(Series Piece 11) Anna Kavanaugh - Syndicated Columnist. Column - Cyber Abuse: The Virtual Violent Crime

Written by: Anna Kavanaugh, Syndicated Columnist

Published for syndicated by: The Global Institute for Cyber Safety and Standards

It is an ugly truth. Our society victimizes its victims. To face that reality is a heavy cross to bear. That’s why we don’t.

This is the real world. We all know it can be rough. We are taught that to survive it we just have to learn to take a punch and turn the other cheek more often than not. Sage advice but it neglects to acknowledge the certitude that there are only so many hits a person can take before they break. This is real life. And if you have been targeted by a cyber-abuser, you already know they will go to any length to end yours.

When revictimization is discussed it is generally in reference to the recurrence of extreme personal violations seen in survivors of rape, sexual abuse, and domestic assault cases. Those are the instances that get most talked about, as they should. Unfortunately, our social and judicial system is geared for the revictimization of victims in a myriad of other circumstances as well and, because it is, too many of them are falling through the cracks.

It happens with victims of voyeurism. Not only does a victim suffer the initial discovery and resulting trauma in realizing their most intimate moments have been videotaped or recorded, they are made to suffer it multiple times. The police become involved and countless officers watch the evidence as do the victim’s attorney and legal team. The details of that evidence are spelled out in court documents and then the victim must recount it as it is replayed again at trial only this time, they must do so in the company of the very offender who so grievously violated them. Similarly, this is also what rape victims must endure. These are just two extreme examples to demonstrate the ongoing trauma and psychological damage that our system, by its very nature, imposes on victims seeking justice, remedy, and relief for the criminal offenses committed against them.

The virtual violent crime of cyber-abuse is about dehumanization. Cyber-abusers aim to kill. They do this by exploiting social media platforms to relentlessly assault the self-esteem and dignity of their victim and by launching deliberate “kill campaigns” designed to assassinate the reputation, career, livelihood, relationships, and overall life of their target. It is not a singular event and allows abusers to reign over their victims in the public domain for years. The residual effects of such a campaign also creates ongoing trauma and damage as the planted false realities and blatant lies about a victim can be indefinitely preserved on the internet and available for perpetual access and propagation.

Revictimization is a common and key contributing factor to the long term suffering of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder often diagnosed in victims. There are many avenues in which this occurs, beginning with the public longevity and sustaining presence of a “kill campaign” and the intentional falsehoods on which it is founded. Victims also suffer from the inaction or silent condoning of bystanders who are too afraid to speak out for what is right when they can clearly see what is wrong, or worse yet, refuse to acknowledge they see anything at all. This is another form of dehumanization serving to condition a victim to believe that in the face of gross injustice and violation they do not matter, nobody will help them, and they are worthless in the eyes of others.

When a victim of cyber-abuse reaches out for professional help they are often revictimized again. Law enforcement may not be in a position to intervene due to the lack of physical threat or the needed state legislation allowing them to act. A victim then retains an attorney to pursue litigation only to find the costs are so prohibitive they cannot proceed unless they are willing to mortgage their home, empty out their savings, or sell their possessions… all of which place a further burden and hardship upon them. A victim may also need ongoing psychological counseling to help them deal with suicidal thoughts or clinical depression as they try to reclaim their lives by learning to cope with the indefinite perpetuation of the damages they have sustained.

This all revictimizes the victim and creates a cruel and vicious cycle of emotional trauma sustained.

Victims of cyber-abuse do not want sympathy. They are not looking for attention. Nobody would want the type of focus that a “kill campaign” thrusts upon them. All a victim wants is to return to a state of living their life without the criminal psychological terrorism, harassing interference, false realities, and blatant lies that have all been wielded against them by pathologically driven cyber-abusers who feed on destroying or humiliating others as much, and as publicly, as possible and who are intent on maximizing the murderous destruction they aim to exact in their victim's tangible "real world" existence.

Sadly, once much of the damage is done, there is no repair.

It is imperative for our federal and state legislators to pass consistent laws that better enable enforcement agencies to respond promptly to cyber-abuse cases. The revictimization of cyber-abuse victims by a systematic failure of our social and judicial system only compounds, and effectively assists, the criminal intentions of online abusers in the achievement of their ultimate goal, and makes suicide look to victims like the only available option they have for escaping their tormentors.

