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Some corner of the Twitterverse believes that it's not possible for someone to be traumatized to the point of PTSD from comments and harmful remarks on the Internet, and proceeds to bully, harass, and be the cesspit of discourse toward someone who does claim sustained online bullying is a traumatic event.
Let's see... so, reading audience, what comes to mind if I have you imagine a suit with no head, or a Guy Fawkes mask? Or when I remind you just how many incidents there are of cyberbullying of teenagers that end up in violence or the taking of lives? Or that there are entire blogs and websites devoted solely to the pursuit of trying to debunk a single person or website? The are plenty of places that will happily and callously inflict trauma, and the lucky people are often those whose trauma stays on the Internet, instead of those who have the hordes looking for their offline address, place of work, and other such ways of bringing the harassment into everywhere.
So there's that. The hordes of the cesspit, when confronted with all the ways someone could conceivably experience traumatic stress from being online, switch to argument number two: "It's not real, because only members of certain classes, such as soldiers in the theater of war, or victims of sexual assault, can experience traumatic stress. Anyone else making that claim is just being a professional victim and diluting the Srs Bzns that those people are suffering from." Which runs into the problem that, y'know, there's an official diagnosis and criteria, not that it stops the hordes from using those criteria to claim there's no way that diagnosis applies, but also runs into the problem of "Who gets to define what constitutes traumatic events to another person?" (Hint: If it didn't happen to you, the answer is Not You.) There's no authority conferred merely by being part of a crowd, and being part of an adversarial crowd raises the requirements for proof and authority, not lowers it.
Additionally, the way that soldiers and victims get used to make an exclusionary point produces the opposite effect of what was intended - the horrors of war, of violence, and of assault are being minimized, as only the province of certain people, and it allows people not only not to care that those people are hurting and have suffered traumas, but to avoid doing anything about helping them or about fixing the situations that are causing trauma. After all, we aren't soldiers or survivors, so we couldn't possibly help someone who has been beaten by robbers and left on the side of the road. Surely some other priest or Levite with the right experience will come by and help them.
Given that harassment really can come from online corners, and that trauma isn't actually limited only to certain classes, a third option appears: "Well, if being online gives you trauma, then stop being online." Or, in its more confrontational form, "Your trauma can't be real, because if you were actually traumatized, you would stop being online."
*beat*
...riiiiiiiiiight. That's a pretty weak position to take. If your job requires you to be managing social media accounts, you can't stop being online. If email or chat is an essential part of keeping in contact with important people in your life, you can't stop being online. If you have any intention of staying connected to this world we live in, you have to be online. And besides, there's no guarantee that going offline will make the bullying stop.
And we're still focusing on the wrong thing, here. Unlike what the school system and the society at large and the house in the cesspit would have you believe, you do not fix problems of bullying, harassment, and trauma by telling the victim to shut up, stuck it up, or to leave the place where they are hurt. You can bury them, or put them off, or procrastinate on the solving of those problems, but they do not get solved by victim-blaming or by silencing the victims or driving them away. You start by believing them and taking them seriously. Then you listen to them when they suggest how things could be made better. Then you take their suggestions and you do them.
"Step on a crack, break your mother's back." That same lack of logic applies to any of the arguments put forth to claim that someone couldn't possibly be suffering online-induced trauma. So I believe and support Melody Hensley. I've seen far too much, just in my own corner of existence not to.
Let's see... so, reading audience, what comes to mind if I have you imagine a suit with no head, or a Guy Fawkes mask? Or when I remind you just how many incidents there are of cyberbullying of teenagers that end up in violence or the taking of lives? Or that there are entire blogs and websites devoted solely to the pursuit of trying to debunk a single person or website? The are plenty of places that will happily and callously inflict trauma, and the lucky people are often those whose trauma stays on the Internet, instead of those who have the hordes looking for their offline address, place of work, and other such ways of bringing the harassment into everywhere.
So there's that. The hordes of the cesspit, when confronted with all the ways someone could conceivably experience traumatic stress from being online, switch to argument number two: "It's not real, because only members of certain classes, such as soldiers in the theater of war, or victims of sexual assault, can experience traumatic stress. Anyone else making that claim is just being a professional victim and diluting the Srs Bzns that those people are suffering from." Which runs into the problem that, y'know, there's an official diagnosis and criteria, not that it stops the hordes from using those criteria to claim there's no way that diagnosis applies, but also runs into the problem of "Who gets to define what constitutes traumatic events to another person?" (Hint: If it didn't happen to you, the answer is Not You.) There's no authority conferred merely by being part of a crowd, and being part of an adversarial crowd raises the requirements for proof and authority, not lowers it.
Additionally, the way that soldiers and victims get used to make an exclusionary point produces the opposite effect of what was intended - the horrors of war, of violence, and of assault are being minimized, as only the province of certain people, and it allows people not only not to care that those people are hurting and have suffered traumas, but to avoid doing anything about helping them or about fixing the situations that are causing trauma. After all, we aren't soldiers or survivors, so we couldn't possibly help someone who has been beaten by robbers and left on the side of the road. Surely some other priest or Levite with the right experience will come by and help them.
Given that harassment really can come from online corners, and that trauma isn't actually limited only to certain classes, a third option appears: "Well, if being online gives you trauma, then stop being online." Or, in its more confrontational form, "Your trauma can't be real, because if you were actually traumatized, you would stop being online."
*beat*
...riiiiiiiiiight. That's a pretty weak position to take. If your job requires you to be managing social media accounts, you can't stop being online. If email or chat is an essential part of keeping in contact with important people in your life, you can't stop being online. If you have any intention of staying connected to this world we live in, you have to be online. And besides, there's no guarantee that going offline will make the bullying stop.
And we're still focusing on the wrong thing, here. Unlike what the school system and the society at large and the house in the cesspit would have you believe, you do not fix problems of bullying, harassment, and trauma by telling the victim to shut up, stuck it up, or to leave the place where they are hurt. You can bury them, or put them off, or procrastinate on the solving of those problems, but they do not get solved by victim-blaming or by silencing the victims or driving them away. You start by believing them and taking them seriously. Then you listen to them when they suggest how things could be made better. Then you take their suggestions and you do them.
"Step on a crack, break your mother's back." That same lack of logic applies to any of the arguments put forth to claim that someone couldn't possibly be suffering online-induced trauma. So I believe and support Melody Hensley. I've seen far too much, just in my own corner of existence not to.
