Oct 20, 2022:  Statement about PEERS

Oct 20th, 2022

It has come to the LSN's attention that earlier this year, when we posted our statement about the Period Events & Entertainment Re-Creation Society (PEERS)'s decision to work with Red Barn Productions (RBP) and a call to action to urge them to change course, some members of the Dickens Christmas Fair (DCF) community used our call to action as cover for their own agendas. We've received reports that people affiliated with PEERS received written threats and attacks from people claiming to be working on behalf of the LSN. While this isn't the first time we've heard rumors of community members sending vitriolic harassment to other community members in the context of this communal reckoning, we now have plenty of concrete evidence of people engaging in verbal and emotional abuse against others while claiming to act on behalf of the LSN.

Our response contains the following three parts:

1. To those who have been engaging in abusive behavior against your fellow DCF community members: STOP. IMMEDIATELY.

This entire upheaval first began because marginalized people who were subject to grave injustices within our community came together and said, "No more." From the day we began this journey, we committed to not just hold the sources of this harm accountable, but change the way the entire community pursues safety, justice, and freedom. It sickens and angers us that there are people using us and our cause as an excuse to vent their personal rage against those they deem "deserving" of such abuse.

If the perpetrators of this behavior are reading this, we want you to know: you do not represent us. You do not speak for us. Though you may believe that you share our values and our goals, you clearly do not understand them well enough to truly align with them. You have no idea how much harm you've done, in terms of both suffering to us personally and damage to the trust we’ve tried to build within this community.

We strongly recommend that you examine your behavior and ask yourself what it was really for: our collective liberation, or your own satisfaction.

If you would then like to engage in a process of accountability, we are more than open to hearing from you.

2. To those who have been harmed by the above: we apologize.

One of the biggest misconceptions we've encountered is that this is a conflict between two diametrically-opposed parties, the "pro-LSN" side and the "pro-RBP" side; and that to be fully with one, community members must be fully against the other. The idea that we are asking members of our community to "choose a side" – and that being on the "wrong" side makes you some monstrous bigot – is at best absurd, and at worst a dangerous lie. That’s not the point of this. It never has been.

We're not in this fight because we want to "beat" RBP.

We're in this fight because we want everyone to win. We want the places where we build community to be safe and freeing for all of us.

If you are working to make this community a safer and freer place for everyone, too, then we are on the same side. Even if we strongly disagree with your ideas about how to achieve those goals, you should never be subject to violence for those opinions or efforts. We do not have to like each other in order to treat one another with basic dignity and respect.

Your safety matters to us. Your welfare matters to us. We are deeply sorry that those things have been violated in our name.

If you feel comfortable speaking to us directly about your experiences so that we can engage in some form of restorative justice, we promise that we will handle that process as carefully and equitably as we can.

3. Moving forward, this is how we hope to prevent this from happening again.

(To be clear: these items were already in progress before we received this news. We're announcing our intentions around them now so the community may know what these items are intended to address.)

In the coming weeks, there will be three major publications coming out from the LSN:

    A. An official LSN roster: We will create a series of posts with the names, affiliations, and pictures of every representative within the LSN, as well as any additional community volunteers who are authorized to speak for us in any capacity. If someone claims to speak for the LSN as a collective, and they are not explicitly present in this roster, they are spreading misinformation. If this happens, we encourage you to inform one of us as soon as possible. Additionally, we hope that this roster will give some insight into who the LSN reps actually are: a collection of volunteer individuals who care about making this community a better place.

    B. Frequently asked questions/LSN mythbusting: With the aid of some community volunteers, we've put together a list of the most commonly asked questions and misconceptions about the LSN, the boycott, the Minimum Requirements for a Safe Dickens Fair (informally named the MSR), and so on. We are working on our responses to those queries, which will be posted on both the official LSN website and all our official social media outlets. Once they've been published, we encourage everyone to read them thoroughly. This way, we hope to prevent redundancies and ensure that we're all on the same page regarding what the aims of the LSN are.

    C. A revised version of the Minimum Requirements: This boycott will end when a specific set of conditions has been met, but we understand that those conditions are not clear to everyone. After consulting with Sue Honor and representatives from Londoners of the African Diaspora (LoAD) involved with writing the original Minimum Requirements, we have begun working on an updated version of those conditions that reflects the current status of our community standards and our conversations (such as they are) with RBP. With this, we hope to clarify the current status of the boycott and what work remains to be done before it can be safely lifted.

To those of you who have read this far: we thank you. Like many of you, we are tired of the misinformation, uncertainty, and lack of trust between the institutions that have harmed us and the communities we have tried to protect. We deeply appreciate your continued attention and care regarding the issues that have created and sustained this communal upheaval. Though there's still a long way to go before it's over, we believe that with honest communication, genuine accountability, and clarity of purpose, we can all make our way to a better future – together.

In solidarity,

The LSN