The virtual violent crime of cyber-abuse is real. It is rampant. It is relentless. Our system in dealing with crime, particularly new forms of crime, is broken. When the very legal system put in place to protect our citizens finds itself in the position of helping criminals fulfill the harm they intend to inflict, something is catastrophically wrong.

This is real life. And too many victims of cyber-abuse are losing theirs. It is long overdue for us to do something about that. We cannot change yesterday. We can change tomorrow… and as they say, it’s better late than never, though that will forever fall short in bringing solace to the loved ones of the online victims we have already lost in their desperate search for relief by fulfilling suicide.

(Series Piece 10) Anna Kavanaugh - Syndicated Columnist. Column - Cyber Abuse: The Virtual Violent Crime

Written by: Anna Kavanaugh, Syndicated Columnist

Published for syndication by: The Global Institute for Cyber Safety and Standards

If you are in the business of information, you had better get it right.

Search engines. We use them every day. Google, Bing, Dogpile, Yahoo, and all the others, give us immediate access to infinite amounts of organized data that we can use to learn something we did not know, keep up with world events, connect and communicate with others, or simply feed the insatiable and voyeuristic curiosities so many people somehow find time to indulge themselves in. The immense index that serves as the roadmap for our individual online experience in navigating the World Wide Web is now such a seamless part of daily life that most of us would feel lost or anxious without it. By way of gradual conditioning, the subconscious notion has been ingrained in us that tangible resources such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other general reference materials, have become less reliable and far more cumbersome sources of information. That is both a sad and incredibly frightening reality.

We tend to believe, without question, that search engines are the most authoritative voice we should turn to when seeking knowledge. However, as with all things dominative, there is an inherent danger that has emerged in tandem with such online search prevalency. Trusting search engines with implicit faith is a risky venture when it comes to placing our reliance on, or building our convictions upon, the results returned or suggested to us. Even when there is little hazard to the individual conducting a specific search, the online exchange between user and search engine response can simultaneously create enormous damage to the subject source, when that source is another individual. The issue here is the deliberate exploitation of the public domain leading to search engines readily returning gross inaccuracies, maliciously planted false realities, and downright blatant lies, in their results… or worse yet, offering them up as “auto-suggestions” for unsuspecting users not even looking for them but then who internalize assumptions based on what they have been provided, and who then further disseminate them. This is a common and easily available weapon of virtual warfare exploited by cyber-abusers. They count on search engines to help carry out the mass propagation of defamation and abuse campaigns designed to assassinate the reputation and credibility of their target, and to ultimately maximize the trauma, public humiliation, and the long term sustaining of damages deliberately inflicted on their victim.

As we ask the same question to social media providers, such as Facebook and Twitter, who allow their platforms to be exploited and used in the virtual violent crime of cyber-abuse, we must also ask why search engines are allowing their indexes to propagate, perpetuate, and essentially assist cyber-abusers in the execution of victim “kill” campaigns. Search engines have already been successfully sued over auto-complete results returning defamatory and unsubstantiated terms such as “fraud” or other libelous descriptors linked to an individual. Even still, many have made no changes to their search system that would rectify and limit damages to victims of cyber-abuse. This means that victims must file a lawsuit to have the terms removed. For most, the legal costs involved are far too prohibitive to pursue litigation, subsequent justice, and relief. The perpetual presence of blatantly defamatory terms in the auto-suggestions of search engines plays a significant role in the trauma inflicted on targets of malicious cyber-abuse campaigns and is also an undeniable contributing factor in the resulting suicides fulfilled by victims.

