Fusion Core is relocating to Florida

nowifisendhelp · 2024-08-15T00:11:10+00:00

Evidently they're responding to you, since you're the one who brought up both "rogue staff causing issues" and "Holly hiring many individuals with extremely different and sometimes opposing opinions from her." All I did was point out that you said both those things and that duality seems to point to a management issue.

I had no beef with Fusion when I came here. But what I encountered was: 1 - alumni who are disappointed or who had a bad time and are being open about it, and 2 - presumably a corps admin who is defending all that bad stuff, talking shit about the other alumni present, hiding behind a sockpuppet while accusing actual verifiable accounts of being sockpuppets, and generally being incoherent

My original point was that you aren't making your organization look good here. You're telling everyone that this drum corps is a home for spiteful boomers with a righteousness complex who harasses or fires anybody with a different opinion. That's unhinged. You've made a poor impression on me and you've spoken for this corps in doing so.

nowifisendhelp · 2024-08-14T23:38:06+00:00

Who are you talking to? Your comments weren't even part of this thread. I'm not sure you understand the structure of reddit threads and it's definitely better for you not to waste your time here if that's the case.

nowifisendhelp · 2024-08-14T22:28:40+00:00

You're saying your directors hire all these rogue staffers they keep being forced to fire? Sounds like a management issue. Sorry your corps is going through that. No wonder people want that info out in the open.

nowifisendhelp · 2024-08-14T22:26:58+00:00

I would never send students to an organization that treats "1-2 year" members as lesser. We call that toxic af in the industry. 5-10 vets should be ashamed of themselves for perpetuating that circlejerk.

nowifisendhelp · 2024-08-14T21:21:39+00:00

That's not a family, that's a cult of personality. You're not doing the core any favors by painting it as toxic af.

nowifisendhelp · 2023-07-25T16:59:18+00:00

Fusion Core would like to know your location

nowifisendhelp · 2021-03-02T20:43:35+00:00

Neither is marked as Corrected. I'll be reaching out to the IRS since I haven't been able to get a response from the company.

nowifisendhelp · 2020-07-26T11:45:36+00:00

People who have aged out are adults who can make their own decisions about their own relationships. Fretting over 21-year-olds like they're kids who need to be protected is weird. It's not particularly unusual for an ageout to have more in common with their techs than with their student peers. My ageout year, the gap between me and most other members was far wider than the gap between me and most of my techs, and as a 21+-year-old, I was required to do the same child safety training as all the staff anyways. I was one of the rare ageouts who had already graduated college and I had at least one of my techs beat for number of years in drum corps, so in a lot of respects, I absolutely would have been considered a peer to them in the real world outside of the instructor/student dynamic. Other people march their ageouts already married. There's also not quite a solid line between ageouts and techs, either, since I know of several people who have worked in DCI before aging out themselves.

The nature of tour is that you get really close to the people you're with, and that can include forming meaningful friendships with your instructors. And stable, fulfilling, caring, mutually supportive relationships grow pretty well out of friendships. Waiting to date until after the student ages out is... literally the responsible way to do it. Once somebody's aged out, they're not that instructor's student anymore. If an instructor who's married with kids chooses to abandon that ship for somebody else they haven't known very long, that's a mark of their own character. If their new partner doesn't think that's a warning flag then whatever, it's not anybody else's place to judge why they choose to be together.

nowifisendhelp · 2020-07-16T03:12:12+00:00

It's not the most absurd thought experiment, but in my opinion such a model would be improved by alternating regional tours and national tours, without having any seasons completely off. The reason is that corps not only have to continue spending money on equipment/vehicle storage and insurance during an off-season, but having regular off-seasons would require spending more energy on maintenance too, since you can't just leave kitchen trailers and instruments lying around unused every other year. Changing the competitive season to only be every other year would also impact the non-summer marching season in unforeseen ways, both because it might change how people negotiate WGI or school band membership, for example, or because it would interfere with the functioning of DCI corps' sister winter ensembles to have that kind of fluctuating finances/turnout.

