Despite the abandonment of their Dewey Square encampment, Occupy Boston demonstrators are still grappling with issues of sexual assault, members said.
But the Boston Police Department said that for the most part, there have not been many issues with Occupy Boston.
“By and large the protesters who participated in the Occupy Boston movement were extremely well behaved,” said BPD spokesman James Kenneally.
Other Occupy movements around the country have previously had official sexual assaults. In November, New York police arrested two men accused of sexual assault by women protesting at Occupy Wall Street.
Protesters from Occupy Boston said that sexual violence, threatened and actual, was and has been a long-standing problem at both the former Dewey Square camp and current Occupy congregations.
“This issue of aggression – sexual, physical or verbal – has been around the entire time and we’ve rarely enforced anything to put a stop to it,” said Allison, an Occupy Boston member who asked to keep her last name anonymous.
Allison said a known Level-3 sex offender threatened her in December while she was facilitating a General Assembly meeting.
“He has come at me physically before and had to be removed from me by a group of men,” she said. “That night, he threatened me again. This was in the midst of processing a proposal about banning him from Occupy Boston resources.”
In recent weeks Occupy Boston activists debated about what the group’s policy regarding sexual assault and violence should look like. The ongoing discussion, which has spilled out of meetings and into blogs and Twitter accounts, has led to the creation of the Resolution Against Sexual Misconduct.
The resolution, passed by Occupy Boston’s General Assembly in early January, states the group “will not tolerate” any sort of sexual misconduct or threats of sexual misconduct against individuals, according to Occupy Boston’s website.
The document also said, “from now on Occupy Boston will immediately respond to threats and acts of sexual violence.”
Occupy Boston created a working group that will establish a protocol for future issues with sexual misconduct, said Gunner, a member of Occupy Boston’s Media Working Group.
“It’s a complicated issue, much like it is in the rest of society,” he said, “and it’s something that we grapple with – how to deal with it effectively and create spaces that feel comfortable for people and address issues of violence across the board.”
For some activists, Gunner said, the issue revolves around the idea that society in general does not discuss issues about neither physical violence nor sexual violence.
For others, he said, the approach is the direct “I was harassed at Dewey Square and I want to make sure that doesn’t happen again,” referencing alleged instances of sexual harassment at Occupy Boston.
“Occupy Boston had an encampment, and issues of sexual misconduct were present, including the presence of persons with a reported history of serious sexual crimes,” according to the Sexual Assault Awareness Proposal published on the Occupy Boston website earlier this month.
The proposal would have created a system for presenting “publicly available” background information on Level-3 sex offenders within the movement and would have allowed the group to choose whether or not the person in question could “remain a member.”
The proposal led to a walk-out at a General Assembly meeting on Jan. 8, according to the minutes of the meeting published on Occupy Boston’s website. About 25 people left the gathering in protest of the proposal being “blocked,” or not passed, according to the meeting’s minutes.
Meg Bossong, the community mobilization project manager at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, said that in tight-knit communities, “it’s always a balance between what is best for the survivor [of a sexual assault] and what is best for the community.”
Gunner said that in addition to creating a working set of guidelines to prevent and deal with sexual abuse properly, many Occupy Boston members also want to preemptively raise awareness about sexual violence and sexual assault.
He said Occupy protesters want to draw a connection between sexual misconduct and economic justice.
“Those are issues that are not talked about enough in society and I think that by having in-depth conversations within the community about those issues, not because of the specific incidents that occurred, it’s something that is proactive,” he said.
In most types of communities, including the kind of community built by the Occupy Wall Street movement, predetermined guidelines about sexual abuse are key, Bossong said.
It is best, she said, to have conversations about what a community’s values are beforehand.
“You don’t always get the best policy after a crisis has happened,” she said. “If someone is hurt as an adult and they decide not to report it to the police, it will not move forward.”
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