Yup, it was. And the situation definitely should be investigated in depth, and the culture changed, such as similar things don’t happen in the future.
I just want to draw attention to the fact, that dating culture is very different in the UK/US and, for example Italy or India. And I think the culture you are born into, not EA membership is a primary factor shaping human romantic and sexual behavior, so the EA dating culture varies heavily between the countries. I think that “finding a way of preventing sexual misconduct” is overall a god damn responsibility of every community builder, but, seriously it is because it was always important to prevent such things, not because of recent events.
Now, what happened can be probably a good feedback or wake up call. But:
It is a good feedback for everybody involved in the UK/US community, as it is the culture which allowed such events.
It should be a good wake up call for everybody outside those countries, who so far didn’t think about prevention measures...
...but those prevention measures should be adjusted to your culture and needs of your community members. Solving local problem using remedies coming from entirely other culture (i.e. Anglo- Saxon culture) and shaming people for not liking those remedies will just cause problems, and, let’s say it gently—we have some very visible examples of serious fuck-ups which such approach caused in the past.
Also, if we focus on “EA culture” instead of “EA Anglo-Saxon culture” here, we end up ignoring some serious nuances I think.
Hm, I think that maybe it explains this tendency. However, I don’t think that a big proportion of people in the community being located in one country should be an excuse for forgetting about cultural diversity here, and treating everybody as if they came from the same background.
I don’t know exact numbers, but I think that this “majority” is rather 70%, not close to 98%. Also, if we want to expand EA it’s super important for it to be welcoming, and I think the tendency to ignore cultural diversity (i.e. by requesting everybody to adopt US-adjusted norms and shaming people who don’t/are confused/behave not according to those norms as their culture has different way of expression) makes expansion unnecessarily difficult.