Our experience with the DSA grievance process

CONTENT WARNING: SEXUAL ASSAULT

A little over a year ago, we wrote to warn the East Bay DSA membership of members who were running for that chapter’s steering committee. We did so based on our experience with them in the now defunct International Socialist Organization, a group with a pervasive culture of abusive behavior towards members who face special oppression and whose implosion was detonated by revelations of a rape coverup at the highest levels of the group.

We are writing this post to update DSA membership on what we experienced from DSA in the 14 months since. In short, we experienced:

• A complete drop in communication for 5 months from the chapter’s anonymous Harassment and Grievance Officers (HGO’s)
• A protracted investigation process that was not survivor centered, and in fact was retraumatizing at multiple points
• A failed mediation process in which the mediator provided by DSA acted unethically and disregarded a survivor’s credible account of sexual assault.

We believe DSA members — both in the East Bay chapter and nationally — have a right to know how their organization handles grievances and warnings of abusive members. We hope that this post will serve as a cautionary tale for others who may find themselves engaged in DSA’s deeply problematic grievance process. We know that there are many good activists within DSA, and we hope that DSA can reform itself to be survivor centered in its handling of grievances.

Double standards of discipline and anonymous, untrained HGO’s

We want to begin by noting that our initial post sounding the alarm about former ISO members running as the “Wave Slate” was made only after a lackluster response by East Bay DSA to formal grievances submitted against one of the members of that slate. By contrast, when we did go public, DSA members who added their names to the post received disciplinary letters within hours. As we wrote at the time:

We [attempted] to work through the official grievance process. After submitting a grievance, it was 8 days before a response was received. The response asked for extensive documentation, (which we then provided), and offered no other information. From this, we became concerned that the grievance process works primarily to protect the organization, and decided to make a public statement.

We chose to go public in the name of transparency, which the grievance process could not offer us. We want EBDSA members to understand our experiences with Wave slate members so that they can make an informed choice. In the ISO, leadership was often unaccountable to the membership, distorting democracy, and undermining the ability to have an inclusive organization. In our opinion, a democratic organization should not resist transparency or hide behind bureaucratic organizational procedures.

DSA chooses to use anonymous HGO’s. This means that members who submit a grievance do not know with whom they are corresponding and are largely in the dark when it comes to understanding how the entire process works. For survivors of abusive individuals and organizations, this does not create a safe space to bring forward concerns.

During the three weeks following our post, one of us who had submitted a formal grievance against one of the Wave Slate members had several back and forths with one of the anonymous HGO’s. During these communications, they experienced repeated skeptical questioning. Then, all communication ceased. Numerous attempts were made to reach back out to ascertain the status of the grievance process, with no response either from the HGO or from East Bay DSA Steering Committee. Eventually, patience exhausted, that member resigned from East Bay DSA.

Five months went by, and it was the end of October before we received any communication. We then heard back from a new set of HGO’s. Apparently the original HGO’s had resigned their position months before. Neither the HGO’s nor the steering committee communicated this to us — something for which East Bay DSA Steering Committee did at least, to their credit, apologize.

The new HGO’s reinvestigated the original grievance, starting from square one. Those of us who had already had to recapitulate their traumatic experiences with Wave Slate members in the ISO had to do so once again. These experiences included being on the receiving end of bullying and whisper campaigns from a long term paid organizer, as well hearing that same member discredit a survivor of a sexual assault that occurred at the ISO’s Socialism Conference in 2015 (an event of which DSA is now a co-sponsor).

It was quickly apparent that the HGO’s were woefully unprepared for the task that had been assigned to them. When two of us had a lengthy video conversation with one of the new HGO’s to answer their questions about the grievance, we asked if EBDSA used a survivor centered approach when handling grievances. The HGO did not appear to have ever heard the term before, and instead turned the question around to ask what the term “survivor centered approach” meant to us. In this conversation, it became clear that the HGO had essentially no background or training that would equip them to serve the role of HGO.

To be clear: we believe this HGO was acting earnestly and in good faith in attempting to handle our grievance. We believe responsibility for properly training and educating HGO’s rests with DSA as an organization, and therefore with its elected leadership. Expecting individual members who volunteer to carry out the very difficult task of serving as HGO’s to do so without any background, training, or education, is callous towards survivors who may attempt to use the grievance process as well as unfair to volunteer HGO’s.

A bungled and dishonest mediation process

In January 2021, 9 months after the initial grievance was filed, we finally learned from East Bay DSA of the outcome of the drawn out grievance process. The most problematic member of the Wave Slate had their membership suspended, as did those individuals who signed onto the initial Medium post who were also DSA members. Those suspensions were in place pending a mediation between the two sides. DSA’s national HGO supplied a mediator for the purpose, for whom EBDSA HGO’s vouched.