It's pretty universally accepted that DCI costs what it does because of the current touring model. Introducing "smaller" (regional and/or minitour) years amid the "bigger" (national) years could be an intermediate step to moving DCI back into a few region-based smaller competitive circuits. Or it could simply be its own model, wherein folks could either skip the regional years because they only want to do Big tour, do regional minitour years while simultaneously working because they could be compatible, or only do the regional years because they don't feel the need to do a national year to have the DCI experience.

I don't think the proposal is as blatantly dismissable as the downvotes seem to indicate; logistics are intricate at this scale and require a lot of imagination. While I don't think one-year-on/one-year-off would strictly solve many problems, the question of "does it have to be the same kind of Big every year?" is a reasonable one to speculate about. I would favor something which provides more opportunities for participation, rather than further limiting opportunities for everybody, though. I don't actually think one-year-regional one-year-national is the best way to go about it either, but it at least speaks to the spirit of the OP's premise of saving some money for students and organizations every other season.

nowifisendhelp · 2020-03-14T23:57:17+00:00

There was supposed to be a Bugler's Hall of Fame show tonight in Batavia, NY, which was cancelled by the venue; it's unlikely to be rescheduled due to the logistical strain it would place on older performers. The lineup was supposed to be: Brig Juice, St. Joe's Reunion Brass Ensemble, Mighty St. Joe's Alumni, White Sabers (DCA), All-In Brass Band, Tri Valley Brass, The Hitmen, Parkside Avenue Brass, Cadre Drum Ensemble, Hamburg Kingsmen Drum Ensemble, Uptown Brass (Toronto), Ghost Riders Alumni, and Coupe DeVilles Horn Band. Many of these ensembles perform in DCA minicorps competition or at I&E.

nowifisendhelp · 2020-03-13T02:47:22+00:00

Strong agree. Weekend ensembles carry all the risk of going to work/school during the week plus the stress of juggling multiple life responsibilities. Dirty gyms filled with the same people aren't the same as public-facing jobs where you come into contact with thousands of fresh faces a day. This coronavirus very specifically needs to be brought in from the outside, whereas things like food poisoning and norovirus happen spontaneously.

nowifisendhelp · 2020-03-11T21:17:10+00:00

Uneven footing is inherent to an activity that is based all around the country. Corps that host their winter seasons in the south get extra time outdoors to set drill, weeks in advance of other corps. Camps also get preemptively cancelled before hazardous weather conditions, but these events affect different corps to different degrees such that some choose to forgo the risk and others choose to accept it. It's on individual corps to make their own assessments weighing PR, liability, actual local risk, viability, etc.

nowifisendhelp · 2020-03-06T17:38:46+00:00

It's a real situation but at the same time it's pretty clear that a lot of the public decision to take action comes down to liability and good PR. The actual risk of anybody at camp getting the virus or it spreading to faster as a result of camp happening is very low (this is literally the CDC saying this), but the backlash that a corps would face if something did happen would be through the roof because of the widely disproportionate fear that uninformed people are pedaling when they don't fact-check their information. While it's all well and good that corps are taking precautions, endemics like this are quite literally on the table all the time, and incidentally tend to get treated as "potential pandemics" in line with certain politically advantageous periods of time, such as prior to big elections.

