Chaos Communications Congress 29 incidents

In December 2012, several sexist incidents happen at Chaos Communications Congress 29.

According to the Awareness Teams report in the closing event their hotline received about 20 calls. One warning was actually issued and one person removed from the premises because of their behaviour.

Other incidents were documented on a private web site. which has since been deleted:

• Creation of an image of a woman's nude body (minus head, arms, and lower legs) with the red Creeper Move cards
• Creation of an image of a penis with green Creeper Move cards
• A game created on the CCC wiki using the Creeper Move cards to sexually proposition others, with bonus points for offending their partner.
• A drawing of a man peeing on a woman. The woman is saying "Let me be your human toilet."
• A public Etherpad with the message "Verpisst euch von unserem Kongress, ihr Idioten und Femi-Nazis" (translates roughly to "Bugger off our conference, you idiots and feminazis").
• The Hacker Jeopardy game(full video, german) featured many sexist comments, including around ten by the moderator. A member of the conference anti-harassment policy team was present and did not stop the sexist comments. Several people walked out of the room in protest. A rough English translation of some of the comments includes:
  • "For reasons of gender-equality, we'll sadly have to pick a woman now."
  • "No prompting, even if you want to help the woman on gender-inequality grounds."
  • "I think we'll have to strike the minus [in front of the points?] on gender-equality grounds."
  • "Is that okay, one guy against two women? Can't have him feeling like he's being mobbed."
• A woman attendee was repeatedly sexually propositioned by a male attendee who persisted after being told no.

Hacker Jeopardy

User:Redmaike reports:

Hacker Jeopady is a quiz game that has been organized by the moderators for about a decade. The moderators have been criticized in 2012 for their history of encouraging women to participate. It was argued that this behaviour is discrimination because of its over representation of women on stage compared to the low percentage of women in the audience. Consequently one of the moderators over-emphasized the anti-discrimination debate in a number of statements.

This prompted one woman from the audience to come to the stage and hand over a red card. In her statement she used a reference to female reproduction organs instead of the term “women”. In an attempt to deal with the public diss, the moderator stated that he considers the cards not helpful. This resulted in further escalation of the situation.

The full name of the other moderator, who tried to calm down the situation, was mentioned wrongly in comments on popular press websites as the trolling moderator.

Responses

• Oh teh drama - or why I stickered a naked headless female on the wall: mirromaru explains her reasons