Vigilantism

[lederhosen]

In case any of you missed the post that's been doing the rounds the last few days, brief summary: an LJer at Convergence was assaulted by an acquaintance, who injured her badly and nearly killed her before fleeing, and various other LJers have been spreading the story and photos around. You can find it via this post, if you're curious (does not include images, but links to pages that do).

It's a repulsive story, and I'm all in favour of catching the guy and bringing him to justice. But there are several things about this that bug me.

The first is that several people decided to share this story with the rest of LJ by posting pictures of the assault victim all over the place, so people were exposed to them without any warning. It's a very effective way to get people's attention (more on that later)... and it's also a very effective way to trigger flashbacks and associated nastiness in people who've previously been exposed to violence. So don't do this. (Yeah, I know, I post stuff that squicks people from time to time, but I try to avoid anything that's really upsetting.)

The second is the number of people who wanted to find this guy before the police did, and beat the crap out of him. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I still think the trial should happen before the punishment; I have no particular reason to doubt the victim's story or the accompanying photo. But given that hoaxes on LJ are not unknown (anybody else remember the burned kitten scam?), it seems to me like it would be prudent to let the guy tell his side of things before the lynching begins. (And, yeah, he ran; guilt is a common explanation for that, but it's not the only reason.)


And the third...

There are a lot of deserving causes out there. Children starving in Africa, AIDS patients dying in the USA, entire species being wiped out in South America, freedom of expression being stifled in Asia, take your pick. There is enough evil in the world that you could dedicate your entire life to fighting it, and you still wouldn't begin to cover it all. So you have to make a decision about what you're going to tackle and what you'll leave to somebody else.

As I see it, there are two different questions you can use to make that decision: "Which option does the most good?" and "Which option makes me feel good?"

IMHO, way too many people make that call based on the second of those instead of the first. Altruism turns into a sneaky sort of selfishness, and the feel-good acts of 'charity' crowd out the ones that really do good.

As one commenter on cleolinda's journal put it, after seeing the before-and-after pictures of the victim: "I was so sad when I read that, she's such a pretty girl."

I have friends who've been on the receiving end of violence. Some of them are photogenic, and some of them are not... and if their looks have any bearing on how we respond to that violence, something is deeply fucked up somewhere, and I'm not just talking about the perpetrator.

Yes, I will be happy if & when the guy is caught and brought up on charges, and if the LJ feeding frenzy helps that happen, so be it. But I don't think that everything that has good consequences is in itself good. When we turn 'altruism' into a way to make ourselves feel good, the end result is that less good is done.

And it becomes really tempting to use an altruistic side-effect as an excuse to do something else that might make us feel good.

Like, say, beating the crap out of somebody. And isn't that where this started?

Comments

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

I still am enamored of the idea of getting this guy's face out and around

All else being equal, that's a good thing; the problem is that all else is not equal. When people get into the habit of doing good things for the wrong reasons, it's not much of a step to doing bad things for the same reasons. In the meantime, if jumping on this particular bandwagon sates their feelings of social responsibility, that means they've got less incentive to look at other ways to help society - ways that might be a *lot* more useful.

This is why I dislike stuff like email petitions; in general, they're not just unproductive, but counterproductive, because every person who signs an email petition is that much more likely to feel they've 'done their bit', and that much less likely to write a paper letter, or make a phone call, or go out and make themselves heard - anything that actually has a chance of persuading anybody. Same principle applies here. For folk who live in the area (as cleolinda does) and actually have a chance of spotting the guy, by all means, pass it around. But for the other 99% of LJ, there are almost certainly more effective, less comfortable ways to combat violence.

I also think that the possibility of getting your face spread all over the internet and getting your ass kicked by total strangers might be an effective deterrent.

Something tells me that thinking ahead might not be this guy's forte. If the threat of regular law enforcement hauling him off to do time for aggravated assault doesn't deter him and folk like him, I doubt the collective wrath of a few thousand LJers is going to make much difference to the equation.

[cavalaxis]

I'm not sure it's an accurate assumption to say that people will do (A) because it makes them feel good, so they don't feel like they have to do (B). I'm not sure that those people who do (A) would ever have been willing to do (B).

I see what you mean by people feeling like they've done their bit when they haven't really done anything at all, but I think all that's really happened is you've given them a wee little flag to wave. I doubt that those same people would think, "Well, now I don't have to send a letter to my senator, because I signed a petition!" In fact, I think the opposite may be true. I know that in the age of email and quick forwards and flist activist memes, I've gotten *more* involved, *more* educated, become *more* willing to write to my senator in addition to signing the petition. Bandwagon or not, the interaction with another human being makes it more visceral.

(In fact, I think that's probably the reason behind the explosion in the blogosphere that's giving mainstream media such a run for it's money. News isn't something that happens somewhere else. News is happening to real people, people whose blogs(journals) we read and news is happening right now, outside their front door.)

As for this A-hole, one can always hope that some good comes of the e-exposure. But I am reminded of the flasher who got his pic on the front page of -- was it the NY Post or something? He got two years probation. That's disheartening as all hell.