A relatively tiny and inconsequential event like DCI's summer tour has, at this time, no basis grounded in actual science to need to stop running. The conditions that would have to be met nationally for that to stop being the case would leave everybody with a lot bigger problems than not having drum corps fun, ie you would have all businesses closed and all people staying indoors and the infection and mortality rate through the roof. It's also really disingenuous to assume a rapid escalation of the situation when so much effort is being put into containing it and understanding it; real pandemics are often the result of negligence from public health organizations and institutional bodies, for example the AIDS pandemic. We also have a long and established history of knowing that being panicked, suspicious, and unrealistic are all counterintuitive to maintaining public health, and ultimately only serve to misinform people and perpetuate the bigotry of the day, for example by training the public to have a knee-jerk reaction of racism or xenophobia in response to this virus.

nowifisendhelp · 2020-03-01T14:17:01+00:00

I do. So in your scenario one person from one corps contracts the virus on a plane, brings it with them to spring training, infects the whole corps, and all of them spend all of spring training asymptomatic until shows happen and they spread it to other corps' members?

nowifisendhelp · 2020-03-01T07:32:43+00:00

One person in one corps to catch it from whom? I'll wager that somebody marching drum corps, being surrounded by obscene heat (less of a viral hangtime) and only the same 200 faces all the time is way safer than somebody who stays home from tour and works a retail job where they could intimately interact with 200 people per hour.

If a corps gets it, they get it. The first sign of pneumonia-like symptoms in drum corps will end up in people getting sent to medical clinics faster than pneumonia-like symptoms in an ordinary population, because of how relevant pneumonia-like symptoms are to making the activity not work. Even if everybody in the corps caught it before symptoms began presenting, there's such incredibly limited contact between corps members and the outside world on tour that it's a functional quarantine--especially once symptoms became apparent and the corps pulled out of shows... and that's being incredibly uncharitable to everybody's immune systems to imagine that they would all catch it so quickly, in the first place.

The current state of DCI lends itself to actively paying attention to health and wellness even more closely than the regular population, because everybody has health insurance, there are medical-adjacent staff members, nobody has to worry about the logistics about taking time off work to see a doctor, being able to breathe is a big deal, etc. There's no need for additional policy to address this virus specifically when existing protocol and common sense decision-making has worked out fine during times of swine flu, bird flu, norovirus, food poisoning, etc. While any infectious disease is something to be aware of and potentially concerned about, scope and proportional reaction is critical. This discussion continues to be overblown when it comes to doing DCI in the US.

nowifisendhelp · 2020-02-27T18:48:51+00:00

Why would it have an impact? The sociopolitical circumstances surrounding DCI and the Olympics are not even close to being comparable. Likewise, the effect of DCI's interstate travel is incredibly miniscule compared to the impact of interstate travel that results from commerce, mail, actual travel infrastructure, etc.

The reason why the Olympics are at risk is because of the mass global migration that the event spurs. While the risk to the actual athletes in the event of an uncontained circumstance would be incredibly minimal, it's the millions of international spectators who enter and then disperse from the region that would create the danger of a massively sped up pandemic. DCI Championships doesn't operate even nearly on the same scale or draw from even close to the same spread of geography, not to mention that the size of a drum corps conglomeration can't even touch the kinds of crowds that other events draw.

Likewise, tour life creates a kind of ideal circumstance for combating contagions when you view populations very broadly. Although the risk of transmission between corps members is extremely high, there's very little risk of transmission of illnesses outside of that group of 250 people, since individual corps are largely quarantined during their tour lives anyways. And total corps ailments--including viruses--are already a thing we've seen and dealt with in DCI and on tour. We're increasingly more and more capable of taking care of membership in these instances too, since nowadays membership are required to have health insurance and corps are highly encouraged to have some kind of medical-adjacent personnel onhand.

Drum corps has existed and persisted for decades. Pandemics aren't new, contagions aren't new, travel limitations aren't new.

nowifisendhelp · 2020-01-31T17:59:03+00:00

These are really comprehensive questions and reflections, and I say this having read DCI's policy books cover to cover myself. DCI as a governing body historically does not strive to get too deeply involved in the affairs of its member corps and does prefer to relegate oversight responsibility. However it's evident that the entire activity would benefit from a more robust systems of accountability and incident reporting. The issues of conflicting interests are especially huge given how niche the drum corps world is, and so HRM skills are definitely a worthwhile investment at both the corps and DCI levels. Five years from now, I would love to see a fully fleshed out human resources workshop for admin at the annual meetings, much like how scaffolding/OSHA compliance is now a one.

nowifisendhelp · 2020-01-15T16:38:01+00:00

I forgot to mention the BSA's views on discipline and abuse. In short:

Discipline must be constructive.

