Anyone who has been involved with leftist political organizing knows you occasionally get that one white dude who gets power in the organization and then uses that power to exploit some younger, vulnerable member. I think most of us know of an instance where this happened…in DSA, SA, PSL, FRSO…any of them. And I have seen firsthand that once in a while when this happens the victims claims are not taken seriously enough and it often leads to big problems. It’s a huge issue in organizing spaces across the board.

So has some member of some PSL group at some point not taken some victims claims of sexual violence as seriously as they should have? I can almost guarantee it.

But.

This has very little to do with PSL or any of the others as organizations. I almost guarantee you PSL leadership is not trying to cover up widespread or even localized instances of SA. This is just unfortunately what happens once in a while in these kinds of groups. It’s wrong and it should not happen and the senior leadership should work hard to stop it from happening and remove people if it does, and I’m sure they have policies in place to do that, but local groups can often hide under the radar with stuff like this.

And it’s not limited to leftist political organizations. It’s not limited to political organizations. It’s a symptom of a much wider systemic problem…one that PSL absolutely is aware of and wants to work towards solutions to.

If there is any legitimate criticism of PSL or if any similar leftist orgs around this topic it would be that they should do better at vetting and training their local leaders to ensure this sort of thing doesn’t happen. But to me claims of some widespread SA cover up in PSL sets off all my “this is propaganda” alarm bells.

All that said, not an expert on it specifically so if someone does have genuine information around it I’d be curious to know.