People are heavily influenced, if not driven by, subconscious perception and societal programming. The motivational influences of our impression formation and the characteristic “pack” or “herd” mentality exhibited in human beings have been studied. We are intrinsically geared to identify the leader we are to follow. When in doubt as to who that may be, where we are to go, or what we are to do, we just follow everyone else. In the world of online information the leadership role translates to the specific search engine providing data results and is perceived to be from an authoritative voice. When search engines arbitrarily present auto-suggestions to users, which may not have even been part of the original search query, they do so with dangerous implications. Users subliminally interpret those suggestions as sound and trustworthy guidance where in effect the search engine is saying, “this is most relevant to the individual you are searching,” or “this is what you need to know above all else,” or “this must be what you are looking for.” Search companies want to return accurate results based on complex algorithms consisting of stats on collective input behaviors. But when cyber-abusers and their malicious “kill” campaigns exploit such framework services in the public domain by deliberately planting false realities, blatant lies, and unsubstantiated claims into the vast expanse of the internet, those results can create catastrophic consequences that propagate and perpetuate ongoing damage indefinitely in the lives of online victims. This is too easy and convenient a method for virtual vandals to plant the proliferation of malevolent gossip and falsehoods about the targets they wish to destroy.

If the owners of these companies, or someone they loved, were to type in their name expecting to see results directing others to their work, accomplishments, and activities, but were instead to find only humiliating inferences, defamatory terms, blatant lies, or false claims, associated with their names, those results would be promptly removed. Similarly, as we have seen in precedent setting court cases, if an online victim of cyber-abuse has the financial means to sustain the staggering legal expense of litigation, they will likely win a judgment forcing search engines to disassociate the reputation-destroying terms that have been linked to their names based on input search popularity.

What happens to a victim not personally so favored? What happens to a victim who cannot bear the often prohibitive legal costs of litigation? They suffer. They continue to sustain damages. They are effectively stripped of their identity, credibility, reputation, and equal opportunities. That’s what happens. They suffer until they either find a way to live with the injustice of the maliciously contrived public shame inflicted upon them or until they can no longer live with the ongoing trauma of that injustice and fulfill suicide to bring an end to their emotional agony.

Search engines want to own and organize information. If you are in the business of marketing information and presenting yourself to be an authoritative source in providing it, you have a basic responsibility to the public. Presenting arbitrary auto-suggestions that directly link private citizens to defamatory and unsubstantiated claims is nothing short of reckless. When we are talking about people’s personal lives, relationships, reputations, careers, and livelihoods, there must be a fundamental degree of common sense and good judgment applied to any online service, whether it be social media sites or search engines. If you can’t get it right, at least don’t get it so wrong.

Something is badly broken when the lives of cyber-abuse victims depend on preferential justice, remedy, or relief. But then, no court mandate could ever repair all the damage done to a victim. Such is the way of malevolent gossip and those cruel enough to seed it. I am reminded of an exceptionally potent scene from the film, “Doubt,” starring the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman and the venerable Meryl Streep. The script is a superb and intentionally unresolved examination of the ruinous and unrestrained nature behind the proliferative spreading of unsubstantiated claims.

In the film, Hoffman portrays a Catholic priest, Father Flynn, who is scrutinized by school principal, Sister Aloysius, played by Streep. Hoffman delivers the following sermon:

“A woman was gossiping with her friend about a man whom they hardly knew – I know none of you have ever done this. That night, she had a dream. A great hand appeared over her and pointed down on her. She was immediately seized with an overwhelming sense of guilt. The next day she went to confession. She got the old parish priest, Father O’ Rourke, and she told him the whole thing.

‘Is gossiping a sin?’ she asked the old man. ‘Was that God All Mighty’s hand pointing down at me? Should I ask for your absolution? Father, have I done something wrong?’

‘Yes,’ Father O’ Rourke answered her. ‘Yes, you ignorant, badly-brought-up female. You have borne false witness on your neighbor. You played fast and loose with his reputation, and you should be heartily ashamed.’

So, the woman said she was sorry, and asked for forgiveness.

‘Not so fast,’ says O’ Rourke. ‘I want you to go home, take a pillow upon your roof, cut it open with a knife, and return here to me.’

So, the woman went home. She took a pillow off her bed, a knife from the drawer, went up the fire escape to her roof, and stabbed the pillow. Then she went back to the old parish priest as instructed.

‘Did you gut the pillow with a knife?’ he says.

‘Yes, Father.’

‘And what were the results?’

‘Feathers,’ she said.

‘Feathers?’ he repeated.

‘Feathers; everywhere, Father.’

‘Now I want you to go back and gather up every last feather that flew out onto the wind.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it can’t be done. I don’t know where they went. The wind took them all over.’

‘And that,’ said Father O’ Rourke, ‘is gossip!’"