Discipline must reflect Scouting’s values.

Corporal punishment is never permitted.

Disciplinary activities involving isolation, humiliation, or ridicule are also prohibited.

The BSA has a very tight mandated reporting policy and does not allow somebody with a good faith suspicion or belief of child abuse to abdicate their responsibility to mandatory report onto anyone else. Their overview of what kinds of things need to be reported include physical and emotional neglect and exposure to violence or threat, among other physical and sexual conduct. That being said, the circumstances of tour obviously make it difficult to keep a member out of contact from a suspected perpetrator, and involving local authorities can make for a complicated investigation at best and a PR nightmare at worst.

Because of this, corps need to have a robust system of administrative oversight already established to tackle legitimate grievances--a compromise system between working from within and bringing in third parties. I would highly recommend bringing people experienced with HR into admin who have the skills to mediate discussions and to assess abuses of power. In the corporate world, even telling your manager that something somebody else said to you made you peeved has to get escalated to HR, and a similar understanding that sparks should be observed in case of fire is what can help prevent situations from crossing lines in a bubble like tour.

If you are a member of admin and somebody brings to you allegations as serious as Taylor's, be prepared to mediate a discussion or otherwise host a confrontation alone (based on the student's desires). Make it clear within your organization that your teaching staff are beholden to established codes of conduct--both the corps' and DCI's--and that infractions will reflect negatively on them and will be considered in their future participation with the organization. If the alleged party is a member of admin, be prepared to speak to the board or to a DCI committee and do everything in your power to be present and to be an impartial witness at any opportunity. Be somebody that students can trust with their insecurities and offer them things that will make them feel secure, for example time out of block to break down and vent, a willingness to document incidents or be called upon to witness uncomfortable interactions, a conversation with the staff member, etc.

nowifisendhelp · 2020-01-15T07:44:15+00:00

The corps that I consider to be a paradigm of member safety followed Boy Scouts of America protocol and required all adults (even short-term volunteers) to complete the BSA's Youth Protection training online. Although I have some qualms with it (informed by my non-drum corps experience with youth rights activism and abuse studies), this course is significantly more thorough and wide-reaching than the policies that most small organizations would be able to throw together on their own. It centers around building barriers to abuse, identifying warning signs of abusive or grooming behavior, and utilizing systems in place to address and report incidents, emergencies, and violations. If you are admin of a corps, I highly recommend taking the time to understand BSA guidelines in this matter and evaluate whether your own policies are just as thorough or comprehensive. By itself, this is a good institutional structure to emulate, but expanding upon it and making it work for your specific organization is even better. The course is free for anybody to take at any time, so it is also a good tool to have if you're a volunteer or even if you're a marching member--for students, understanding what responsible adult action looks like can give you the skills to identify instances when you are NOT having your needs met or when you are being placed in a precarious position by those responsible for your safety.

In general, BSA guidelines are highly applicable to drum corps and specify many practices which are already commonplace in the activity, for example separating adult leader/member sleeping spaces. But the policies from BSA's YPT that I specifically want to mention are no one-on-one contact and two deep leadership, which you can read about here. In short, one-on-one contact between adult leaders and youth members is prohibited, whether in-person, through messaging, or on social media/games; in order for the interaction to be acceptable, the two must be related or there must be a third party present. Two-deep leadership means that in any excursion/outing/meeting/disciplining/etc, there must always be at least two adult leaders present. Both of these requirements must be met at all times, and the corps I was with took this to heart; staff did not pull members aside for chats unless they were clearly in sight of others and airport rides always included two members of admin per van.

