Harassment and Condemnation: Where the Border Between
alexander savina
Recently, only talk of baiting is heard. Recently, the Russian presidential spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, called for an end to the harassment of a schoolboy from Novy Urengoy, who made a speech in the Bundestag: the boy told the story of a German soldier who fought on the Wehrmacht side in the Battle of Stalingrad, and said that not all German soldiers wanted to fight among they were also "innocent victims" - first he was accused of justifying Nazism on social networks, and later threats began to come to him. They talked about bullying when discussing the scandal in Hollywood, and not only cinematographers who terminated contracts were called harassment subjects, but also social network subscribers (both in the US and in Russia), who simply discussed the loud story in private conversations.
Between group condemnation and harassment many find it difficult to draw a clear boundary. Can the mass action of victims against Harvey Weinstein be considered a bulling? Or is Weinstein not a victim, but the culprit of the persecution, given that he spent a whole year collecting dirt on the victims and journalists who are preparing an investigation about him? How to deal with the situation with Karl Sargent, a former minister of the government of Wales, who committed suicide after several women filed charges against him - Sargent said that he was never explained what these accusations are?
Bulling is called "the type of aggressive behavior when a person deliberately and repeatedly inflicts damage or humiliates another." It is difficult for a victim of harassment to defend herself against aggression, and physical and psychological violence is in no way connected with her own actions - that is, she does nothing to “deserve” him. Harassment takes many forms - it can be ridicule, the spread of rumors and gossip, name-calling, damage to personal belongings, threats, boycotts, beatings, physical violence and any other type of bullying. Separately, emit cyberbullying - harassment via the Internet, from which the victim is more difficult to escape: moving to another city or changing the environment will not solve the problem.
There is always an imbalance of power at the heart of the bulling: the victim is usually weaker than his abuser or cannot find the courage to answer him. From this point of view, what is happening with Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and Louis C. Kay is difficult to perceive as harassment. Those who oppose them have no superiority (many victims at the time of the events were at the beginning of their career path, for some the opposition to the producer was the end of their careers or seriously stalled them), and the famous producer, the Oscar-winning actor and the famous comedian had many opportunities to answer them: There were PR teams, an impressive credit of trust, and financial capabilities that made it possible to resolve the conflict without bringing the matter to court.
On the Internet, the line between condemnation and public humiliation is erased particularly quickly: it is enough to recall the story of Monica Lewinsky - as she calls herself, the "zero patient" of cyberbullying
Opponents of public "campaigns" accuse their participants of the fact that if a group of the weak attacks the strong, weakness and strength automatically switch places. But to consider what is happening as a purposeful campaign to destroy a specific person (in the Russian context, on this occasion, party committees and Komsomol meetings are more often remembered) is a substitution of notions. The victims, who for many years could not admit what had happened to them, finally found the strength to do so. Group recognition in most cases gave the victims a sense of security: blaming the big boss for the crime alone was simply not safe.
British Laura Bates, founder of the project Everyday Sexism, notes that the consequences of admitting violence can be very hard for the victims themselves: “Today, more than two thirds of women face harassment at work. Eighty percent of them cannot say so. who did it after all, they said that after that the situation did not change - and 16% said that it had become even worse. " Confessions of others enable victims to speak freely about their experiences.
Mass condemnation of a misdemeanor or offense is a normal reaction, which in itself can in no way be related to bulling: it is rather a listing of facts and a discussion of norms. But this, alas, does not mean that one cannot develop into another. On the Internet, the line between condemnation and public humiliation is erased particularly quickly: it suffices to recall the story of Monica Lewinsky, as she calls herself, the “zero patient” of cyberbullying. In 1998, Lewinsky became a member of a powerful political scandal over the affair with married US President Bill Clinton - and this ruined her career. In her famous TED talk, she said that the reaction to the mistakes she made was disproportionate to what happened: “The attention and condemnation that I caused — not the story, but myself — turned out to be unprecedented. I was called a whore, a cheap, dissolute girlfriend , a fool and, of course, “that woman.” Everybody knew me, but almost no one really knew. It is clear: it is easy to forget that “that woman” is multidimensional, she has a soul and once everything was with her okay. "
When a person is condemned for an obviously unapproved act, the line between social condemnation and harassment is also erased quite easily - simply because the condemning are convinced that any measures are appropriate in such a situation. This happened, for example, with Justin Sacco: at the end of 2013, she, then still the PR manager of the American media company IAC, flew from New York to relatives in South Africa. While waiting for the flights, she posted to Twitter not the most tolerant and subtle jokes - for example, during the transfer to Heathrow she wrote: "It's cold, cucumber sandwiches, bad teeth - I'm back in London again!" Before boarding a flight to Cape Town, she wrote: “I am flying to Africa. I hope I don’t catch AIDS there. Joke! I’m white.”
