Some people get uncomfortable from being looked at, talked to, seeing a mascot, being surrounded by a lot of people, hearing grinding gears, and seeing messy wiring. A lot of little things make a few people uncomfortable but shouldn’t necessarily be banned.
Real harassment can happen at events. Complaining this much about clothes pinning, which is usually just mildly annoying, is an insult to victims of actual harassment.
Don’t teach everyone not to have a little harmless fun. Teach creeps not to creep.
I had a team at champs, who will go unnamed, kick me out of my seat. As I left, I heard an adult yell a racist term, as I am not white. I was taken aback and looked back at them, where the adult and some other mentors stoood snickering.
Why can’t districts/regionals/events take these types of things into their own hands? HQ clearly has not addressed this reoccurring issue. There is enough email traffic from these people already, why can’t we ask them to address their teams prior to competition. Why can’t this be addressed with the whole consent and release form process? Not all events have security, and although there is an established protocol in the manual but clearly not everyone reads the manual.
Arguing with another person over the rights to sit in an unclaimed seat is verbal abuseif it goes beyond a “hey, I was sitting there and I went to the bathroom type statement”
Clothespin Game is harassment. It can also turn into sexual harassment. It can turn into sexual assault in the wrong circumstances. In the popular case of targeting a law enforcement officer, its ASSAULTING A POLICE OFFICER.
**Solicitation of Free Hugs is harassment. ** It can also turn into sexual harassment. It can turn into sexual assault in the wrong circumstances.
Specifically in both of these cases targeting an individual without consent is harassment. Unless you have written consent you are going to have a very difficult time winning a he-said she-said argument in court.
End the practice now, before someone ruins events for all of us. You can’t treat these events as a free for all. We might have teenagers at these events but in the court system they can, and will be treated like adults.
I hope HQ finds an appropriate response to indemnify themselves from future risk.
The things you’ve listed as making people uncomfortable are things that are not being forced on people. If they don’t like grinding gears or messy wiring, they can stay out of the pits. If they don’t want to talk, they can say “sorry, I need some quiet” or even just find a quiet place to sit for a little while.
Clothespinning is something that is being forced on people. Yes, some (perhaps many) people aren’t bothered by it. But forcing somebody to accept deliberate violation of their personal space is harassment.
Yes, we should be striving to teach students “not to creep” aka respect boundaries. I see this as part of it. Some of my students were clothespinned in St. Louis last week, and while some shrugged it off, others were bothered by it. One of my girls had already had to deal with mentors yelling at her while she was pit scouting as well as students from another team throwing things at her while her friends helped her calm down from the incidents with the mentors. She was not exactly thrilled to have somebody sticking things to her.
I recognize that whoever had the clothespin didn’t know about what happened to her. But that’s part of the problem - you don’t know what’s going on with a stranger, and you don’t know which stranger is the one who will be distressed by what you only intend as a harmless prank.
I’m going to piggyback on this (which, if done literally, could be considered harassment) and say that many forms of “real” harassment are similar to having a clothespin clipped on your clothes. Hugging, inappropriate touching and clothespinning all include violating a personal bubble and initiating contact without consent, the latter two are often done while trying to not be detected. To say that this is not actual harassment is to not respect the people who want their physical space respected.
Man, poking hornet’s nests is always fun. Sorry for the inattention today, I was busy getting de-cyborged and recovering from that. (Long medical story.)
First off, added clothespinning and unwanted physical attention to the harassment types, which is now checkboxes to avoid “Other: this, and this, and this” responses. Only 38 responses so far, but that plus this thread is still pretty informative. So far ~40% of issues are seating related.
Second, to marshall and others annoyed by having to deal with these things themselves: This is obviously entirely the purpose of having a real and enforced harassment policy. The interaction with the harasser or their team gets put into official hands, where there’s better odds of the message sticking anyways. Yes, this is even more volunteers that we’re going to need, and specialized ones at that. I’m still thinking about that side of the problem.
To those that think clothespinning is harmless fun, it’s really not. Secretly invading someone’s personal space is not cool. Imagine if you will that the clothespins have fun messages like “I’m watching you.” or “See you tonight.” There is a non-zero percentage of the population that will interpret a sleath clothespin in this manner. It is sending the message “I can get close to you and touch you without you ever noticing.” For some people, this is going to be a spine-chilling moment, especially if they’ve previously been traumatized. And you do NOT know that they haven’t.
Clothespinning TL;DR: You’re literally terrifying an unknown number of people for your own amusement. Stop it because that’s an awful thing to do.
Final note: I’m mostly expecting this thread to be consolidating reports of incidents, etc. For instance, I’d forgotten clothespinning was a thing. Discussion of why things are problems is also understandable. I’m planning on starting up a new thread for working on policy and ideas for dealing with these issues in a few days, after I pull some links and ideas together I’ve run across in the blogosphere.