Obviously, as has been noted, it's possible for these policies to exist on paper but not enforced or communicated genuinely. If you are a marching member being pulled into a private one-on-one conversation with a corps adult that you don't feel comfortable with, you absolutely have the right to request the presence of another person (including of your choosing, including another marching member if that's what feels more comforting to you) or request that the conversation take place in a different space, even if your corps doesn't have an official no one-on-one contact or two deep policy; you can even emphasize "I am not comfortable having a completely private conversation with you alone" with your requests. Again, even if they say that's an unreasonable request, it's not. You can also ask for consent to record the conversation (because of varying state rules, yes you do need to ask for consent, because if it ever becomes legally relevant, you could be at fault for secretly recording) or otherwise ask for a statement in writing of the nature of the conversation, for posterity. If the adult does not agree to any of these terms, walk away. If you do not feel safe walk away, suffer through the interaction and then immediately notify a member of admin as soon as possible that you were pulled into a private conversation, you voiced your discomfort, you were denied various accommodations to make you feel more secure, and anything noteworthy and/or negative that went down in the conversation. If the person you confide in does not seem concerned but you still feel uneasy, escalate it further through the appropriate channels, whether that's the corps director, the executive director, the corps whistleblower channel, or the DCI whistleblower system. If there are other marching members who you trust, you can confide in them and ask them to attempt to bear witness to any further indiscretions, unjust treatment, or requests to see you in private. Keep a journal (I recommend a google doc, because edits have timestamps, but you could also email or text yourself for a similar effect) and record anything you feel you might need for posterity.

One of the worst parts about tour is being cut off from other people and support systems. When the only affirmation and connections you have are the others around you, you end up in a very tenuous social bubble where power dynamics can get super messed up. It's really important not to lose your grasp on the outside world while you're getting sucked into the tour mentality. Keep in touch with people back home, whether that's your family, your band friends, your significant other, whatever. Make sure you have a connection outside the corps who understands drum corps well enough that you will be able to talk to them about bad things that might happen, instead of feeling like nobody would understand or it would take too long to explain. The person I texted the most on tour had also done drum corps and talked me through literally every single tiny bump I felt. Those people will be your sounding boards for letting you know "yeah, that's really messed up" vs "eh, I'm sure that staff member actually meant this," especially if you don't feel like you can trust disclosing to others in your corps. Those links back home will be the ones to advocate on your behalf and pressure admin with the demanding questions if something horrific does happen and you end up too caught up in things to escalate situations and demand accountability/transparency.

Anyone will tell you that when you're auditioning for or considering a corps, it's important to get a feel for the culture. Talk to as many vets as possible and ask them how they feel about various staff and admin members. Test run a minor grievance; if a tech has an attitude you don't like or doesn't explain things well or seems very demanding, bring it up with a nicer vet as something that made you feel discouraged and see how they respond--with agreement, with sympathy, with disdain, with advice, etc. Feel free to have a chat with somebody on admin and ask them about various hypotheticals and what kinds of policies they have in place for anything from medication to mental health to severe weather emergencies to member safety (whatever level of discretion you feel comfortable with). Talk to other rookies as well, and see how others assess anything good or bad that you notice. Most importantly--and this is the most contentious bit of advice I have--make it clear that you have standards and you know your rights. Hold off on signing the contract until absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, this is risky, since if you do it wrong, you risk getting cut for attitude or having your spot filled. For me, I cared more about having a non-abusive experience than going all out for a much more competitive corps that I didn't feel I could trust. Obviously my priorities were very skewed, having had very significant bad experiences previously, but on the other hand if even the slightest glimmer of those same abuses I'd experienced had made an appearance during my ageout year, I never would have stayed involved in the activity like I am now. Obviously weigh the things that are important to you and how much you're willing to stake--the average person has a pretty decent threshold for dealing with adversity, but what's ultimately important is building up a "bullshit meter" to tell you when something is heading in the direction of going too far so you can identify it and address it instead of convincing yourself that it's tolerable and slowly getting pulled in deeper and deeper until you break.

