“At What Point Does Abuse Deserve Your Recognition?”
Quotes of victims and people who disagreed with victim legitimacy are included, but not assigned.
Quotes of victims and people who disagreed with victim legitimacy are included, but not assigned.
Abuse over the internet. Some would call that a laughable idea. How could someone deeply and traumatically affect another person over a medium lacking real life physical interaction? Those ‘some’ would be grievously mistaken to think this. Internet relationships can be as solid as real life relationships, and so can abuse. Abuse does not have to be sexual harassment or real life threats to the other party. In fact, some of the most damaging situations to occur may involve neither. How you respond when trusted with these situations is a critical affirmation or critical blow to the self-worth of victim of the case you look at. The most important thing to remember when trying to decide on whose side you stand in cases of abuse is: Your opinion has no bearing on what happened here whatsoever, and even less bearing on what damage was left behind. What you should be thinking about is not only what happened between the abuser and victim, but in fact what impact was left on the victim’s psyche.
What someone thinks was “not a big deal” may very well be the one of worst experiences the victim has ever lived through. Your opinion well after the fact does not make the trauma any less real, and when stated will in fact contribute to the steady deterioration of their sense of self-worth. When you brush off something that dramatically affected another person, what you are really doing is telling that victim that how they feel doesn’t matter. How they are left feeling because of the maltreatment of the abuser is not a factor in how you perceive the abuser, because the victim “overreacted” and should simply “get over it like a normal person would.”
The first argument of apologists is very basic: “Well, he/she seemed to be playing along/leading him/her on anyways.” This is not only grossly untrue in many cases, it is ignoring that sometimes people have no idea how to react and try to play it cool as a method of coping. What you would call “playing along” is not the case every time. The ability to say “No” is not as commonplace as you might expect it to be in these situations. Some victims hesitate to say outright no because they fear repelling people they called friends who are now grossly abusing the trust between them, and are having trouble reconciling the situation. Others simply do not know how to react to what is going on, and their first response is not always going to be “Stop it.” It will be shock, and uncomfortable attempts to change the subject or deflect through indirect means. If you have trouble understanding how this can be the case, you have never been in a situation where saying “No” to someone is difficult, and thus you take an alternative route until hopefully the subject is changed. That does not mean that the problem is any less real to others. No two people are the same, and while one person can say “No, stop it”, the other might be unable to say that same thing.
“‘I don't want to sound insensitive... But this conversation seems rather two sided.’ Having to show logs containing harassment and repeated sexual advances was already uncomfortable, but it also came with personal information. To share this took a year to finally commit to, and the first thing said by an unrelated party was a dismissal of the entire thing as not being clear enough. Later on there were some people who took it very seriously and took decisive action, but that one person throwing the experience out the window cast a pall over the entire ordeal, and I constantly wondered if someone else I trusted these logs with in confidence was going to say the same thing and dismiss the evidence of harassment on grounds of the discomfort felt at the time not being clear enough in the logs presented.”
Another argument of apologists is “Well, that wasn’t so bad. What’s the big deal? He/she just overreacted to this.” What you should be looking at here is not what you personally think was a problem, but how the victim was affected by the abuser’s treatment. Your opinion does not mean anything to a victim who was deeply hurt or scared by the advances of his/her abuser. Voicing your disdain just tells the victim that they should feel silly for being so sensitive. What is being ignored here is the hurt left behind in this victim, and a free pass is being given to the abuser on the grounds of the aforementioned argument. Throwing verbal rocks at the glass pane that is their sense of self-worth because you don’t see the problem here is a rather contemptible move on your part.
This argument is usually issued because people expect to see explicit sexual harassment or verbal threats when they think about harassment, and thus discredit anything that seems to be less blatant than either sexual harassment or threats. Hint: Explicit does not always mean more severe. Most skilled abusers are very subtle in their work, and you may even fail to pick up on it entirely. The apologist may have failed to identify the problematic behavior, but the victim did not.
So, we come to the question. At what point does abuse deserve your recognition? What awful things have to happen to a victim before you will acknowledge the severity? What responses do the victims have to give before you will admit that they did not want this? The fact that these questions have to be asked is quite candidly unspeakable. Those who will be labeled apologists after viewing the evidence for themselves and subsequently blaming the victim, expect only the most blatant harassment by the abuser. They will admit there is a problem only when they see that the most adamant refusals by the victim have been issued before they will fully acknowledge that it was completely inappropriate and disgusting behavior. Harassment is not restricted to sexual harassment and real life threats. Abuse also is not restricted to either of those cases, for that matter. Abusers should not be exonerated of their misdeeds just because an apologist thinks that it was not blatant enough to be acknowledged, or because they choose to believe the abuser’s side of the story – “Oh, he/she lead me on”, “Oh, he/she didn’t say no”, “Oh, but I didn’t mean it.” The abuser and his/her excuses do not matter here. What matters is what damage the victim has taken from this. The victim is not the problem – the abuser is the problem.
