

Backlash silences discussion about discrimination

To live on the Earth, especially as a modern human being is to do a substantial amount of violence to it. Today we call it our footprint.

Although I call myself a vegetarian, I realize that it’s impossible to live a truly vegetarian life. When the farmer plows the field, he or she is going to turn up a few dead bodies of the ground animals that were living on it. The environmental effects of my dinner plate don’t end with the production. There’s also the transportation to take into consideration.

Though I could live a subsistence existence by growing and preserving my own food, I choose not to, which makes me a hypocrite. Most of us are living our lives as hypocrites refusing to acknowledge our footprint not only on the land where we live, but on the lands of people we will never meet.

Our obsession with cheap material goods creates unhappy working conditions for people in other countries. Our dependency on resources creates global warming, which causes drought and famine in Africa.

Some of us are driven to denial to deal with the overwhelming reality of our lives. I remember having this discussion in a fourth year seminar at university. One of the most calm, accepting students in my entire year, who had never seemed to argue with anyone about anything, suddenly objected to the very idea that he was doing violence just by living. However, when faced with the evidence, he had no facts to rely on, but just kept repeating, “That’s going too far.” Eating meat, driving a car, living on native land. To talk about it was going too far.

Backlash against human rights is kind of the same thing. If you stand up for native rights in this country, you will inevitably find someone willing to angrily denounce your argument. One only needs to read the comment section on the CBC website to know it’s true. In fact, Aboriginal groups have complained to the CBC about allowing racist comments on their website. And yet, here we stand on land that we took from others, or, at the very least, we are benefiting from decisions that were made long ago and never rectified.

Though the statistics won’t back them up, there are numerous people who will deny that racism and sexism exist in Canada and reverse the blame onto the people complaining about the problem. I’ve yet to see the headline that reads, “Gender discrimination solved” or “Same opportunities given to everyone.” Without evidence, the comment section is the only place for these views.

Although I could have picked from hundreds of examples, I recently read an article about racial discrimination in the Durham Catholic and Public School Boards from Oshawa This Week. Parents of black students are complaining that their children are disproportionately being disciplined for fighting and bullying.

There are three comments under the article all blaming the students. I’m guessing the commenters don’t know the students and are completely unfamiliar with the facts of their cases. Here’s one example:

“Why am I sick of hearing that every thing they don’t like is RACISM ?? Do the crime, do the time !!! Just look around its no different any where else, Look at all the people that get shot in Toronto, They are not white !!! I wonder why !!!”

I don’t know. Maybe the students feel victimized by racism because people make random, unsubstantiated allegations about “crimes” and equate them with all the gun violence in Toronto simply because of the colour of their skin. Could that be it?

The biggest problem with backlash is it stops us from talking and looking for solutions. Who would want to come forward to talk about their struggle if they are just going to be accused of “crimes” and of trying to deflect blame? It’s difficult to address the realities of the situation if you are just going to be shouted down in the comment section.

How do we tackle racism and sexism if we can’t talk about it in a healthy way? I myself have experienced being drowned out and defamed by ignorant comments just for raising my experience with sexism in the workplace. That’s why I’m looking for solutions. Censorship of the Internet is not the answer. We need to find ways through education, media coverage and government programming to find a solution that builds dialogue rather than building up walls between us.

The Trumpification of Web 2.0

In the 1980s people loved legal dramas and police procedurals. In this world crime doesn’t pay and the people without morals always get caught in the end, even if there are a few twists and turns that try our faith ever so slightly.

By the end of it all, the killer is locked up and the police and the lawyers, our heroes, throw their jackets over their shoulders and saunter out into the evening air with some clever, parting quip.

It cost the networks a tidy sum to come up with these dramas. They had to hire the dashing cops and lawyers and pay for the writers to come up with original stories, which got harder and harder each year.

Then some evil genius came up with a plan. It’s hard to make people hate a criminal. You have to have a diabolical plot with a bit of suspense and mystery. You have to have a sympathetic victim that we can all like. You have to make your cop/lawyer hardboiled, but not so hardboiled that they are unsympathetic. It’s easy to make us hate each other. We are full of flaws. We say the dumbest things. We gossip. We try to make others look bad. What if we just took a bunch of regular people and put them in a house – or even better, an island – and let them do the dumb stuff that humans do when no one is looking. Of course, in this case, everyone would be looking. In the 1990s police and legal dramas were cleared from the prime time schedule for an ever-multiplying number of televised “reality” shows.

This mean and petty environment launched a thousand careers, including that of what, frighteningly, seems to be the Republican frontrunner. Donald Trump likes to portray himself as a business mastermind, but the truth is he was born into wealth and not losing it all doesn’t make you a brilliant entrepreneur. Nevertheless, he puts himself in the position of judge and juror of a process that either supports or ridicules the actions of individuals vying for a position with his company declaring, “You’re fired” to one contestant a week.

Another “workplace” type model, is America’s Next Top Model. Although I couldn’t stomach The Apprentice, I did watch a few clips of this show randomly on the Internet. They mostly involved the staff around the modeling shoots berating the contestants for minor infractions. In one clip I watched Tyra Banks, the host, berates a model she had just “fired” because she was smiling and not sad enough. Apparently, she was especially angry about it, because she had come from a “poor” background (her grandmother had to sew her bathing suit for the competition… or something). And, being from a poor background, the model should have been especially humble and destitute looking… or something.

Let us not forget the numerous cooking shows where the celebrity chefs engage in behaviours that would land them in court in real life.

Now, we’ve segued straight from the 1990s into Web 2.0 – the world in which everyone has an opportunity to report and judge everyone else’s transgressions whether the transgressions are legal or not.

What is the point of this kind of haranguing of individual private citizens? In this climate the title of one of these 1990s reality shows becomes even more prescient – “Big Brother.” It doesn’t matter if you did anything wrong. It doesn’t matter if you agree with someone else’s interpretation of how you should behave.

I think of that model whose grandmother sewed her bathing suit. She probably thought she was being gracious by smiling at the other contestants before leaving the stage. It probably never occurred to her or anyone else that there was something wrong with her actions until someone said there was and that person was suddenly the loudest, most powerful person in the room.

Millions of people are not surprised or offended when people take their workplace concerns to court or to tribunals such as the Human Rights Tribunal. Workplaces are full of conflict and there’s always going to be someone who loses out, just as business transactions will often land the participants in court. This is why the procedures have been set out for us.

So what does one gain by ridiculing one individual citizen for not being successful in a case in which the evidence was never even heard? Just like on network TV, it’s hard to be the dashingly handsome justice seeker doggedly pursuing his quarry for the safety of the entire city with a clever quip always at the tip of one’s tongue for one’s deserving enemies. It’s easy to be the pathetic snitch who gets to bully behind an anonymous moniker on the Internet.