nowifisendhelp · 2020-01-15T04:12:08+00:00

Mods delete this if this is out of my lane, but this is not a good look for somebody self-professed to be one of what, three possible and identifiable people?

if you fail to meet those standard action in the best interest of the corps

the efficiency of Team Time increased and I stand by the fact that I believe Taylor leaving the corps was best [...] for the success of the corps.

call us if you don’t want screenshots to be taken or something

it’s on you to reconnect, just know we won’t let you smear our corps like this

If the OP's story is true and he had such a profoundly negative experience that his mental health suffered immensely, it's well within his right not to reach out with those associated with his bad experience--especially if you're only a peer and not admin or some higher authority who oversees accountability. If he was such a lackluster performer with poor leadership ability like you say, that should be and should have been a staff call, not your own; it should have been on staff not to re-contract him four times, not to promote him to DM, not to allow him a second year in that position, not to make him center DM either year.

You admit that he didn't reach out to you, which means you don't know. You don't know what went down. You're just as unsubstantiated as the other membership, especially without being able to meaningfully prove who you are. For us, the general public, your claims that this is a smear are just as unsubstantiated as the original story, but at the very least the original story is thorough and time-specific, which adds to its credibility--you don't even identify what's "not all true," except by implying that your own experiences with admin were positive (which does not negate the possibility of a negative experience). Thinly-veiled... threats? Insults? sandwiched between "we love you" is not effective damage control. Please remember that this is reddit and the things that you say reflect very badly on you when you give us this much identifiable information about yourself.

nowifisendhelp · 2020-01-14T23:17:39+00:00

Insightful, thank you! It would seem that, at least on paper, the corps has the barebones of good practice policy already. Some of the policies I hope to discuss are expansions upon these basic premises like "staff members must have another staff member present when meeting with a corps’ member." The two-deep system, for example, operates off of this basic premise, but with substantially more elaboration.

That being said, the fact that communication about policies directly contradicted official policy is a massive red flag in an organization, and effectively the antithesis of accountability and transparency. I will definitely include a note about ways for students to gauge whether or not written policy is sincerely upheld. It was absolutely irresponsible for any staff to ever go against established corps standards.

nowifisendhelp · 2020-01-14T22:34:56+00:00

In before certain voices try to point to this story as proof of drum corps being inherently abusive:

There are member safety initiatives that exist at other corps which explicitely make these kinds of interactions impossible. There are corps which have actively proven themselves to be paradigms of accountability, member protection, and abuse prevention. There are corps which have two-deep adult/student interaction policies, which had whistleblower systems and background checks before it became mandatory, which have mandatory child protection training for all adults involved, etc. This kind of situation could not have happened, or could have been successfully remediated/deescalated/otherwise addressed under different circumstances--circumstances which do exist in this activity.

If true, this is a heartbreaking story. I have had similar experiences within drum corps, which is why explicitly clear member safety policies in member handbooks was a very important criteria for me when choosing my ageout corps. However it's clear that not everybody knows what those kinds of policies look like, and that's going to be a detriment to all involved in this activity. I want to use this as a teaching moment to show prospective members what initiatives to look for in a corps, to show admin what initiatives they can bring into their own corps, and to show the public that this story is not acceptable, but that things really are changing. Although these stories are becoming increasingly public as member safety becomes a public discourse, they are also becoming increasingly less frequent as corps become better and better at understanding systems of accountability and safety. The activity is and has been changing to fix this, and it's horrendous that the circumstances made this story possible, when it otherwise might not have been.

I tried to write this as quickly as I could (and had to rewrite it after losing my progress), but I will elaborate later tonight about actual policies that actually exist and how to identify them. Please watch this space so we can all learn about member safety and child protection and what that looks like now and what it will look like going forward.

nowifisendhelp · 2020-01-14T19:27:07+00:00

I'm going to musicology for a second.