While we had concerns about participating in a mediation with a DSA supplied mediator due to DSA’s handling of this process to this point, we agreed to participate in good faith. Two of us had an initial video call with the mediator lasting 30–45 minutes. There were some early warning signs: for example, the mediator expressed an undue confidence in her own abilities as a judge of character, claiming she could easily tell when someone is being evasive or defensive vs when they are engaging in good faith. Nonetheless, we still agreed to participate in the mediation process. In hindsight, we wish we had insisted on an independent mediator agreed upon by both sides.

Two months went by, in which that mediator showed further troubling signs, including taking weeks to respond to emails, randomly dropping involved parties off email chains, and almost completely ignoring the person who had submitted the initial grievance to EBDSA.

Several days before the mediation was to occur, the mediator called off the mediation. Two days later, some of us joined a video call with her to understand what had happened. In that call we learned the following, which we reported back to East Bay DSA HGO’s and steering committee:

• The mediator conducted a biased investigation rather than an impartial mediation. She spent “multiple hours” (her words) talking to individuals on the other side of the dispute. Outside the initial video call she had with the two of us, she never spoke with us again. She never once spoke with the individual who filed the grievance. To be clear: our grievance had already been investigated twice by EBDSA. Ostensibly, the mediator was there to mediate the conflict, not conduct yet another investigation.
• The mediator did not take seriously the sexual assault that occurred at Socialism 2015. She appears to have dismissed it out of hand and not attempted to ascertain anything about it. In our call with her, she told us it was only an “anonymous account that claimed to be from the survivor.” When we asked her why she did not ask to be put in touch with the survivor or any of the authors of the corroborating accounts, she then said she did not want to know the identity of the survivor.
• The mediator misled us in such a way that led to the cancelation of the mediation. She encouraged the person who had initially submitted the grievance to withdraw and then cited that person’s withdrawal as a reason to cancel the mediation. This was the only time that the mediator ever communicated directly with the person who submitted the grievance!
• The mediator cited as one reason for the cancelation of the mediation the “already high cost” of the case. The implication appears to be that she ran out of billable hours for the case.
• The mediator falsely claimed that she had “always thought mediation was not called for in this case” despite having emailed in the initial week of the process that she thought mediation “was a good idea.”

We learned shortly after this call that the mediator is an attorney who is suspended in multiple states for previous unethical actions in her law practice. She apparently is a professional colleague of the national HGO, raising serious concerns about why she has been chosen as DSA’s go-to mediator.

Despite having been informed of all these details, East Bay DSA Steering Committee and HGO’s ultimately upheld the mediator’s findings. The member of the Wave Slate who had been suspended had their suspension lifted. They are now active in DSA San Francisco, whose membership will now have to contend with an organizer practiced in political maneuvering and bullying. On the other hand, those of us who were suspended remain suspended unless or until we remove our names from the original Medium post.

What might make the process more survivor centered

We do not have special training in how to conduct investigations of grievances and mediations between members, but we have some suggestions about how to improve the process.

HGO’s should generally aim to create a process in which survivors of abuse are treated with dignity and respect. Survivors should not be asked to go over their experiences repeatedly as this can be retraumatizing. People filing grievances or being asked to participate in mediation should be given clarity on the overall process in the beginning and their questions about the process should be answered with care and in a timely manner.

HGO’s should recognize various kinds of abuse that can take place. HGO’s should believe survivors’ accounts without skepticism. DSA should provide actual training for HGO’s on what a survivor centered process is and how they can uphold one.

Mediators that DSA may hire in the future should be able to adhere to some basic ethical standards of conduct, especially with regard to survivors of abusive organizations and individuals:

• Strive to be trauma informed and survivor centered
• Communicate to all sides the scope and limitations of the mediation process
• Communicate what response times should be expected: for example “time sensitive emails that impact participants ability to participate will generally be responded to within 2 days, all other communications will be responded to between 1–7 days.”
• Be transparent about the mediator’s role and who they work for
• Respond within the time frame stated and, at a bare minimum, acknowledge receipt of sensitive emails
• “Reply all” in group threads
• Provide both sides with same access to information and same options to be interviewed; whether or not the mediator interviews one side more or less should only be determined by the extent to which participants choose to be interviewed
• Provide opportunities for, and encourage, constructive feedback

Concluding thoughts

One goal of writing this post is to let DSA members know what the grievance process looks like so they can consider whether this is a process they want to go through. We also want to encourage DSA members to reflect on how they might reform and transform the process.

We understand that some DSA members may have been discouraged from talking to us about the grievance and mediation process in order to maintain organizational discipline. We can relate to this as we also experienced silencing during our time in the ISO and some of us felt we could better change the culture of that organization by maintaining our credibility and reforming from within rather than breaking discipline and losing influence in the organization. However, we recognize the harm that this discipline caused, in part by leading others to believe we supported the harm being caused to them, and in part because it kept us from noticing the full extent of the harm being caused. We invite DSA members sympathetic to us to reflect on the impact of their silence about our grievance.