The psychological impact on the victim is frequently overlooked by those who choose to dismiss the harassment as insufficient due to their own opinions on the subject at hand. When a victim shows someone their ordeal, they are going back through logs that left deep scarring just to show that person what they went through – whether to protect others from the same ordeal they endured, or to protect themselves from the abuser. It is a show of trust to let another person see what happened to them, and a trial to read back through logs of the situations as they occurred or to write testimony of incidents which requires thinking about and remembering what they had to suffer through. It is not an easy thing to share logs, particularly soon after the incident, and even sometimes years after it happened. When logs are shared, some people will ignore the effort it took for victims to show evidence of themselves at their most vulnerable times or their weakest moments during a traumatic experience in their lives. The willingness to go back over the times they were abused and to see once again what horrible things were said or done to the victim at the time of abuse and harassment.
“I only shared logs with people I trusted a good deal at first, because I was ashamed that this had happened to me and I had been ‘weak’ enough to be manipulated. I had never encountered what I did with him in my life, so I was grossly unprepared for it when it came. At first I thought I just didn’t want to hurt his reputation further, because I had made a decision to forgive. I begged him never to do that to someone else again. But after a while, I realized that I would never be able to forget. Furthermore, while I trusted him not to do it again to someone else, I could have been putting another player in danger by withholding what I had. So eventually I shared, and I was able to create a network of people who would be willing to shield me if he ever came back. I was no longer alone, no other player would go through what I had, and I was grateful for these new realities.”
This essay continually brings up the words “psychological impact.” What does psychological impact mean? The answer to that is that it can be either as ‘light’ as bad memories that are uncomfortable to talk or think about, or it can be as deep as developing a legitimate anxiety disorder over what happened to the victim. PTSD, to name a more famous one, is not a disorder that is restricted to one traumatic incident like a bad car accident, living through a war in a foreign country, or being sexually abused. It is not restricted to real life, either. It can, in fact, be developed through a long period of time over the internet suffering through severe abuse and threats and manipulation. Just because you disagree that it is a valid way to develop a mental disorder does not mean that it is any less valid when it happens. PTSD is perfectly possible to develop from long-term abuse, and over the internet. If you think that sounds absurd, again, your opinion does not change facts. Weeks or months of being degraded, harassed, threatened, and made to feel worthless will take a deep psychological toll.
“It started as simple controlling behavior and harassment in the form of bullying in NS. When that ended due to intervention and a temporary separation, it turned to a RL angle, the abuser no longer content with NS. It went from subtle controlling behavior to outright orders, sexual advances, verbal abuse, emotional blackmail... I was told that I was lower than dirt, that I deserved the worst, that I would be better off dead. It eventually spiraled to real life death threats. The result of this was that I developed PTSD six months after it ended. Once he was gone for good, the PTSD began to include hallucinations like hearing his voice telling me I was worthless, and nightmares and frequent mental scenarios and paranoia that I would see him come here with the intention to kill me like he so often talked about. I saw a recent thing in Gameplay making an issue over the argument that PTSD is restricted to soldiers in war. But you know, living through severe abuse and harassment is surviving a war on your own. War does not always come in the form of explosions and death and atrocities. War can be psychological and exist solely between two people.”
Why did it go on for so long, one might ask after seeing timestamps from logs that go back for months at a time? Because the victim may not necessarily have realized what was happening. Again, some abusers are very subtle and not everyone is informed enough to see it happen. Some victims may have been afraid to lose a friend by speaking out. Other victims may have been conditioned to feel reliant on the abuser, and thus are even less likely to speak out. There can be many other reasons, though these three are the most common in my experience. Abusers choose victims based on several reasons. One is that they have the ability to see vulnerability and the will to take advantage of it. Your average long-term victim is frequently either identified as vulnerable in areas that can be exploited and decided to commit to the effort, or just someone the abuser developed an obsession with and spent time looking for weaknesses that could be exploited until they found something. Conditioning is a dangerous and potent process that sometimes is built up in ways that are not easily identified by a naïve or trusting victim until it is too late and reliance becomes a reality.
"I tried saying “no”, but sometimes the line was so blurred. It didn’t seem as if it were a normal situation to say no to. I trusted this person very much. What went on, it was subtle. Bits here and there, nothing outright explicit toward me, but the aim of topic of conversation seemed to be indirectly aimed at me. “Hypothetical” conversations here and there… In the back of my mind, I felt a nudge of discomfort, but keeping in mind I trusted this person, I thought these advances of conversation were normal, so saying “no” didn’t seem to fit."
