A lot of excellent points here. I also think one of the issues at play here, with the "abusers thrive in secrecy" framing, is that not all kinds of openness are equal, or equally helpful here. Your examples illustrate that well. And to be honest, it's not uncommon for people who've had their boundaries transgressed against to struggle at times with intuitively ascertaining where social boundaries should lie. There can be a bit of a skewed sense of who is or isn't a "safe" person to trust, or when a person is demanding an inappropriate level of openness.
I don't say this to victim blame, just to draw attention to one of the things that serial abusers (consciously or unconsciously) can pick up on quite easily. And it doesn't necessarily just result in abuse either! Sometimes, the negative results of this are more along the lines of the "open" abuse victim struggling with feeling chronically rejected and dismissed- because they're being transparent with people who are not equipped to *do* anything with this information, as you touch on in your last para.
I just saw a Key and Peele skit titled "Wendell May Not Really Be Addicted to Sex" that had a thumbnail of Peele looking fat in a therapy-circle. It brought what you were saying to mind.
Earlier this year, with my then-semi-gf, she had been telling me about how "at least you're not like all my other bfs who had pee jars under their beds" and i argued that instead of the 'natural' conclusion that this made me better, given she had also dated them in a less complicated way, maybe she'd like me more if I behaved similarly.
One other topic she frequently brought up regarding her exes, was that they were abusive to her. Often physically and always emotionally. I'd make similar points to the piss jars. In a sense, there was likely a lot more truth there, but fortunately I had the sense not to. There's no sense in continuing the line of thought, beyond that A). My thought process was inspired by your thoughts and B). after getting screamed at and hit and semi-cheated on enough to claim "abuse" I sustain a vague dislike and lack of interest in women that mirrors posts I'd considered annoying and regarded for years from the fairer sex.
I think the problem with abuse is that, unlike many issues ppl can come together about such as environmentalism, there isn't a real solution.
If you're concerned about gun violence or the environment, there may be debates about how best to get there, but these are problems that have solutions. There isn't some infallible system that can catch every person abusing others. That's not to say apathy is best, but that much like murder it is impossible to eliminate entirely.
The biggest correlation with abuse I've seen is class/environment: poor ghetto people are simply more violent.
And in all but the most obvious of cases where we can assume the victim had no ulterior motive, (ie pedophilia), absolutely nothing has changed in how its treated historically, but that now sometimes women can gain enough social power and respect to be believed. idk, having been "cool" for a bit, it feels every bit like a 'popularity contest' as everything else does. Hell, a man in his mid 20s groomed a 15 YO friend of mine in HS and no one cared because he was associated with a trendy local band. Had the issue been pressed by a hot alt girl in the scene instead of me on her behalf (she had left the area), he would have been cancelled.
"Abusers don’t thrive in secrecy; each individual abuser thrives in a secrecy differential[; and in an environment with no secrecy, abusers do X]."
I agree that the secrecy differential is the place where abusers thrive, but if you imagine that we're able to slam the Secrecy Dial to either 0 or 11, we'd prefer total openness, hence the advice. I think the tendency to consider edge cases (not the advice itself) is maybe what's creating the issues in your examples, e.g. the child thinking, "I need to tell /someone/" as opposed to "I need to tell /everyone/".
I think, to your point about how abusers get away with abuse when they aren't stopped or punished, the idea of "Abusers thrive in secrecy" is that you need to tell people until you finally tell someone who will do something. And if you accidentally reveal abuse-facilitating information to an abuser in the process, at least that process ensures that you will eventually reach someone who will stop that person. I guess I'm having a hard time seeing how this advice, literally interpreted with no edge cases considered, could go wrong (as long as there are fewer abusers in the world than people willing to step in to stop abuse).
i was thinking about this, total openness or total secrecy--i think if there was no possible secrecy, secrecy dial was slammed to 11 total openness, that would be good for me. but it would be good for me bc i'm basically lucky. like in a world where you totally couldn't hide your abuse, where your abuse history was visible death note style, i would be better off, probably most people would be better off, but i think there are obviously some people who would be much worse off, would be marked as people you could fuck with without being stopped or punished. (and also in a world w no possible secrecy, people would get killed more.)
i did i think give an example where everyone knew, in the cases in Britain w rape gangs, often everyone in contact w a victimized child knew not only about her previous abuse but about her current abuser
> I guess I'm having a hard time seeing how this advice, literally interpreted with no edge cases considered, could go wrong (as long as there are fewer abusers in the world than people willing to step in to stop abuse).
