It’s clearly sexual assault, and in most jurisdictions a criminal act. It may or may not be classified as rape. But that doesn’t matter. It’s both wrong and criminal, and it’s abhorrent that it happens as often as it does and that it’s so easily ignored. None of that is the point of this post.
The victim was harmed, but feels like they’re being further harmed by the common assumption that it should have harmed them more deeply and more permanently, and that they should somehow visibly display that harm so the crusaders have a clear victim to worry about (ok, this last part is my interpretation).
In fact, many people who’ve suffered superficially-similar invasions HAVE been permanently altered—I know a few, and it would be both incorrect and insensitive to tell them “it’s no big deal”. For them, it was a big deal. I ache for them, and it is a pareto improvement to reduce that frequency and severity of such crimes.
That doesn’t invalidate the point of this post—https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy is a fallacy—people react differently, have different expectations, different social support, different prior experiences, etc. It makes things WORSE to treat everyone as if they’ll have the same reactions to events (from crimes to classrooms) - you’ll overreact in some cases, causing harm as they question themselves about everything, or you’ll underreact as they REALLY question themselves about everything.
I tend to believe that under-reaction to this kind of violation is a lesser harm than over-reaction (as long as the reaction is somewhere near the median “proper” reaction), but acknowledging variance is way way better than either.
It’s clearly sexual assault, and in most jurisdictions a criminal act. It may or may not be classified as rape. But that doesn’t matter. It’s both wrong and criminal, and it’s abhorrent that it happens as often as it does and that it’s so easily ignored. None of that is the point of this post.
The victim was harmed, but feels like they’re being further harmed by the common assumption that it should have harmed them more deeply and more permanently, and that they should somehow visibly display that harm so the crusaders have a clear victim to worry about (ok, this last part is my interpretation).
In fact, many people who’ve suffered superficially-similar invasions HAVE been permanently altered—I know a few, and it would be both incorrect and insensitive to tell them “it’s no big deal”. For them, it was a big deal. I ache for them, and it is a pareto improvement to reduce that frequency and severity of such crimes.
That doesn’t invalidate the point of this post—https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy is a fallacy—people react differently, have different expectations, different social support, different prior experiences, etc. It makes things WORSE to treat everyone as if they’ll have the same reactions to events (from crimes to classrooms) - you’ll overreact in some cases, causing harm as they question themselves about everything, or you’ll underreact as they REALLY question themselves about everything.
I tend to believe that under-reaction to this kind of violation is a lesser harm than over-reaction (as long as the reaction is somewhere near the median “proper” reaction), but acknowledging variance is way way better than either.