# Procedural Burden Falls Hardest on Those With Least Standing ## Claim Reporting requirements written to screen out bad-faith accusations screen out frightened good-faith ones first, because only the good-faith reporter reads the requirements and concludes they do not qualify. <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> ## Evidence **Source**: [The Standard for EXPOSERS Is THIS Let's Talk About It...](3.%20Resources/Readwise/Articles/The%20Standard%20for%20EXPOSERS%20Is%20THIS%20Let's%20Talk%20About%20It....md) — Blaze Foret, responding to a published list of conditions for publicly reporting misconduct The conditions under critique: deep fear and trembling, a tear in the eye and a lump in the throat, absolute certainty of correctness, a private conviction that God directed this specific disclosure, the heart of both a pastor and an evangelist, total humility, and a spotless conscience. The inference that generalises is structural, not theological: > [!quote] > it is the victims that start the exposure process always. They're the ones that have to speak up to begin with Because sources come first in the chain, **any condition placed on intermediaries is inherited by sources**, whatever its author intended. Foret anticipates the denial and rejects it — *"this person might say no I'm not putting that burden on the victims. Yes, you are."* The observable consequence he names is the one worth carrying: some people conclude they cannot satisfy the conditions and **leave the institution in order to speak at all**, which means the institution loses its only corrective signal precisely when it most needs it. ## Scope & conditions - Holds where reporting is voluntary and the reporter bears personal risk — community codes of conduct, vulnerability disclosure, internal whistleblowing. - Weakens where reporting is mandated and legally protected, or where the reporter is an institution rather than an individual. - Does **not** imply thresholds are always wrong. Adversarial legal processes have evidentiary standards precisely to protect the accused. The claim is about who a *voluntary* threshold filters out first, which is not who it was written for. - The design test is one question: **who does this filter out first?** The answer is almost never the bad-faith accuser, who was not going to read the form. - Practical mitigation: make the lowest-commitment path explicit — telling one person is enough, going public is not required. ## Links - [[Commons & Community Governance MOC]] — the design test for any reporting path — who does this filter out first? - [[NAR and Charismatic Authority Critique MOC]] — the impossible-standard mechanism that keeps survivors from ever reaching a reporting process - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Institutional Response Speed Distinguishes Tolerated From Addressed Harm]] — what happens after a report clears the burden; this note is about the reports that never arrive - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Concentrated Authority Without Accountability Produces the Same Failure Patterns Across Religious and Software Ecosystems]] — the cross-domain frame this instance sits inside - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Absence of Complaint Is Resignation Not Satisfaction]] — the downstream signal: once the burden has done its work, silence is what an institution sees - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Contribution Pathways Must Be Documented Not Left Emergent]] — contrasts; documenting a path helps, but documenting a *demanding* path suppresses - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/An Above-Market Offer Is Coercive When the Alternatives Are Already Gone]] — because extends: the same distributional logic, where a uniform offer lands differently depending on what the recipient can absorb. - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Support Collapses When the Benefits Are National and the Costs Are Local]] — because extends: concentrated burden lands where the capacity to object is weakest, which is also where siting is cheapest.