The Missing Stair: Why Communities Work Around a Known Problem Instead of Fixing It

Someone new to a community gets pulled aside at their third event. The warning is friendly and a little conspiratorial. Watch out for that guy. Don't let him corner you. Don't go into the back room with him. If he offers you a ride, say you already have one. It is delivered as a kindness and it is meant as one, and the person delivering it would be upset if anything happened.

Nobody in that conversation suggests that the guy should not be at the event.

That gap, between the effort a community will spend warning people about someone and the effort it will spend removing him, is what this piece is about.

Cliff Pervocracy coined it in a blog post in June 2012, on a blog about BDSM and kink, writing about a man in their social circle who was known to be a rapist. The community did eventually expel him, but only after months in which his behavior was widely shared knowledge.

What Pervocracy identified was that deliberate protection was not the main mechanism. Some people were shielding him on purpose. Far more were doing it by accident, through accommodation. They had gotten so accustomed to working around him that the working-around had stopped registering as a response to danger and started registering as a fact about the room. The analogy was a house with a missing step on an unlit staircase with no railing, where everyone who lives there simply remembers to jump, and nobody asks what it would take to repair the stair.

The term left kink quickly, because the pattern was never specific to it. Churches have missing stairs. So do academic departments, recovery fellowships, music scenes, nonprofit boards, medical residencies, group practices, professional associations, and families. The pattern needs three conditions and no more: a community with insiders and newcomers, a shared reluctance to have one difficult conversation, and enough time for the workaround to become ordinary furniture.

The reason this is hard to see from inside is that every individual component of it is an act of care.

Warning a newcomer is care. Seating someone between him and the new person is care. Keeping an eye on the back room is care. Making sure he is never alone with anyone is care. Nobody in that chain is behaving badly, and the people who maintain a whisper network are frequently the most protective members of the community. They are doing the thing available to them.

The trouble is structural. A whisper network makes the situation survivable, and a survivable situation does not generate the pressure required to change it. Every workaround that functions is one more reason the stair stays missing. The community has solved its own discomfort without solving the danger, and having solved the discomfort, it stops experiencing the danger as urgent. The alarm that should have grown louder each year has instead been steadily muffled by competent management.

Once the workaround is established as the norm, the responsibility for harm quietly transfers. If someone gets hurt, the community skips the question of why he was still there and asks whether she had been warned and whether she went into the back room after being told not to. She was told. Everyone knows about him. Somebody definitely mentioned it. What did she think was going to happen.

Nobody decided to blame her. The blame is simply what falls out of a system where the safety mechanism is individual vigilance. If safety depends on each person jumping correctly, then injury means someone failed to jump, and the stair itself is never on trial.

Because the costs are asymmetric and they land on a specific person.

Warning a newcomer takes thirty seconds and generates no conflict. It requires no decision, no meeting, no risk of being wrong, and no possibility of being blamed for splitting the community. It is the cheapest available action, and cheap available actions crowd out expensive necessary ones.

Removing a longstanding member requires a confrontation, a determination of what happened, a decision, communication of that decision, the tolerance of people who will disagree with it, and the willingness to be personally identified as the one who did it. Whoever moves first absorbs most of that cost, and everyone in the community knows it, which is why the first move so rarely comes.

Missing stairs are usually load-bearing. He runs the space, teaches the intro class, owns the equipment, holds the money, knows the history, has the relationships, or is close to whoever does. A community that would actually lose something by removing him will locate reasons the removal is premature, and those reasons will sound like fairness. We should be careful. We only have one side. Due process matters. Let's not ruin someone's life over an accusation.

Those are reasonable concerns, and they are also the exact concerns that, deployed consistently, produce a decade of nothing happening.

A reader who has been through the rest of this site will notice a tension. Other pieces here cover DARVO, coordinated smear campaigns, reactive abuse, and the way families construct a villain out of the person they excluded. Those describe accusations being used as weapons. This one describes communities failing to act on accusations that are true.

Both are real, and understanding why they fit together is the most clinically useful thing in this article.

DARVO, named by Jennifer Freyd, describes what someone does when they are finally named. They deny the behavior, attack the credibility of the person reporting it, and reverse the roles, so that the accused now occupies the position of the wronged party and the reporter occupies the position of the aggressor.

That tactic requires an audience willing to receive it. And the audience most willing to receive it is a community that has already spent years accommodating the person.

Consider what accommodation does to a group. It trains everyone in the practice of generating reasons why this is not urgent. He means well. He's socially awkward. That's just how he is. He's been here longer than anyone. Those explanations get rehearsed, year after year, in low-stakes moments. They are fluent and immediately available by the time a high-stakes moment arrives.

So when the reversal comes, the community does not have to change course. It continues doing what it has been doing, with a fresh vocabulary. Rather than converting a protective community into a hostile one, the missing stair supplies a community that was already accommodating with a story that lets the accommodation continue.

This is why the two phenomena keep appearing in the same rooms, and why I write about both. A community that handles problems informally is a community where the informal handling will eventually be used against whoever asks for something formal.

Since both exist, the practical question is how to read a situation you are inside of.

The most useful signal is what the community does when someone asks for a process. A group that has a reporting procedure, a person responsible for receiving reports, and any history of having used either is a group operating on record. A group where the answer is that these things get handled quietly, or that there is no need to be formal about it, has already told you what protection exists.

Another signal is the direction of the information. A whisper network that flows downhill, from established members to newcomers, about someone established, is a missing stair. A campaign that flows outward from one person, recruiting third parties to carry a narrative about someone with less standing, is the pattern the smear campaign piece describes.

It also helps to watch what the accused does with the process when offered one. A person who has been wrongly accused generally wants the record examined. Someone running DARVO wants the frame changed and the process avoided.

None of these is conclusive on its own. The point is that the question can be asked structurally, without requiring anyone to adjudicate the underlying incident from outside.

Someone takes responsibility for the repair.

Concretely, that means a written process that exists before anyone needs it, a named person or small group whose job is to receive reports, a decision that is made and communicated rather than allowed to circulate as rumor, and an accepted willingness to lose members over it. For communities where consent is explicitly part of the structure, that also means a shared and stated framework for what consent requires, which is why the FRIES model and materials like it earn their place on a wall rather than in a folder.

Communities that manage this have almost always been through it once, badly, and resolved never again. The cost of the first time is what purchases the process.

For a person inside one of these, the question is narrower and more answerable. What is this community's actual process, and has anyone ever used it. If the answer is that the whisper network is the process, you now know exactly what is available to you, which is the thing you needed to know.

For clinicians: when a client describes being harmed in a community that knew, the injury is frequently double. There is what the person did, and there is the discovery that a system of warnings had been operating without them and that their inclusion in that system had not been considered important enough to arrange. The second injury is often the one that takes longer, because it is about belonging rather than about a single event.

Content on this site is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Nothing here creates a therapist-client relationship. If you are in crisis, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or go to your nearest emergency room.

Clinical descriptions in this piece are illustrative composites drawn from patterns across many years of practice. They are not accounts of any specific client, session, or family.