i think for a lot of people you can meet a lotvof abusers before you meet someone willing to step in to help--& those arent two totally different groups
i am not saying no one should ever tell, when you're in a bad situation you have to act in risky or uncertain ways. just that, when people dont tell, its not necessarily out of irrational shame, it's a rational choice
yeah, I guess i was thinking in a hyper-hypothetical way, like “everyone” meaning “everyone in the world”, not just the victim’s immediate social network. I also think I find it much harder to reason about situations with imperfect information, so I prefer the no secrecy world for ease of reasoning. probably a lot of people do and that also makes it hard to figure out who to tell and who not to tell about abuse, who should be included in the whisper network or not, etc and maybe creates inefficiencies in the system.
I think I thought the post was more about “don’t give black-and-white advice when shades of gray are more accurate”, so I was sort of following the thread of how black and white advice can be useful. but it seems like maybe what you’re pushing back against is the specific idea that black and white advice can stigmatize useful behavior for fighting abuse, i.e. it’s not accuracy that’s the problem but the function of the advice. it makes me think about Agnes Callard’s whole anti-advice thing. like maybe we should just stop
yeah, when i think in a hyperhypothetical wprld, like literally everyone in the wprld knows abt everyone's abuse history, i think that would be good for basically safe-ish people but really really bad for vulnerable people who dont have anyone watching out for them. abusers would know who they could get away with hurting and how
its not exactly anti advice...i guess ultimately im most curious & confused abt how & why half of the advice reproduces mych better than the other half of the advice
"they’re saying it in response to specific people being hurt, in order to try and change people’s behavior so less people will be hurt"
I think this claim is false. Your teacher was siding against the bad behavior - playing the role of someone who might condemn others for it - rather than trying to reduce how often it happens. When she's addressing children who already know precisely which sorts of talk she means and do not need additional details to distinguish the good from the bad cases, she is not informing them about behaviors to avoid; if they know perfectly well already which sorts of "talking behind someone's back" are bad, then they necessarily already know that they ought not to do the bad kinds. Nor does it seem like there was any credible threat of punishment.
What she was really saying was, "you should be ashamed of yourselves," which not only validates their drama and helps them feel a little frisson of naughtiness, but establishes that "talking behind backs" is now an officially sanctioned charge to level against others.
If people were secretly conveying accurate information in proportion to its intrinsic importance, then as you point out, "talking about people behind their back" would be not only innocent but helpful. Your teacher must either be forbidding something good (which seems unlikely), or she is serving as a sort of moral notary, certifying certain accusations as valid currency in the economy of playground grievances. The children are not trying to discover which actions truly harm their fellows. They are gathering weapons for their social battles. And the teacher obliges them, not by reducing unkindness (though she may rehearse to herself the story that that is what she does), but by stamping certain accusations with her authority. She plays the role of Good in their drama, while furnishing them with props for its continuation.
I will say that I thought secrecy in this case referred to secret identities of abusers, the missing stair phenomena, not the secret identities of the abused. You're correct, that if you reveal you have been abused, you are often less safe from future abuse.
So yes, gossip about the missing stairs is probably far more preventative of future abuse than open sharing about being affected by previous abuse. There is often advice about what to do, in broad strokes, as though context doesn't matter. But an abused person often knows they have less support in their clique than their abuser, and even with the anti-abuse broadcasting of our society, they know that the people around them might not support them.
The more victimized someone is, by this, I mean, the less support the victim has in their social world, the more likely they won't be open about their abuse. Because they know that their openness will not protect them. I'm reminded of Autism Speaks, all the people who are barely autistic speak out against it, while the extremely autistic aren't listened to anyway. Something about the people who are benefitting are the ones who are least in danger now. There's some threshold thing going on, something where if you try to "even out the world", by helping the marginalized, most of the benefits accrue to the barely marginalized. idk
i love your comment & even so im gonna be picky about something small. even for gossip about a missing stair....when gossip about missing stairs works, it works by giving options to potential victims. when they can take those options, they can avoid abuse. but "ignorance of a missing stair" isnt the only thing that can make someone vulnerable to a missing stair, victims can also be vulnerable for reasons that the victim can't just instantly decide to stop being--like the victim being broke or physically weak. & if the missing stair is just being gossiped about without being stopped or punished, then gossip about the missing stair also tells other abusers what kind of abuse workd in this community. even openness that's focused on the abuser rather tham the victim, doesnt straightforwardly increase safety
the details are what matter, feel free to be picky! that's fair, although it does straightforwardly decrease the chances of that person abusing whoever's being shared the gossip. so we're back to the distinction between an abuser thriving in secrecy vs. abusers in general thriving in secrecy
related to openness and secrecy, i don't expect you to watch 30 minute videos that are linked by randos, but in that video, Louis talks about what happens when you fight back while weak. Namely, the bully that was 80% confident he could abuse you, now realizes there's a 100% chance he can abuse you. Open information for all makes things more certain, which allows for more action, including abuse from abusers.