Later in an interview with John Ronson, the author of the book "So You've Been Publicly Shamed," Justin said that her joke was not racist ("Simply put, I did not want to draw attention to the problem of AIDS or piss off the whole world so that my life would collapse. Americans seem to be in a bubble in relation to everything that happens in poorer countries. I wanted to laugh at this bubble "), but events developed faster than she had time to react and explain to them. Sacco had an eleven o'clock flight, and while she was offline, her tweet flew off the net. Twitter users were outraged by the racist joke and demanded that she be dismissed from the IAC - the company said that the employee’s behavior was unacceptable, but they could not contact her while she was on the plane. The hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet ("Justin has already flown?") Reached the top of the world twitter - and Justin began to receive threats and wishes to get AIDS after rape. When the girl finally got to Cape Town, turned on the phone and realized what was happening, she was already waited at the airport: a twitter user took a picture of her and uploaded the photo to the network to show everyone that Justin had really flown in.
The story was quickly forgotten, but Sacco's life never returned to normal. After being fired, she worked for a month in a charity organization in Africa, and now she tries to avoid publicity - and refuses to say which company she works for in order not to attract too much attention. The scandal influenced her personal life ("I am alone - but not so much that I can go on dates, because today everyone is googling those with whom they want to go on a date") and at work - in one of the interviews she admitted that she hopes that sometime the first when you query her name in Google, the LinkedIn page will drop out.
Insults, threats, disclosure of personal information such as addresses, stalking - all this is much closer to bullying than to healthy discussion.
A similar story happened in the same 2013 at the PyCon technology conference. A conference attendee heard a sexist joke told by some of the visitors sitting behind her - she thought that this case perfectly illustrates gender inequality in the industry, and decided to post a photo of the joke authors on Twitter (where she had more than nine thousand subscribers) condemning them. A few minutes later, the organizers called the men to themselves and asked for clarification, and one day later one of them was fired. The story has had terrible consequences for Adria Richards herself, who wrote the tweet. The man wrote about his dismissal on the developer forum, after which Richards began to receive threats. Someone tweeted her address, after which she was forced to live with friends for some time, fearing for her life and health. Her employer launched a DDoS attack on the site - and they said that they would stop her if Richards was fired. A woman lost her job the same day.
All these stories are united by the fact that attention has quickly shifted from a specific act - a racist or sexist joke, dismissal, which someone seemed wrongful - to the transition to the individual. Insults, threats, disclosure of personal information such as an address, stalking - all this is much closer to bullying than to a healthy discussion. Ethics requires discussing and condemning unacceptable acts of people (especially public ones) openly - otherwise the principle of violence in society will continue to be challenged, and the violence itself will go unpunished.
But the fact is that the offense must correspond to the punishment. Meanwhile, as in the case of Kevin Spacey, refusing to work with a person who behaves unacceptably in a work environment and threatening a person and publicly heck, for example, his external qualities (even if he acted horribly), there is a huge difference . A person who commits a wrongful act should be ashamed - but shame and guilt for wrongdoing can be easily confused with humiliation, that is, retaliatory violence from those who are trying to act using allegedly symmetrical methods. Needless to say, humiliation not only does not help the culprit to realize the consequences of his actions, but also increases aggression and pressure.
The acute ethical discussions of recent times have greatly pushed the norm of relations - it is only in this way that it finally becomes clear that the rules are changing, and that which used to be familiar and did not cause questions is no longer acceptable. The main thing is not to forget that mass reprimand is a powerful tool that can get out of control.
Cover:Ted