Reporting

You never owe anyone a report

Not the community. Not the next person. Not the organizer who says “we can’t do anything unless someone comes forward.” That sentence is true about their limits. It is not a debt you carry.

People who were harmed often get handed a second job: keep everyone else safe. “If you don’t say something, he’ll do it to someone else.” Maybe. And the responsibility for what he does next is his, and belongs to the people with the power to stop him. It doesn’t transfer to you because you were the one it happened to.

Deciding not to report is a decision, not a failure. So is deciding to report later. So is starting and then stopping. A report is yours in the same way a yes is yours: you can give it, shape it, and stop at any point.

Why people report, and why they don’t

Both lists are full of good reasons. Nobody on either list is doing it wrong.

Some reasons people report

• They want it on record, in case it ever matters.
• They don’t want to be in a room with that person again, and the room belongs to someone else.
• Saying it out loud to someone official makes it real in a way that helps them stop doubting it.
• They want something specific to change.

Some reasons people don’t

• The person who hurt them is a teacher, a host, a friend of the organizer, or the reason they have a community at all.
• They’ve watched how the last report went, and it went badly for the person who made it.
• They aren’t sure it “counts,” because they said yes to part of it, or went quiet, or stayed.
• They just want to heal, and telling it again costs more than it gives.

That third reason deserves its own sentence. People with less power often cannot safely say no. A student with the instructor who decides their progress. A newcomer at a party run by the person touching them. When no isn’t safe, people go still, go along, or smile through it. That is a frozen no, not a yes. Silence and compliance are not consent, and they don’t disqualify a report. More on this in Power Dynamics & Consent.

Reporting is a spectrum, not a single door

“Reporting” sounds like one big official act. In practice it’s a range, from completely private to fully formal. You can pick one, several, or none, in any order, and you can stop at any step.

• Write it down for yourself. Nobody else sees it. It exists so that future you has an accurate account if you ever want one. Example: a dated note in your phone that says what happened in three sentences.
• Tell one trusted person. A friend, a partner, a therapist. Not to start anything. Just so you’re not holding it alone.
• Tell the organizer or host. The person whose room it was, or whose room you’ll both be in next. Example: “I don’t want to go into details yet. I need you to know I won’t come to Thursday’s jam if he’s there.” That is a complete report.
• Tell the platform. If it involves someone you met through Arsclepius, or something you found here, you can write to us through the report page. What that does, exactly, is below.
• Go outside the community. A doctor, a crisis line, a sexual assault service, a lawyer, or the police where you live. Some harms need people with training and authority no community has.

None of these steps requires the one before it. You can go straight to a professional and never tell the community. You can tell a host and never go further.

What to write down, and when

If you think you might ever want to report, even if you’re nowhere near deciding, a private record written soon after is a gift to your future self. Memory is honest but it moves. A few lines on the day beat a polished account a year later.

• When and where. The date, the event, the venue or the address. “Saturday rope jam, the upstairs room.”
• What happened, in your words. Not the words you think an official wants. “He kept tying after I tapped his arm twice” is better than a paragraph of careful legal-sounding language.
• Who was there. Anyone who saw it, heard it, or who you spoke to right after.
• Messages. Screenshots of texts or DMs before and after, with the dates visible. Some apps let the sender unsend a message from your side too. A screenshot stays.
• What your body did. Froze, left early, couldn’t sleep, bruised. This is part of what happened, not a footnote to it.

And this, as plainly as I can say it: you do not need perfect records to deserve belief. Gaps are normal. Getting the order of events wrong is normal. Remembering the song that was playing and not what day it was is normal. A single sentence is a real report. Anyone who treats an incomplete account as a false one is showing you how they receive reports, not how true yours is.

Keep it somewhere only you can open. Not a shared laptop, not a cloud folder a partner can see, not a group chat. And if writing it down makes things worse right now, skip it. This is a tool, not a task.

What the Arsclepius report page actually does today

I would rather tell you exactly how small this is than let you imagine something bigger behind it.

• It’s one email address, read by a person. Not a form, not a ticket queue, not a model. The report page opens your own email with a few optional prompts already in it, or you can write to the address from anywhere. It goes to a very small number of people, and right now I’m the one reading it. Not around the clock: if someone is in danger now, call your local emergency number first.
• You get a reply within 3 days. If that time passes with nothing, assume the mail went missing, not that you were ignored, and send it again.
• Nothing you write is stored on the platform. No incident record, nothing on your profile or theirs. Your account of what happened lives in your sent folder and one mailbox. You keep control of it.
• The first reply is a question. What do you want to happen? Something done, something on record, or nothing further. All three are complete answers.
• What we can do is administrative. End someone’s access, take someone off an event roster, stop a booking between the two of you, pass on a message to a host in words you approve, or point you toward people trained for this. We tell you before we do any of it, unless someone is in danger. Then we may act first and tell you as soon as we can.
• You choose how much of yourself is in it. You can write from an address that doesn’t name you; the cost is that we can’t write back. You can write for someone else, if you say so and say whether they know. And there is no deadline. Something from two years ago is still worth sending.

