Organizations can do a lot–even just through norms–to make people feel unsupported when it comes to addressing issues that would upset the status quo. Even informal ones, like friend groups, make people feel hesitant to rock the boat, and those are people you supposedly trust and they don’t even hold power over your means of making a living.
If you’re talking solely about bystanders, then yeah, they should have said something at the time, particularly if they were in any sort of position of power (even just being a white dude standing up to the other men would count). They aren’t heroes for corroborating now, but they are doing the bare minimum of a right thing, which is at least something. Considering the majority of the threads on these forums, that bare minimum is even outrageous to a huge swath of the (likely men) players commenting here.
And people need to understand the difference between being legally culpable for something and the fact that something happened. You have all the information to understand the sexism and harassment that took place here. Saying that’s for the court to decide is just a way to pretend moral superiority while actually taking the side of those in power.
The court will decide Activision’s culpability in these matters–the evidence that they happened is public record.
You are assuming that they all knew who were the ones that felt attacked. Or maybe no one said anything about it because they were to embarrassed. We can play the if game for a lot but not everyone has a lot of money saved where if they say something, lose their job, that they can just pick up and keep moving
I am assuming that when people watched the men get drunk and play video games while they sexually harassed the working women, that an office section all witnessed this.
So many of these allegations happened at company outings too, so many eyes on it right? Yet nothing comes out how many years later?
I am not cancelling. I enjoy the game. I just think it’s off that people don’t acknowledge that there was years of this, so much turn over within, yet even upon leaving they didn’t care enough to try to help. Now they are all about it on twitter amidst the outrage.
First, I totally understand where you are coming from. On the surface it seems simple. But it isn’t. It’s a case of outside looking in for some (not necessarily all but some).
One thing to understand is that regardless of todays public opinion of Blizzard, the idea of working on the WoW team (or whatever game’s team you fancy) is a dream job for many. This alone creates a tremendous amount of conflict internally for individuals to weigh when determining their course of action. From a clear, ethical perspective of course the right decision is obvious. But it’s human nature to allow subjective feelings to complicate logical decision making.
Next to consider is the “one voice won’t make a difference” idea. It’s very likely that many wrestling with the question of whether to speak up or not were afraid to do so after concluding that they would be alone in their action. It’s very likely that fear of reprisal kept them from talking to other employees that might be coping with the same internal conflict, thus not realizing that they had “strength in numbers”. So rather than recklessly risking losing their dream job without any clear chance of making a difference, they remained quiet. Again, from a clear, ethical perspective of course the right decision is obvious. But the circumstance dictates a very clouded perspective.
It just isn’t reasonable to expect logic to win out under these circumstances.
So it’s not really fair to assume anyone is giving a free pass to them (though certainly certain people are weaponizing them to bolster their personal opinions).
I personally agree with you. But I know or atleast see how the world works. In my line of work I show up to what people believe is a crisis in their life at that moment.
Fear is a very powerful emotion that stops alot of people from action.
Oh, you mean the women who were victim to this type of behavior?
Let me ask you something. If you had a daughter who worked for this company and found out that grown men were doing this to your daughter, how would feel? What would you do?
None of us know what really happened as we weren’t there and many of us don’t even know anyone that was involved during that time as, again, we weren’t there.
This is just dishonest. Most people are in support of lawsuit and victims.
Also people are going around harassing random employees as well. https://i.redd.it/b82hd2a7c5d71.png
I think the thread was referring to the official-sounding statements by former management employees who are acting like they had no idea any of this was going on during the many years they worked there.