haptalaon | (Reply)

From:

One of the things I think about a lot is that there are people who are decent people, but who have (and persist in) specific behaviours that are intolerable in specific settings. Or who just are not a good fit for a specific group.

There's also an issue of communication - Boston is especially weird like this, because Salem warps a lot of the regional community, and the heavy college/university focus in Boston as a city doesn't help either, but there are very few public groups here.

I am actually in regular communication with the HPS for the main public group, and go occasionally to their rituals and do periodic workshops for them. But I didn't train in a tradition that's present locally, I don't have great connections to the existing trad groups here other than a few fairly tenuous connections.

(Which I could and would use if I had a potential student whose background included that, but I wouldn't go to them with "I had a problem with this person, just giving you a head's up" as I might have with a few people in Minnesota where we had established history.)

And of course, there's no central reporting agency, and probably never should be (because confidentiality, because people can't differentiate between 'not right for us' and 'dangerous to others' in many cases, and so on.)

In the one situation where I (and others) did actively report concerns about someone, it also blew up badly in our faces (destroying multiple years of good interactions, creating significant fragmentation in the larger community, etc.) Which tends to discourage people from doing it again.

I think that some of it comes down to good vetting: I have a detailed questionnaire for people at the point we're talking about dedication.

I am really clear that sharing things on it will in most cases not change the decision about accepting someone as a student, but lying on it is grounds for immediate dismissal from the group. (i.e. someone who claims they didn't have previous group experience where it later comes out they were booted, someone saying there are no health issues that are relevant - I'm pretty specific about what counts - and finding out later there are things.) It's not perfect, but it's a model I can actually work with.