Stockholm syndrome is the mind’s way of protecting itself from the abuse being dealt to the victim, and is certainly a reason that the victim will defend the abuser sometimes even after they have been separated from their manipulations. Yes, all of this is very possible over the internet. Vulnerabilities can be exploited by abusers over the internet perhaps even more effectively than with real life, because over text a person can be vastly different from how they are in their real life settings. Internet communication is in some ways far more direct; a mind-to-mind interaction that does not require overcoming the same boundaries than what is usual - even possible - in person. Direct mind-to-mind communication creates the opportunity for a quicker lowering of barriers, and relationships can progress far more swiftly than they might in person.
"I didn't realize at the time what was going on, or why I'd gotten to a point where if she wasn't there, or wasn't speaking to me, why it'd feel like going through withdrawal, my insides felt like they were curling in on themselves, twisting around. There was a visceral pain inside from a lack of contact with her. I still can't say when it began, or how it started to change to controlling me. She had conditioned me to do only as told, and I did so too eagerly by the time it was too late to escape. The verbal abuses were only made tolerable because at least if she was screaming at me, I was getting some of her attentions, even if I hadn't done anything to deserve her anger. After awhile, though, I could hear the screaming even when I was awake and alone. My self-worth plummeted rapidly and my sleep was interrupted by terrible nightmares. Awake, I had no reprieve and often went several days on only an hour or so of sleep, and barely ate. Even despite this, I waited patiently, albeit agonizingly, to see her name come up online, running to her excitedly, often to be berated or told to go away. I took it, because at least it was something. So many days did I worry about losing her, when I never realized I was losing myself in the process. She had me believing I was an absolute failure to her. And to me back then, that was a far worse fate than death. I didn't just defend her, either, I turned on many of my friends, attacking them for slights against her, or every time they tried to tell me she was toxic and bad for my health. I was becoming sicker and sicker physically as I continued to spiral out of control. It took everything in my power to finally escape, and honestly, in reality, she probably really was the one who released me. I don't think I would have been able to escape her abuse on my own."
The circumstances of how the trauma developed do not always seem to “match” the severity of the trauma left behind. It does not take real life death threats and explicit sexual advances to leave an impact. The trauma is dependent on the nature of the victim, and how he/she perceives the abuse as it happens. Something one person might dismiss as insufficient could well be significant to the victim. The one given witness to this does not have the ability to say that overreaction is the problem. Overreaction is not the problem in cases where the trauma is not “equal to” the circumstances. What matters is that the trauma exists, and that it should not be disregarded over personal opinion. A victim suffering through residual trauma in the aftermath should be enough to tell you that it was not a small matter to the victim. What you might say is not a big deal could well be a big deal to the next victim you contribute to bringing to the abuser by dismissing it and permitting them access to other potential victims. Because it will happen again. Abusers are rarely not serial. If you fail to understand why the victim reacted so badly and was so deeply hurt and choose to disregard what you are given, you can safely bet that you are already failing to understand why the next victim will react so badly to the same, or perhaps even more honed, tactics. Giving the abuser/harasser access to a larger victim pool is quite frankly a stupid thing to do.
"The trauma done to myself can be and is considered minor when compared to other cases, but due to the close relationship between myself and the harasser, it left psychological trauma at a deep level for me. This is italicized: because of the nature of the relationship. So even if you look at the situation I was involved in, it does not seem so terrible looking at the surface of the harassment, but the damage was done in my mind, if you only looked deeper.”
At what point does abuse deserve your recognition? It should not be when it meets your standards. It should be when you look at the victim, see how deeply they have been affected by this, and realize that the evidence is only proof that it happened. What you should judge the abuser on is not how “severe” the abuse was, or whether or not the victim said “No” in a clear and decisive enough way to merit your attention. The abuser should not be given a blanket pardon or leeway because they are your friend. The abuser is someone who took the trust and life of another person and ran it through a garbage disposal for their own self-gratification. Why are you judging it by what you think about it? What right do you have to belittle the trauma of a victim or condone the actions of an abuser when presented with the facts? You do not, and you should not think you do. If you are given evidence, stop prevaricating over your perception of what happened between them, and take a good look at the damage the abuser left. That is what you are enabling the abuser to bestow upon the next victim you give them access to by pardoning what happened. Is that abuser still worth your protection when you see what their abuse has done to their victim? If you still want to say yes to that, just remember: There will be another victim.
at you.
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