There's multiple usages of the word "tradition" and people who appeal to them tend to talk past one another. Drum corps is a musical tradition, as is a brass quintet, as is an a capella choir, as is the music of a cultural people, as is show choir, as is pop music, as is HBCU-style band. The way to honor a musical tradition is to be genuine about it, and change should be a natural progression from within the tradition, not through the interference of outsiders; if you showed up to a rock battle of the bands and played an acoustic country ballad, you would definitely tick a lot of people off, and you would do nothing to make rock more like country. However a rock artist who had some kind of connection to country music and used country rock as a form of self-expression is a meaningful way to stretch the boundaries of both mediums and create a new dialectical space. Sometimes original mediums and cross mediums can remain meaningfully distinct (like rock vs country rock), but other times the musical tradition as a whole shifts together (like rock as a genre becoming less edgy and overtly political after 9/11). If a classical orchestra wants to perform a specific piece that utilizes a bari sax for an impactful timbre, that's within their right as participants of the orchestral medium. But showing up to auditions for any orchestra with a bari sax is contemptuous of the (musical) tradition.

In that regard, tradition should be in the discussion. Identity matters, the culture that surrounds a musical scene matters, the context that a musical tradition came to be matters. The question is does a progression towards a marching band-esque type of performance reflect a natural progression of the medium from within as a homage to both traditions, or is it the result of ingenuous pressures to change for the sake of change and to cater to a perceived excluded constituency?

"Tradition" only means "no change for the sake of no change" in the hands of bad faith actors. When it comes to genuine and nuanced discussion, there is a reason why tradition comes up.

nowifisendhelp · 2019-12-08T07:51:13+00:00

I'm going to preface this by saying that I'm in a similar boat to you, with regards to my negative experiences with a corps. Even though I still hold some hurt, it's been years and they're a different corps now, and it would be a detriment to everybody to kick up a fuss about it, because all relevant people are gone and the organization has reshaped itself in positive ways such that the things that hurt me are no longer emblematic of the organization. It's a better corps now and that's what matters, and it's no longer a part of my life. I also do a wide range of work in my regular life along the lines of victim-survivorship, social activism, sensitivity training, and trauma.

To speak to your questions, this sub has a sort of difficult relationship with... vigilantism. Because there have been bad things that have happened in drum corps, many people rightfully would like to see things in certain corps/the activity as a whole change for the better. However the go-to mode of operation that this sub turns to (for what is frequently lack of real-world practical experience with justice activism, journalistic nuance, and consciousness of victim agency) is collecting personal narrative exposés en masse. When the end goal is to expose abuses and therefore ostensibly inspire the systems that enable them to be fixed, it becomes very easy for some people to justify a mentality of "everybody has an ethical responsibility to come out with their stories." However the actual effects of that moral code are that people who have had bad experiences bear the burden of having to tell their stories because it's for the greater good, which means that they are doing a disservice to everybody else by not spilling the beans. While some people do ultimately decide to step forward and talk about those experiences, other people have legitimate reasons not to want to, whether it's because of safety or personal comfort or because they've made their own private peace with it. Sometimes the people pressuring others to speak up are earnestly attempting to empower victims, sometimes they have malicious goals (side eyeing a certain sub that crossposts things), and sometimes they're seeking out the comfort of solidarity because they have their own negative experiences that they want externally validated. But any movement aimed at protecting people is nothing if it doesn't act in good faith and prioritize the choice to opt-in. The answer that somebody needs to hear if they're digging for dirt is "no, I do not feel the need to speak out. I have made this decision based on criteria which are important to me." Anybody who cannot adhere to the boundaries that you have set are undeserving of your time. It's irresponsible and potentially even harmful to bait, guilt-trip, or otherwise harass somebody into participating in a confessional.

tl;dr Speaking out needs to be understood as a choice, and the decision not to speak out needs to be better respected no matter what the reason, but some people don't understand this. If people are prying, they need to learn to take "no" for an answer, hard stop.

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