By now we all know about the law students who begged out of
final exams because they were traumatized by events in Ferguson, MO and Staten
Island, NY.
Many sentient commentators wondered how these students will
ever be able to practice criminal law. Won’t their delicate sensibilities
prevent them from digging deeply into the minutiae of a crime? How can they
offer the best defense if they refuse to examine the details of what happened?
Now, pretending that they will be traumatized by discussions
of rape young law students at places like Harvard Law School have persuaded
their teachers not to discuss the topic at all.
Apparently, the thought police have found a new way to suppress speech. These students will be severely traumatized by
hearing the word—rape-- or, God forbid, the word-- violate.
But, how will these incipient lawyers ever be able to
prosecute a rape case? If this movement gains more traction, we will end up
with a group of lawyers that cannot prosecute rapists. Who profits from that
piece of idiocy?
Harvard Law Professor Jeannie Suk describes the situation at
her law school:
Students
seem more anxious about classroom discussion, and about approaching the law of
sexual violence in particular, than they have ever been in my eight years as a
law professor. Student organizations representing women’s interests now
routinely advise students that they should not feel pressured to attend or
participate in class sessions that focus on the law of sexual violence, and
which might therefore be traumatic. These organizations also ask criminal-law
teachers to warn their classes that the rape-law unit might “trigger” traumatic
memories. Individual students often ask teachers not to include the law of rape
on exams for fear that the material would cause them to perform less well. One
teacher I know was recently asked by a student not to use the word “violate” in
class—as in “Does this conduct violate the law?”—because the word was
triggering. Some students have even suggested that rape law should not be
taught because of its potential to cause distress.
The result:
But
asking students to challenge each other in discussions of rape law has become
so difficult that teachers are starting to give up on the subject. About a
dozen new teachers of criminal law at multiple institutions have told me that
they are not including rape law in their courses, arguing that it’s not worth
the risk of complaints of discomfort by students. Even seasoned teachers of
criminal law, at law schools across the country, have confided that they are
seriously considering dropping rape law and other topics related to sex and
gender violence. Both men and women teachers seem frightened of discussion,
because they are afraid of injuring others or being injured themselves. What
has made everyone so newly nervous about discussing sexual-assault law in the
classroom?
On what grounds are these radical students suppressing
classroom instruction into criminal activity?
On the grounds that such discussions will traumatize them.
It’s not about the law. It’s about a crackpot theory of mental health.
Suh writes:
For at
least some students, the classroom has become a potentially traumatic
environment, and they have begun to anticipate the emotional injuries they
could suffer or inflict in classroom conversation. They are also more inclined
to insist that teachers protect them from causing or experiencing
discomfort—and teachers, in turn, are more willing to oblige, because it would
be considered injurious for them not to acknowledge a student’s trauma or
potential trauma.
Were we to follow the logic of the argument we would
immediately run into difficulties. If the word “rape” triggers a traumatic
reaction, the same would be true of any word associated with the event.
If a woman was raped on the beach, the word beach or the
word ocean might trigger the memory. If her assailant was male the word man
might do the same. Unless, of course, he called himself a dude. In that case,
the word dude would have to be banned. If he had dark hair or blond hair or red
hair, all of these words might be traumatizing. If he was wearing jeans… and so
on.
Any teacher who wanted to follow the politically correct
rule to the letter would then have to find out which students had suffered
which traumas and which words they associated with their traumas.
You would end up with a list of prohibited words, a type of
Index.
But that isn’t even the strangest part.
We live in a world where therapy is often conducted
according to the principles of cognitive neuroscience. It is well known, or it
should be well known that behavioral treatments, especially, try to cure by desensitizing
people to traumas and psychic pain… through gradual exposure to the triggering
image or word.
Someone who is phobic about spiders will gradually be
exposed to spiders. It might begin with the word… it might move on to pictures…
and it might arrive at real spiders.
Gradual exposure will desensitize the individual to an
object or a threat.
By extension, an individual who religiously avoids all exposure
to a threatening object, like a spider, will, upon confronting one, have no
defenses, no way to process the information beyond sheer terror. Someone who
does not know how to deal with the triggering images or words will be
especially vulnerable to any image denoting the threat.
Of course, some people do not believe in the
cognitive-behavioral approach to therapy. They prefer the more
psychoanalytically inspired approach.
Even there, however, the key to overcoming trauma, pace Freud, is to remember it, to recall
it, to recollect it… then to recount it within a coherent narrative.
