I suspect this is coming from people who think somehow it means you care more about dead Palestinian kids if you watch videos of them, because it’s such an aversive stimulus that it feels to them like they’re “doing something”. They’re not.
as someone who looks at a ton of atrocity videos for my work: you do NOT need to be looking at that stuff unless you have a specific genuine purpose for doing so
you are NOT helping anybody by traumatizing yourself
As many of you know, I spent years on the Board of NCMEC. The staff kept a strong firewall between us and the badness, and I tend to be very skeptical of anyone who thinks they need to see images if that’s it their job. You don’t need to become that hardened in order to care about what’s happening.
I mean, fuck. You want to do something about it? Do something about it. Don’t just sit there watching videos and thinking that somehow that’s “bearing witness” or some shit.
And, in fact, exposing yourself to them (especially when there is no meaningful way you can directly and personally intervene in the specific scenario you're watching) *prevents* you from being able to care about what's happening, very very quickly.
I have a lot of things buried in my memory as "I know I've read evidence for this and can probably turn it up again fairly quickly"; I need to start keeping actual links on hand to avoid having to find stuff again when I need it, heh
Like rahaeli says, you see it a lot in people who suffer secondary trauma. First responders, medical professionals, etc. One of the reasons prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys frequently are so fucked up.
I can testify to that from an outside context. Spending years hardening myself meant empathy was just...not a thing for a long time.
It's taken work, but at least now the default emotional setting is "empathize"
I wonder if this partly explains atrocity denialism, like all the people posting videos of horror from Syria or Gaza or the Israeli kibbutzes and saying that they were fake or staged. I know part of it is intentional propaganda, but I wonder if some people believe it as a defense mechanism.
Yeah I don't think you should need to see kids getting murdered to think it's bad for kids to get murdered. My heart goes out to the rare individuals stuck seeing that stuff for work
At NCMEC we had an annual briefing from the FBI that I refer to as “recent trends in CSAM”. They never showed us images, but there were some things described in words that I will never ever forget. I don’t disbelieve them even though I didn’t see images.
I used to work as a data scientist for a modern slavery NGO, and some of the things I read in reports gave me horrible nightmares. They tried to make me the resident expert in this because I was the Computer Person, one of the many reasons I don’t work there anymore
Folks don't want to hear it, because I get that it doesn't feel like this, but someone should say it anyway: forcing yourself to watch trauma videos is self harm, and it is main character syndrome. The world is not better if you self-traumatize, and watching them is not building empathy with victims
right, in my experience people who are affected by the situation don't give a shit that you were sad about a video, they want to know what you are actually DOING to help them
I didn't need to watch George Floyd be killed by Chauvin to believe that it happened and that cops kill Black people with impunity every damn day in this country.
I was never able to bring myself to watch the George Floyd video, to listen to the Elijah McClain tape. The way I see it, I know they were brutally murdered in cold blood by cops. I don't require proof. And, what I already know has been doing a good enough job keeping me up on an occasional night.
Unfortunately for the jury they've often gotta see images related to the actual charges.
But it's one of the reasons you'll find people who are arrested in possession of THOUSANDS of CSAM images and they only get charged with like a dozen.
It's enough to put them away for decades and that's enough
In some cases the process is as follows:
The bad thing is still going on.
People aren't doing anything to stop it.
The only reasons for not doing anything is either not knowing or not caring.
Show them how bad it is. If they don't do anything, then they don't care and are evil and can be yelled at.
There does seem to be a (thankfully very tiny) segment of the Left that seems to operate under the premise that if you're not driving yourself to the point of physical and/or mental breakdown in your activism, than you don't actually care and you're just a virtue signalling Liberal.