There's also another aspect of this discussion that you could touch on, what qualifies as abuse? An elementary school that canes kids doesn't count that as abuse, while they might count kids bullying other kids as abusive. It's possible that the push for legibility is just the dominant power's way of closing ranks, destroying any would-be usurpers of power, after all, if a kid is worried about being abused by other kids, then the school might have less of a grip on them.
Though that's a little too conspiratorial/conflict-minded even for me.
i do have a theory about where the push for legibility is coming from, idt its a conspiracy, i think its like causes by the incentive-structure of the internet
oh with the internet yeah i could see it, all sorts of identity play and teams and posturing and broadcasting views you don't believe to show what side you're on.
alsp just like, any call for openness is going to breed more attention than any call for privacy. a call for openness can make its readers share attention-grabbing stories abt themselves, chain of transmission continued. a call for privacy might convince its readers to be private. chain pf transmission ended.
In all these examples, you suggest the abuser chose one particular victim because they were familiar with that victim's past abuse; but if that abuse hadn't been known, the abuser would have just targeted someone else at random. Abuse didn't increase overall.
Not as true of the last example--for someone who works like that, I think he might have abused less people total in a more secretive environment. Although there is an obvious reason it's hard to compare secretive environments with open ones
There is another side of this coin. Someone has to protect the person, or help the person, or confront the abuser when the abuse is spoken. This doesn't happen. Not in my experience.
the more you speak about it, the more you alienate yourself from the people around you and end up with less resources. Society operates from a "pretend it's fine" standpoint and blames survivors. Until this changes, it must be weighed in a real benefit vs. risks analysis.
The public vs private/selective revelation angle is important, but interacts with another factor: the incidence of C-PTSD among the relevant "public." It's not quite true that abusers don't work for a better world for all abusers; a common feature of C-PTSD is feeling compelled to side with abusers against the abused.* When enough people in a society have C-PTSD - including in positions of authority where occupational trauma is common - public disclosure plays into a perverse dynamic: rather than invoking corrective mechanisms, it can mark the victim as someone who can be safely harmed, and the abuser as someone who can harm with impunity. Paradoxically, the more blatant the transgression, the more strongly it tends to trigger this response. See also http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/guilt-shame-and-depravity/
For instance it's of some personal interest to me that, in my impression, there's no real upside for the victim in this story shared by Zvi (https://thezvi.substack.com/p/childhood-and-education-roundup-7 ) in revealing who they are, and no meaningful avenue of recourse for them, but a substantial downside in being construed as the sort of person who gets in trouble with cops:
>I was told a story the week before I wrote this paragraph by a friend who got the cops called on him for letting his baby sleep in their stroller in his yard by someone who actively impersonated a police officer and confessed to doing so. My friend got arrested, the confessed felon went on her way.
The story exemplifies this dynamic perfectly: authorities sided with someone who openly admitted to impersonating police, against their victim.
>Betrayal trauma is a term popularized by psychologist Jennifer Freyd for the effects produced when someone is harmed by someone whose care they rely on, and is compelled to conceal this fact. The military is a well-known institutional betrayer, as is the health care system. Freyd has documented the occurrence of "betrayal blindness," in which the victims of betrayal trauma tend to develop blind spots around the betrayal as a coping mechanism, to compartmentalize their knowledge of it in order to keep up appearances for their abuser.
>People with complex PTSD such as betrayal trauma acquire new behavioral patterns such as feeling compelled to side with transgressors - people who are insisting on a coverup - simply because they are transgressors. This is documented among other places in psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk's book The Body Keeps the Score.
as a pakistani reading this, that immigrant example was uncalled for. lol.
Many people say the same
yeah, igs.
You know the concept of "telling on yourself"? I'm generally not a big fan of it, but you know, might want to consider it.
haha! you expand that phrase out for sardonic effect bro. they will never be based grey tribe
A lot of excellent points here. I also think one of the issues at play here, with the "abusers thrive in secrecy" framing, is that not all kinds of openness are equal, or equally helpful here. Your examples illustrate that well. And to be honest, it's not uncommon for people who've had their boundaries transgressed against to struggle at times with intuitively ascertaining where social boundaries should lie. There can be a bit of a skewed sense of who is or isn't a "safe" person to trust, or when a person is demanding an inappropriate level of openness.