Even in the Freudian exercise in mental gymnastics, a trauma
can only be neutralized by being recalled. To be more precise, the purpose of psychoanalysis is to help the victim accept that he really wanted it to
happen.
Thus, the cognitive-behavioral approach works to help people
to put their traumas behind them. It claims that sensitivity or oversensitivity
to a trauma is more like a bad habit than it is a meaningful statement about
who you are or what you want.
Be that as it may, no therapy asserts that shielding people
from recollecting trauma is beneficial.
When cognitive therapists developed the concept of triggers,
they wanted people to learn how to deal with them, not to run away from them.
8 comments:
Humans are curious animals. I agree it isn't a good sign, and perhaps it is "caused" by a therapy culture or whatever, but I can be more curious for wider possible truths here.
For perspective, I've long wondered how surgeon could so "heartless" cut into human flesh without screaming in pain. I mean how do you "do no harm" when you have to cut someone open to help heal them?
Not being one I can't say, but obviously there's some sort of objectification going on. It's not a person, its just an organic system, one that we rationally know from experience, is self-healing, if you give it the right sort of help.
But out empathetic system probably will never accept such "reason", and people who want to study dead bodies are probably evil and deserve some special place in hell for their evil knowledge.
At least a superstious perspective can go there easily - anything I could never do because I'm a good person, but someone else can do, well, something must be wrong with them!
So in order to be a good doctor, you have to suppress an important part of your humanity.
Take away empathy, and we can become Nazi doctors who will dehumanize subjects into objects for medical knowledge. Give them full empathy and they'd rather let a pregnant woman die than cut out the baby.
Trauma is an interesting word, suggesting that a person has hit an experience they can't process. So if you take it slow, we can be desensitized to things.
But when you're not talking about your own actions, or your own experiences, it is strange to imagine how trauma exists. Perhaps it means such "sensitive people" are not reacting directly to the external information, but are reacting to some other hidden trauma?
Or maybe its all stupid imagination, and mass-hypnosis, and suggestability of people in groups?
Maybe its even a psychic field phenomena? When a critical mass of people are overwhelmed by their trauma, their emotional states are "contagious" to others?
I remember after my mom died in my early 20's, I couldn't watch any TV news for over a year, and new of violence hit me the most.
Perhaps in the olden days people were more isolated, and now with mass-media emotional-meme viruses are spreading quickly in large populations?
Its hard to know, or how you might scientifically prove anything. OTOH, we're collecting more data than ever before. Perhaps someone right now is statistically measuring internet hysteria, and even "planting" viral topics to measure how fast it propagates? Perhaps these are the new Nazi doctors, practicing on a blind culture in need of manipulation and proding into the "correct" directions?
Or would that be too conspiratory?
But plain old murder isn't considered traumatic, I guess...
How about bankruptcy law? There must be millions of people who have been traumatized by personal bankruptcy or by a major loss stemming from business bankruptcy.
I think there's an opportunity for some college to position itself as the non-wimp university: "Our students are expected to have the emotional strength and maturity to participate in a wide range of discussion, and if they can't do that, they shouldn't come here."
I suspect a lot of employers would hire people from such a university in preference to the shrinking violets which appear to be so common in most of today's higher education.
What doesn't break you, will [potentially] make you stronger. It's a principle of physical immunity; of mental immunity; and of wisdom.
They refuse to be vaccinated against the ills that could plague them later in life, and face life with no (NO) immunity built up thru exposure to things(and especially) thinks/thoughts that exist in the wild of real life.
It's a good thing these candy-asses don't have to hit the beach at Iwo or Normandy. We'd lose. Same with their college profs or admin people. ISIS would have them for lunch. One wonders if the demands arise mainly from the male or female genders? I hope the latter. If not, we're really doomed.
They're not using the word 'trigger' in any clinical sense, but merely for political gain.
They are arguing that women are simultaneously independent, strong, intelligent, sex-positive and delicate hothouse flowers unable to even be in the room when unmentionable topics are broached.
Worse, they demand we also believe this impossible contradiction is true, and blame us when we cannot correctly guess which face they are showing at any one moment.
I think Pogo nailed it.
Let's be clear. The concept of mental triggers comes to us from cognitive therapy. It is certainly a clinical concept. Of course, the students who are invoking it to declare their sensitivity are obviously misusing it, even abusing it. That was the point of my post.
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