World makes no sense...

[jeshyr]

[Trigger warning: Discussion of rape and public shaming of children in this status. Please be safe.]


There are a bunch of posts on my Facebook wall tonight from various of my friends and acquaintances tonight advocating rape and public shaming of children and I am finding this really bizarre and upsetting.

I’d like to respectfully suggest that I believe rape is NEVER okay - no matter what anybody did to you they don’t "deserve" to be raped for it. Also, I believe that publicly shaming one’s children is a pretty awful thing to do to them and is probably going to make the kids resent their parents and stop communicating with them altogether, it seems at the very least to be highly unlikely to lead to actual positive consequences for anybody.

The weird thing is that I don’t think anybody who I’m friends with would actually agree with the phrase "raping people is OK" or "publicly shaming your children is a useful parenting technique." The post advocating rape explained that this man had robbed a woman and she retaliated by "keeping him as a sex slave" - it never used the actual word "rape" and justified this as "retaliation".

The posts advocating child shaming generally consisted of young teenage girls holding up pieces of card explaining they had done something inappropriate online and sharing this photo was their parents’ idea of a way to make them "learn better" - the words "public shaming" were not used. In both cases the text accompanying the picture indicated that the writer thought this was a fair and reasonable punishment/retaliation for what these people had done.

Examples which you can totally skip unless you want to see the type of picture/article I'm talking about:
* Graphic image of the newspaper clipping, sorry no text representation of the actual text, this article "Hair Stylist Keeps Armed Robber as Sex Slave" from 2009 is about the same story but the framing is much less positive about the hair stylist.
* Huffington Post article about child-shaming pictures which includes a representative photo and text.

I'm sure it's the framing of these things that makes them seem reasonable … I’m genuinely curious about what people who post this stuff think or feel about the articles when they do it. Is the framing so strong that people never mentally think "rape" or "shaming"? It must be, I guess?

What is it about Facebook shares that makes people appear to turn off their brains, or is it just that generally when people do unthinking stuff like this they aren’t in public where random folks like me will notice? Or am I just being unreasonably harsh by thinking this?


OK. Feel better now. Thank you for listening to me :)
r

Comments

[acelightning]

i daresay the average person, reading about a would-be burglar who was subdued by a woman who knew martial arts, would think she was a hero for preventing a crime. and "everybody knows" that a woman can't rape a man, and that most men would be happy to become a woman's "sex slave", because men want sex all the time anyway. the average person would read this whole story as a joke - the framing is that deeply embedded in modern culture.

and humiliation as a suitable form of punishment is even more deeply embedded, going all the way back to the pillory, the stocks, and other medieval (and even earlier) public punishments for people who trangressed against the norms of social behavior. if a baker cheated his customers by selling adulterated or spoiled bread, he'd have one of the defective loaves tied on a string around his neck, and be dragged through the marketplace on a sled with a sign describing his offense and inviting public mockery. even today, many people would think of that as a perfectly reasonable punishment.

it takes looking at these things from the point of view of the "losing" side to realize that the woman was committing sexual assault against the burglar, and that public shaming would breed anger, resentment, and rebellion in the nagging wife or the dishonest merchant.

it's ironic, but the current outcry against "bullying" in all its forms could easily be applied to these incidents. it's very hard, sometimes, when you can see both sides...

[jadelennox]

I think that in the easy share sites like Twitter, tumblr, and Facebook (not that I know Facebook, but I suspect it works like Twitter and tumblr) it's easy to getthe initial reaction that the person posting/writing/photographing wants you to have, and just click "like". They aren't sites designed for introspection, they are sites designed for glance, react, Move on. I try really hard not to retweet things I haven't read and thought about, but the platform really wants me not to work that way, you know?

That being said, both of those stories are horrific. The rape story is obviously worse, and yet they are both horrific.

[vass]

I'm particularly struck by the first mother in that article, the one who wanted her daughter to learn not to share inappropriate information on Facebook. Her shaming has caused her daughter's name and 'crimes' to be far more widely broadcast than her daughter managed.

What is it about Facebook shares that makes people appear to turn off their brains, or is it just that generally when people do unthinking stuff like this they aren’t in public where random folks like me will notice? Or am I just being unreasonably harsh by thinking this?

No, you're not being unreasonable at all. Facebook reminds me of dinner table conversation with strangers and people I don't know well. It's small talk, and small talk about current events is frequently a painfully bad level of discourse.

Also it's (at least for me, don't know about you) the place we interact online with the people we didn't choose, like birth-family, people we went to primary school with, coworkers... so of course it's an opportunity to find out how horribly ignorant they were.

[belle-marmotte.livejournal.com]

Not unreasonable of you at all. I think ace summed up the mentality behind it nicely, smart woman that she is. The kid-shaming really irks me (along with the pet shaming too) because of the massive power differential between those imposing the shame and those upon which it is imposed. No coincidence that most of these examples emanate from the US either, in my view.

Since I came to the US 2.5 years ago I have noticed a big difference in parenting styles compared to my country of origin (UK), neatly exemplified by a trip to the dentist. While waiting I was rooting through a pile of books to find something suitable to read to my daughter. There was a book which was all about 'the importance of doing as you are told' and at the back there had been a lot of tear off strips to mail in to get your free copy of 'how to get your kids to obey you' bumpf. Every single one of which had been torn out. Needless to say I didn't read the book to my kiddo, but I have learned quickly that parental obedience is central to the American way of parenting, down to the kids who address their parents deferentially as 'sir' and 'ma'am' (and most of the kids around here are always encouraged to use those terms to adults anyway).

As someone who wants to raise her child to question everything, including whatever I may say (because how else did we ever advance in knowledge as a species without that desire to understand and then challenge the accepted paradigms?) and kowtow to no one, I find it massively disturbing. I'm also mindful that bringing my kid up in this way in the heart of the Midwest runs the risk of making her a social pariah in this culture.

And on the subject of cultural differences the rape case coming out of Russia doesn't surprise me much either. That country is one of the most patriarchal cultures that ever was, with an horrendous reputation in the lack of justice for victims of rape/sexual and domestic abuse. That particular story probably made the news more because of its novelty value in having a man as the victim. Had it been a woman I doubt it would have ever surfaced.

And yes people do need to engage their brains a bit more before hitting the 'like' and/or 'share' buttons.

[not_a_sniglet]

I don't know how much help it is. But when we see posts like that on any site, whether it be facebook when we had a facebook at all, or wherever, we automatically think, "That's rape and public shaming." That hair stylist should be in jail. What the man did is not right. But as our mom says so often, "Two wrongs do not make a right."

And it is the same with the shaming. Two wrongs, the act of the child and the shaming of the parent, don't make a right.Maybe we have less problem seeing through the framing because there are more than one of us, and we can discuss amongst ourselves?