I don't say this to victim blame, just to draw attention to one of the things that serial abusers (consciously or unconsciously) can pick up on quite easily. And it doesn't necessarily just result in abuse either! Sometimes, the negative results of this are more along the lines of the "open" abuse victim struggling with feeling chronically rejected and dismissed- because they're being transparent with people who are not equipped to *do* anything with this information, as you touch on in your last para.
I just saw a Key and Peele skit titled "Wendell May Not Really Be Addicted to Sex" that had a thumbnail of Peele looking fat in a therapy-circle. It brought what you were saying to mind.
Earlier this year, with my then-semi-gf, she had been telling me about how "at least you're not like all my other bfs who had pee jars under their beds" and i argued that instead of the 'natural' conclusion that this made me better, given she had also dated them in a less complicated way, maybe she'd like me more if I behaved similarly.
One other topic she frequently brought up regarding her exes, was that they were abusive to her. Often physically and always emotionally. I'd make similar points to the piss jars. In a sense, there was likely a lot more truth there, but fortunately I had the sense not to. There's no sense in continuing the line of thought, beyond that A). My thought process was inspired by your thoughts and B). after getting screamed at and hit and semi-cheated on enough to claim "abuse" I sustain a vague dislike and lack of interest in women that mirrors posts I'd considered annoying and regarded for years from the fairer sex.
I think the problem with abuse is that, unlike many issues ppl can come together about such as environmentalism, there isn't a real solution.
If you're concerned about gun violence or the environment, there may be debates about how best to get there, but these are problems that have solutions. There isn't some infallible system that can catch every person abusing others. That's not to say apathy is best, but that much like murder it is impossible to eliminate entirely.
The biggest correlation with abuse I've seen is class/environment: poor ghetto people are simply more violent.
And in all but the most obvious of cases where we can assume the victim had no ulterior motive, (ie pedophilia), absolutely nothing has changed in how its treated historically, but that now sometimes women can gain enough social power and respect to be believed. idk, having been "cool" for a bit, it feels every bit like a 'popularity contest' as everything else does. Hell, a man in his mid 20s groomed a 15 YO friend of mine in HS and no one cared because he was associated with a trendy local band. Had the issue been pressed by a hot alt girl in the scene instead of me on her behalf (she had left the area), he would have been cancelled.
"Abusers don’t thrive in secrecy; each individual abuser thrives in a secrecy differential[; and in an environment with no secrecy, abusers do X]."
I agree that the secrecy differential is the place where abusers thrive, but if you imagine that we're able to slam the Secrecy Dial to either 0 or 11, we'd prefer total openness, hence the advice. I think the tendency to consider edge cases (not the advice itself) is maybe what's creating the issues in your examples, e.g. the child thinking, "I need to tell /someone/" as opposed to "I need to tell /everyone/".
I think, to your point about how abusers get away with abuse when they aren't stopped or punished, the idea of "Abusers thrive in secrecy" is that you need to tell people until you finally tell someone who will do something. And if you accidentally reveal abuse-facilitating information to an abuser in the process, at least that process ensures that you will eventually reach someone who will stop that person. I guess I'm having a hard time seeing how this advice, literally interpreted with no edge cases considered, could go wrong (as long as there are fewer abusers in the world than people willing to step in to stop abuse).
i was thinking about this, total openness or total secrecy--i think if there was no possible secrecy, secrecy dial was slammed to 11 total openness, that would be good for me. but it would be good for me bc i'm basically lucky. like in a world where you totally couldn't hide your abuse, where your abuse history was visible death note style, i would be better off, probably most people would be better off, but i think there are obviously some people who would be much worse off, would be marked as people you could fuck with without being stopped or punished. (and also in a world w no possible secrecy, people would get killed more.)
i did i think give an example where everyone knew, in the cases in Britain w rape gangs, often everyone in contact w a victimized child knew not only about her previous abuse but about her current abuser
> I guess I'm having a hard time seeing how this advice, literally interpreted with no edge cases considered, could go wrong (as long as there are fewer abusers in the world than people willing to step in to stop abuse).
i think for a lot of people you can meet a lotvof abusers before you meet someone willing to step in to help--& those arent two totally different groups
i am not saying no one should ever tell, when you're in a bad situation you have to act in risky or uncertain ways. just that, when people dont tell, its not necessarily out of irrational shame, it's a rational choice
yeah, I guess i was thinking in a hyper-hypothetical way, like “everyone” meaning “everyone in the world”, not just the victim’s immediate social network. I also think I find it much harder to reason about situations with imperfect information, so I prefer the no secrecy world for ease of reasoning. probably a lot of people do and that also makes it hard to figure out who to tell and who not to tell about abuse, who should be included in the whisper network or not, etc and maybe creates inefficiencies in the system.
