Rape and Race: Observations from Six+ Years in Sexual Assault and Abuse

Sunday, April 9, 2023

Throughout the past six-plus years, I’ve dealt with 92 assaults/abusive situations, with over 50 accused person. In the beginning, I would connect to a few survivors per year; lately, it’s been several reports in the last two months. This is the tip of an iceberg, as approximately 80% of rape goes unreported.

One (Asian-American) survivor’s rapist called the police on her when she panicked and tried to cover her nudity post-assault. Another accused threatened suicide if the Asian-American survivor told anyone. Yet another raped three Asian-American/people of Asian ancestry, including a teenager under the age of consent in any state. Four, five, and eight people have accused specific persons of completed rape.

The survivors of assault and abuse that I’ve connected to are tied to the same community. The broad community I speak of here are insular, interconnected subgroups that are involved most of these categories: tech, EA (Effective Altruists), rationalists, Burning Man camps, secret parties, and coliving houses. I’ve heard it referred to as a “clusterf**k” and “confluence”, I usually call it a community. The community is centered in the San Francisco bay area but branch out into Berlin, London/Oxford, Seattle, and New York. The group is purpose-driven, with strong allegiance to non-mainstream morals and ideas about shaping the future of society and humanity. Allegiance to purpose often equates to a need to stay in the group, and to protect the group. The people in the community party together, host conferences and talks, live in co-living houses together, and date one another. And if you’re respected, your place in the hierarchy yields more invitations, introductions, and investment.

Nothing in the above paragraph is shocking. It’s how much of society operates, and why rape/abuse and racism are systemic. However, while much of society is now trying to remediate systemic racism, gender violence/bias, and the like, this communities often are proud of continued gender and racial biases. Some spaces explicitly say they are not safe, which leads them to be less inclusive. For the past eight years, I’ve asked people in this circle about the women leaders in the circles are. No one has been able to point to high-powered or influential women in these groups. Even post-#metoo and post-George Floyd and after most of mainstream tech, startups, the bay area, and much of the non-conservative world began to discuss how to improve DEI concerns, this circle is largely antagonistic to such efforts. While men and gender non-conforming people suffer rape/abuse, the survivors I’ve spoken in these communities are cis-women. Many are young, new to community and preyed upon/funneled to men with more power. Specifically, sixty-eight percent of the survivors I’ve spoken to are Asian-American, in communities that are majority white.

After speaking to the survivor and depending on their wishes, I relay information to the accused and survivor’s communities/workplace, to facilitate those communities taking accountability. A community has so much greater reach and influence than I acting alone do. Some community leaders will say that the community doesn’t have a problem with rape, that some other subgroup has a bigger problem. These non-mainstream communities holds themselves to higher standards, and the purposes they work toward are to influence the future for the better – and so, even average level of rape should be acknowledged, worked on, and rape should be reduced. Unlike other professional and social groups, these interconnected communities deny the problems they have, and go so far as to silence stories of rape because those stories may be detrimental to their purpose/cause. For example, I received two reports about a high-powered individual who had assaulted and silenced the women accusing him. When I shared this with two people (who are “deep EA” and work in/founded EA-funded org) who knew and worked on the same cause as this high-power individual – the two people spoke to the harm their cause would suffer if the story came out, and how it could be used against the cause. I had to remind both that this high-power individual had been credibly accused of sexual assault by more than one person.

This isn’t the only example of such a story, at other times, I’ve heard “I’m still processing this information” (months and years later), “we don’t have enough information” (and haven’t reported back that they’re investigating the accusation with lawyers/investigators), “we need to think about the good he’s doing/done” (without considering the good that those harmed could have done if they hadn’t been harmed), and “we can’t ruin his life” ( what about hers – and perhaps multiple hers that could be harmed). In another situation, a woman told a survivor that the white man had more value to the group’s cause, and the Asian-American woman was not “worth the trouble”. One survivor reported that her assailant told her he expected submissiveness because of her race. Another Asian-American survivor said community members told her that even though X man is a rapist, “they can still go on to create something net good, and we should not prevent them from doing that.” To be clear, I’m not advocating bans of the accused or accusers - I am advocating for communities to do more, for thorough investigations by trained/experienced professionals, and for accountability if an accusation is found credible. Untrained mediators and community representatives/liaisons who are only brought on for their popularity and/or nepotistic ties to the community, without thought to expertise, experience, or qualifications, such as the one in the story linked above (though there are others), often end up causing the survivors greater trauma. One community leader said they will put anyone coming forward with an accusation through a process they called an extrajudicial trial, and root out “sociopaths” and “dark triad” that lie about sexual assault. Such statements and reactions leave survivors further traumatized. They also chill reporting. When a survivor is understandably emotional/traumatized, this community has repeatedly used her reactions to the trauma to discredit her. In my experience – and according to my mentors, who have been doing advocacy for survivors for 25 and over 30 years – most survivors say that the response to their sexual assault was more traumatic than the assault itself. These groups must develop better reporting systems, policies, consult/work with professionals, and educate/train to respond in ways that reduce trauma to survivors, rather than increase as they are currently doing.

Recently, there’s been a spotlight on EA through the media. The misconduct as reported illustrate the patterns well, and I have received first-hand stories of leaders in bay area and London/Oxford accused of fairly egregious sexual assault and misconduct. I believe there are approximately 30 accusations which put the organization (The Centre for Effective Altruism) at risk from either the accused or accuser. In response to my speculation, the community health team denied they knew of my work prior to August 2022, and that it was not connected to EA. Three white community health team members have strongly insinuated that I’ve lied and treated me in much the gaslighting, silencing way that survivors reporting rape fear being treated. The founder of an org with the EA ecosystem shared my work with the then-only liaison of CEA in February 2019, and the liaison confirmed earlier receipt of shared work in an email dated August 2022 – she additionally confirmed the aforementioned EA founder shared them. She also confirmed I had helped publicly days before. Someone on another nonprofit EA team confirmed via DM that the community liaison had shared my work with them “years ago”. Another founder of an EA nonprofit org emailed me through my website, sharing (quote) “I heard through the grapevine that you hold some sort of record on individuals in the EA community in the Bay Area, and that you are open to sharing whether you have received any concerns about certain individuals in confidence.” The story is illustrative of the way in which these communities deny the problem, as accusations of rape are dismissed, and people bringing the accusations or making accusations are discredited.

I am exercising caution around survivor confidentiality and personal liability in this piece. Yet, I strongly believe the acceptance and enabling of rape in these communities must end. The bias against Asian-Americans and against women must be addressed. I’ve been public with my story of rape in the past. I’m sharing it again, not to call attention to the person I accused, but to illustrate the patterns I’ve described in this piece. I’m Asian-American, and my well-being was not considered when I was assaulted. When I spoke out about my rape in 2016 and 2017 in these communities, I was called crazy, troubled, vindictive, manipulative, destructive, and more. The person I accused had been accused twice before and once after. The community members that supported him tried becoming friends with my friends, and sent messages to those friends of mine to tell them I was crazy and advising them to stop being a friend to me. After weeks of saying no, an untrained non-professional convinced several people to pressure me into an unprofessional mediation. I agreed to one evening conversation, was not allowed to share my story or perspective, and the mediator texted me to encourage me to commit suicide the next morning. This isn’t the only story from within these communities of an untrained mediator encouraging a survivor to commit suicide. This isn’t the only time an Asian-American woman was silenced by a majority white tech-ish community. And it’ll take a long time and a lot of work before we’re anywhere near ending it.

(1) read the comments; notice which have the most upvotes in all these posts.