The Report option on a message, a profile or a card is a smaller thing: it sends us a link to what you flagged, so someone can look at it. For what happened between you and another person, the report page is the place, because it starts with what you want.

What it doesn’t do matters just as much. It doesn’t rule on what happened between two people. It doesn’t publish anything. It doesn’t call the police for you. There is no mediation service behind it today, and I won’t promise an outcome I can’t deliver. You can also block someone yourself from their profile, right now, without telling anyone, including me.

When someone tells you

Most reports aren’t made to an organizer. They’re made to a friend, in a car, late, half-finished. How to be that friend, in the first minute and after, is the whole of When Someone Tells You. Start there.

This page only adds one thing: if they decide to report and ask for your help, help with the mechanics and leave the words to them. Sit with them while they write. Read it back if they ask. Let it go from their own email, in their voice, asking for what they want. Example: “Do you want me here while you send it, or do you want to do it alone and call me after?” If you write it for them, it becomes your report about their life.

For organizers: receiving a report well

If you run a class, a jam, a party, or a community, someone will eventually bring you a report. Not maybe. Will. Decide how you’ll receive it before the day comes, because on the day your nervous system will be deciding for you.

Don’t hold it alone

You are almost certainly not trained to investigate, and holding a report alone means every judgment is yours, with nobody to catch your blind spots. Bring in at least one other person the reporter agrees to. Know which professionals where you live you would point someone to before you need them.

Name your conflicts of interest

If the person reported is your co-teacher, your partner, your biggest ticket seller, or your friend of ten years, you have a conflict. Say so out loud, to the reporter, and step back from decisions. Example: “He’s my business partner. I don’t trust myself to be fair here, so I’m asking Dana to hold this with you.”

Protect the reporter from retaliation

Retaliation is rarely a threat. It’s being dropped from the assistant rota, not being invited to the next intensive, a sudden coldness from the inner circle. Watch for it, and treat it as its own harm when you see it. If the reporter loses their place and the reported person doesn’t, the whole community learns what reporting costs.

Say what you’ll do before you do it

The reporter should never learn what you did from someone else. Before you act, tell them what you plan and who will know. Before you speak to the reported person, remember that the details of a report often identify the person who made it, and ask the reporter first. Example: “I’d like to ask him not to come to Thursday’s jam. If he asks why, I’ll say a concern was raised and not by whom. Is that okay with you?” Write down, briefly, what they asked for and what you did, and keep it private.

If the report is about you, or about someone you can’t be fair to, say so and point the person to someone outside your circle, or to the report page if it involves someone or something on Arsclepius.

A reporting process is not a punishment process

When those two get fused, reports stop coming, because every report becomes a trial the reporter has to win.

Reporting yourself

Sometimes the report you need to make is about you. You realize, days or years later, that something you did landed as harm. Often it isn’t a dramatic moment. Sometimes not asking is what caused the violation. You assumed the yes from last week still held. You moved a hand somewhere new because the body in front of you didn’t object. You read stillness as enjoyment. The harm wasn’t in a question you asked badly. It was in the question you didn’t ask at all. (That’s the whole of Asking Out Loud.)

Coming forward looks like this: you tell the host or organizer what you did, in plain words, without making them manage your feelings about it. “At the jam last month I changed a tie without checking in first, and I now think my partner couldn’t say no. I’m telling you so you know what I did, and I’ll sit out until you tell me otherwise.” You ask what the space needs from you. You don’t contact the person you harmed to process it with them unless they’ve said they want that. If it involved someone or something on Arsclepius, you can write to the report page about yourself, too.

Two cautions. First, their story is still theirs. Naming them to a host tells the host something about their life they may not have wanted known. Say what you did, and leave out who it was done to unless the host can’t act without it. Never tell a wider circle. Second, a self report is not a way to get your version in first. Reporting yourself to shape how their account will land is a tool turned into a weapon, not accountability. What happens next is shaped by them, not by you.

This is the front door to accountability. It will cost you something. That’s part of how people can tell it’s real.

How reporting connects to everything else

A report isn’t the end of anything. It’s a doorway. On the other side can be repair, shaped by the person who was harmed. It can be a restorative process instead of shame and exile. It can be distance and nothing further. What decides it should be what the harmed person needs, not what makes the community comfortable.

And like every tool here, a reporting process can be turned into a weapon. The version I worry about most isn’t a false report. It’s a process that exists on paper and quietly buries what comes in: the “we’re looking into it” that never ends, the review run by the reported person’s friends. If a process keeps ending with the reporter leaving and the reported person staying, that is the process working as designed, and the design is the problem.