I think I thought the post was more about “don’t give black-and-white advice when shades of gray are more accurate”, so I was sort of following the thread of how black and white advice can be useful. but it seems like maybe what you’re pushing back against is the specific idea that black and white advice can stigmatize useful behavior for fighting abuse, i.e. it’s not accuracy that’s the problem but the function of the advice. it makes me think about Agnes Callard’s whole anti-advice thing. like maybe we should just stop
yeah, when i think in a hyperhypothetical wprld, like literally everyone in the wprld knows abt everyone's abuse history, i think that would be good for basically safe-ish people but really really bad for vulnerable people who dont have anyone watching out for them. abusers would know who they could get away with hurting and how
its not exactly anti advice...i guess ultimately im most curious & confused abt how & why half of the advice reproduces mych better than the other half of the advice
"they’re saying it in response to specific people being hurt, in order to try and change people’s behavior so less people will be hurt"
I think this claim is false. Your teacher was siding against the bad behavior - playing the role of someone who might condemn others for it - rather than trying to reduce how often it happens. When she's addressing children who already know precisely which sorts of talk she means and do not need additional details to distinguish the good from the bad cases, she is not informing them about behaviors to avoid; if they know perfectly well already which sorts of "talking behind someone's back" are bad, then they necessarily already know that they ought not to do the bad kinds. Nor does it seem like there was any credible threat of punishment.
What she was really saying was, "you should be ashamed of yourselves," which not only validates their drama and helps them feel a little frisson of naughtiness, but establishes that "talking behind backs" is now an officially sanctioned charge to level against others.
If people were secretly conveying accurate information in proportion to its intrinsic importance, then as you point out, "talking about people behind their back" would be not only innocent but helpful. Your teacher must either be forbidding something good (which seems unlikely), or she is serving as a sort of moral notary, certifying certain accusations as valid currency in the economy of playground grievances. The children are not trying to discover which actions truly harm their fellows. They are gathering weapons for their social battles. And the teacher obliges them, not by reducing unkindness (though she may rehearse to herself the story that that is what she does), but by stamping certain accusations with her authority. She plays the role of Good in their drama, while furnishing them with props for its continuation.
I'm reminded of Louis Rossmann, who talks about how kids are abused because abusers know that nobody will protect them, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq60ccWHJcQ
and of Patrick McKenzie, talking about how accurate descriptions of systems are often viewed as attacks on that system: https://x.com/patio11/status/1880098800741892446
I will say that I thought secrecy in this case referred to secret identities of abusers, the missing stair phenomena, not the secret identities of the abused. You're correct, that if you reveal you have been abused, you are often less safe from future abuse.
So yes, gossip about the missing stairs is probably far more preventative of future abuse than open sharing about being affected by previous abuse. There is often advice about what to do, in broad strokes, as though context doesn't matter. But an abused person often knows they have less support in their clique than their abuser, and even with the anti-abuse broadcasting of our society, they know that the people around them might not support them.
The more victimized someone is, by this, I mean, the less support the victim has in their social world, the more likely they won't be open about their abuse. Because they know that their openness will not protect them. I'm reminded of Autism Speaks, all the people who are barely autistic speak out against it, while the extremely autistic aren't listened to anyway. Something about the people who are benefitting are the ones who are least in danger now. There's some threshold thing going on, something where if you try to "even out the world", by helping the marginalized, most of the benefits accrue to the barely marginalized. idk
From my substack https://theignorantschoolmaster.substack.com/p/ramblings-of-an-idiot
> The less someone or something is believed, the more your support is appreciated.
