Posted by name on January 22, 2001, at 15:40:47
In reply to Re: The best of Both Worlds., posted by shar on January 22, 2001, at 12:30:44
I recall the Vesper post quite well, too. With respect to the person who posts as Vesper, I don't know what happened to cause that injury, and I don't intend to infer a cause.
But I read that post as a person who spends days in court listening to conflicting stories and perceptions of domestic violence. I had recently spoken with prosecutors, defense attorneys, police officials and victims' advocates about patterns of violence. I had followed an instance of an apparent false report of domestic violence that left a person in jail for an extended period and I had discussed with officials why victims often recant their reports of violence by a domestic partner.
I can't say what happened to cause Vesper's cut. But I can say what happened in my mind when I read the report, and the resulting concerns that arose regarding a supposedly supportive milieu offered here.
When a police officer responds to a report of an injury caused in a fight, it is usually investigated as a battery. The person who suffered the injury is not always the victim. Officers and investigators are alert for defensive injuries that might indicate the injured party is the perpetrator of violence. Police who respond the scenes of violence are well aware that men are often injured while they are abusing women. Attorney's general in most states advise local police to identify the primary aggressor rather than to sympathize with the most injured party.
If police rountinely hear contrived stories about the cause of an injury, it is fair to suspect similar stories will, for some reason, be posted on the Internet. For a person who has committed violence against a domestic partner, there are often feelings of guilt, and an urge to find sympathy and support to mitigate feelings of guilt. The anonymity of the Internet allows a person to elicit sympathetic and supportive responses to a representation of events that might not be at all accurate. In an environment where challenges and queries concerning a person's representation of facts are discouraged, there is ample opportunity for a person to find pollyannic sympathy.
This is a good reason for therapy to occur behind closed doors; in private a therapist can pursue hunches and investigate motivations that troubled individuals often try to mask. The caveat at the top of the page, that says people in a crisis should get help the old fashioned way, does not address people who have a pathological reason for avoiding old fashioned face-to-face encounters.
In some of the circumstances that are reported here, there are clearly other people involved. Those people are not always available to comment, and on at least one occasion, regular posters viciously criticized the friend of a spouse who advised the spouse that his private matters were being discussed here. The result is that the support offered here is at times limited to the person who posts here. Efforts to maintain a supportive milieu here seem to allow non-supportive and accusatory comments about people who are not here to defend themselves or to tell their side of the story.
As a medium for exchanging information about the effects of medications, this site might perform well. But as a medium for exploring personal problems, the format presents problems. In a domestic situation, threats of suicide are often recognized by victims' advocates as abusive and as efforts to control a domestic partner. Here, a person making such threats is most often treated with unmitigated and unqualified sympathy. If the suicidal postings reflect genuine despair, such a supportive response might be helpful. But if the suicidal posts are used to practice a rhetorical device and find support for a person who is losing control of their spouse, support here can serve to support a situation where one domestic partner is controling another.
In the case of the Littleton, Colo. school shooting, the perpetrators apparently used the Internet to practice their mindset before they actually committed violence. The lack of challenges to their behavior, even after the family of their young friend reported their on-line comments to police, allowed them to infer to themselves that somebody supported their mindset.
I am concerned that inattention here to the hazards of cyberpsychology is driven in large part personal enjoyment of the site and by affection for friendships developed through the site. I don't see unmitigated support for this process as being based on a realistic assessment of the real life situations involving thousands of people that in some way include posting here of select details of their situation.
It is a mistake to assume that the only malicious people who post here are those who are overtly abusive. People may use this environment to covertly find reinforcement for pathologic aspects of their personality. The "group" process here, using the limited information presented here, might at times be ineffective for sorting through some the problems presented here.
In the case of a person who comes here to discuss injuries incurred during a fight, sympathy and support for them might be unsympathetic and non-supportive to possible victims. That a similar situation was represented in a medical journal as evidence of the "Best of Both Worlds" and that the article is inaccesible to many of the people involved here might not represent the best spirit of peer review.
poster:name
thread:266
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20001124/msgs/279.html