Ok so I agree with 99% of this thing. Probably 100%.
But: the conclusion isn’t really offering any solution. There’s no alternative proposed here. “Stand up for victims” sounds great…but how? There’s a token line about verifying claims about people before running with them on your own, but that doesn’t really solve the core problem proposed by the thesis to me (indirect harassment). We all know people have a “double check what you hear” problem and it’s frankly broader than this/will always be an issue even with great education initiatives. It also feels like it addresses one vector of the issue but not root causes. It’s a response to the slander and does nothing to prevent it kicking off in the first place unless everyone is coordinated.
The article is saying that blocking only stops direct harassment and even acknowledges that it’s good at it (in some examples), but it also says there is a problem with indirect harassment (the thesis here really) and is almost kind of angry about how sites have not implemented a solution, but I don’t really see anything being proposed here. Hopefully this makes sense, I know it’s a bit rambling.
Am I missing something?
If I knew the answer to how to stop indirect harassment, I wouldn’t have PTSD. I want to tell you I know how to fix all of this, but I don’t. People are too impatient, too loyal, and too impressionable. They don’t take the time to tell truth from lie, they just trust whoever their friends are or who spoke to them first. I only know what doesn’t work, because I’ve lived it for years.
I guess I’m just trying to figure out what the call to action is here. I want to do something about it. Like I said i agree with the article basically top to bottom. I’m looking the next step, I’m not saying “solve harassment for us.”
Well, I’d like to be able to say you should fight for victims. When I was alone and felt isolated by the abuse, that was the worst My trauma got. When I had friends who were willing to stand up to My bullies, I felt empowered. But, see, My abusers had friends standing up for them, who thought they were helping victims. So knowing who’s the victim and who’s the abuser is just as important as having that drive to help others. The message of the #metoo movement is only half the equation. People who want to do the right thing but won’t think critically and learn the truth are worse than bystanders.
Thinking like a scientist is a good way to find the truth in any situation. I’ve helped other victims of harassment and rape. I always started out by thinking like a scientist. A good first test is: “Is the supposed victim actually making concrete claims?” I had an abuser who said I abused her, but it never told a single soul how. One of its partners stayed friends with Me and tried to figure out how, and never got a straight answer. Didn’t think the abuser even had one itself. It believed I had abused it, but there wasn’t a how. The dozens of people who believed it, they were operating on vibes and trust. They didn’t even try to verify the claims, because they didn’t hear the claims. There were no claims. So if you think like a scientist and try to verify the claims, you might find there’s nothing to verify and your friend is a liar. That’s a good way to do it.
Another issue is realism. My best friend was raped in the astral plane. Xe has schizophrenia, and experiences text roleplay as real. A lot of otherkin and plural systems I know experience roleplay as real, schizophrenia or no schizophrenia. But in this case xe had no options. Physically tried to extricate ximself from sexual contact, the rapist pinned xim down and kept going. Thinking everything is fine, this is just part of the roleplay. The rapist in that situation made a lot of choices after the fact that turned a misunderstanding into something unforgivable. Never apologised, used DARVO, etc. But a lot of bystanders, even in the otherkin community, didn’t care because it wasn’t “real”. The contact didn’t occur on the material plane. A lot of abuse is going to occur in ways that most people aren’t used to dealing with. A lot of abuse is going to involve schizophrenia or otherkin or these other “weird” things. You need to adapt your thinking to the context and empathise with everyone involved, understand the motivations from every perspective. Sticking to your preconceptions of realism and denying the pain a rape victim feels isn’t productive.
That’s two things I saw that got in the way of the truth, and how to deal with them. But I’m still searching for answers on a lot of the subtler reasons why people side with abusers. I’ve been getting a lot better at the practicalities of fighting abusers. Recently I exposed a pedophile ring and have been dismantling the pedophile’s cult, with a lot of success. But the lessons I learned that helped Me do that are more applicable to victims and journalists than to bystanders.
I’m going to be honest, I don’t feel I truly understand a lot of what is going on here and as such don’t feel qualified to respond.
Oooh a medium article that lists Lemmy as one of the example social media’s. Interesting.