i love your comment & even so im gonna be picky about something small. even for gossip about a missing stair....when gossip about missing stairs works, it works by giving options to potential victims. when they can take those options, they can avoid abuse. but "ignorance of a missing stair" isnt the only thing that can make someone vulnerable to a missing stair, victims can also be vulnerable for reasons that the victim can't just instantly decide to stop being--like the victim being broke or physically weak. & if the missing stair is just being gossiped about without being stopped or punished, then gossip about the missing stair also tells other abusers what kind of abuse workd in this community. even openness that's focused on the abuser rather tham the victim, doesnt straightforwardly increase safety
the details are what matter, feel free to be picky! that's fair, although it does straightforwardly decrease the chances of that person abusing whoever's being shared the gossip. so we're back to the distinction between an abuser thriving in secrecy vs. abusers in general thriving in secrecy
related to openness and secrecy, i don't expect you to watch 30 minute videos that are linked by randos, but in that video, Louis talks about what happens when you fight back while weak. Namely, the bully that was 80% confident he could abuse you, now realizes there's a 100% chance he can abuse you. Open information for all makes things more certain, which allows for more action, including abuse from abusers.
There's also another aspect of this discussion that you could touch on, what qualifies as abuse? An elementary school that canes kids doesn't count that as abuse, while they might count kids bullying other kids as abusive. It's possible that the push for legibility is just the dominant power's way of closing ranks, destroying any would-be usurpers of power, after all, if a kid is worried about being abused by other kids, then the school might have less of a grip on them.
Though that's a little too conspiratorial/conflict-minded even for me.
i do have a theory about where the push for legibility is coming from, idt its a conspiracy, i think its like causes by the incentive-structure of the internet
oh with the internet yeah i could see it, all sorts of identity play and teams and posturing and broadcasting views you don't believe to show what side you're on.
alsp just like, any call for openness is going to breed more attention than any call for privacy. a call for openness can make its readers share attention-grabbing stories abt themselves, chain of transmission continued. a call for privacy might convince its readers to be private. chain pf transmission ended.
yeah 100%
In all these examples, you suggest the abuser chose one particular victim because they were familiar with that victim's past abuse; but if that abuse hadn't been known, the abuser would have just targeted someone else at random. Abuse didn't increase overall.
Not as true of the last example--for someone who works like that, I think he might have abused less people total in a more secretive environment. Although there is an obvious reason it's hard to compare secretive environments with open ones
There is another side of this coin. Someone has to protect the person, or help the person, or confront the abuser when the abuse is spoken. This doesn't happen. Not in my experience.
the more you speak about it, the more you alienate yourself from the people around you and end up with less resources. Society operates from a "pretend it's fine" standpoint and blames survivors. Until this changes, it must be weighed in a real benefit vs. risks analysis.
The public vs private/selective revelation angle is important, but interacts with another factor: the incidence of C-PTSD among the relevant "public." It's not quite true that abusers don't work for a better world for all abusers; a common feature of C-PTSD is feeling compelled to side with abusers against the abused.* When enough people in a society have C-PTSD - including in positions of authority where occupational trauma is common - public disclosure plays into a perverse dynamic: rather than invoking corrective mechanisms, it can mark the victim as someone who can be safely harmed, and the abuser as someone who can harm with impunity. Paradoxically, the more blatant the transgression, the more strongly it tends to trigger this response. See also http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/guilt-shame-and-depravity/
For instance it's of some personal interest to me that, in my impression, there's no real upside for the victim in this story shared by Zvi (https://thezvi.substack.com/p/childhood-and-education-roundup-7 ) in revealing who they are, and no meaningful avenue of recourse for them, but a substantial downside in being construed as the sort of person who gets in trouble with cops:
>I was told a story the week before I wrote this paragraph by a friend who got the cops called on him for letting his baby sleep in their stroller in his yard by someone who actively impersonated a police officer and confessed to doing so. My friend got arrested, the confessed felon went on her way.
The story exemplifies this dynamic perfectly: authorities sided with someone who openly admitted to impersonating police, against their victim.
----------
* For pointers to sources on C-PTSD see my summary in The Trauma Coup (http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/the-trauma-coup/ ):
>Betrayal trauma is a term popularized by psychologist Jennifer Freyd for the effects produced when someone is harmed by someone whose care they rely on, and is compelled to conceal this fact. The military is a well-known institutional betrayer, as is the health care system. Freyd has documented the occurrence of "betrayal blindness," in which the victims of betrayal trauma tend to develop blind spots around the betrayal as a coping mechanism, to compartmentalize their knowledge of it in order to keep up appearances for their abuser.
>People with complex PTSD such as betrayal trauma acquire new behavioral patterns such as feeling compelled to side with transgressors - people who are insisting on a coverup - simply because they are transgressors. This is documented among other places in psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk's book The Body Keeps the Score.