Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  Russell Meares, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Sydney, explores why some bullied children are more profoundly affected than others, and his work sheds light on how the gendered nature of bullying works. Meares suggests those with traumatic histories are vulnerable to what he calls ‘malignant internalisation’. Healthy psychic development, states Meares, depends upon a process of playful imitation, in which the modelling and teachings of the caregiver are internalised by the child in a way that advances their functionality and supports their well-being. In malignant internalisation the positive dualism and play of this process is lost, replaced by ‘high anxiety aroused by the traumatic situation’, which in turn produces fearful alienation. ‘Normal internalisation,’ he writes, ‘is associated with, and determines, stable forms of relatedness, whereas the traumatic process underlies shifting, oscillating, and discontinuous forms of relatedness.’ Which happens to describe girl bullying very nicely. Quite apart from whatever goes on at home, how are girls to develop healthy internalisation when our broader culture habitually casts the female body as objectified and violenced, declares girls and women ‘bitches’ and ‘ball-breakers’ if they dare to be assertive or ambitious, and rewards prettiness and sexiness over character?

  When organic and more direct expressions of anger are prohibited, girls have little recourse but to react with suppression and stealth, and where malignant internalisation and traumatic shame run high, peer abuse is inevitable. Technology creates an ever-expanding network of opportunities for those inclined towards bullying, and the NCAB reports one in seven children are cyber-bullied regularly. With its potential for multi-pronged and anonymous attack, cyber-bullying has already been the catalyst for numerous youth suicides.

  Meares uses the term ‘attacks on value’ to describe certain kinds of relational trauma. Though his focus is on familial relations, bullying fits neatly into his schema. In his view, reasonably good conditions are required for a child to develop a secure personal reality and solid self-image. Attacks upon a child’s sense of well-being are ‘major but neglected traumata’. This is trauma related to invalidation. Deprived of affirmation, children who have not sufficiently encountered such recognition are plagued by ‘persisting dysphoria, involving emptiness and deadness’. He adds: ‘Out of these negative emotional states emerges a negative judgement of value, of low self-worth.’

  Whatever goes on in the complex relationships between girls, the threats they face from outside remain both real and formidable. As I write, a federal investigation is underway into an online pornography ring in which adolescent boys and men swap and exchange sexual images of schoolgirls from over seventy schools from around Australia. Over two thousand images have been posted and traded, with men invited to list the names and schools of specific girls they are ‘hunting’. These boys and men characteristically contribute identifying information, such as addresses and phone numbers with directives such as ‘Go get her, boys.’ ‘Targets’ are declared ‘wins’ once a nude photo is obtained and posted. Some targets are so highly prized as to come with a ‘bounty’.

  I’ll never forget the first time I was accosted and harassed out of the blue. I was around eleven, with barely budding breasts, and I still had the colt-like legs and narrow hips of a pre-pubescent girl. It was summer. My mother had sent me to the shops, and as I walked back down Glebe Point Road a man sidled up to me and said something aggressively lewd before disappearing again. My relaxed saunter was shattered: I shook all the way home. It was not just that the words and their delivery were disturbing, threatening even, or that I was shocked by the sudden encroachment into my personal space. It was as if the earth had opened up under my feet, exposing the hell of rape culture beneath society’s seeming civility. I couldn’t have put it into thought and words that way, couldn’t articulate my reaction or what I was reacting to, but I momentarily sensed the ground I was walking on was built on a foundation that seethed with darkness and danger.

  When the story about the pornography ring broke in an article by Nina Funnell, feminist commentator Clementine Ford weighed in, pointing out that the young men engaging in the ring are members of the communities and schools their ‘targets’ inhabit. These so-called average boys and men, using predatory and abusive language such as ‘tracking’ ‘bitches’ and ‘sluts’, ‘seek to dehumanise and violate the young women among them and, in doing so, elevate their status within the decidedly toxic masculine space in which they operate’, wrote Ford. She concluded that the toxic masculinity in question is ‘more widespread and dangerous that [sic] many people will allow themselves to believe’. Ford’s article was titled, ‘The Epidemic of Rape Culture in Schools Can No Longer Be Ignored’, yet there seem to be many willing to continue ignoring both it and the festering toxic masculinity – an explosive melange of transgenerational trauma, socialised conditioning, an ingrained attitude of entitlement and gendered privilege – that gives rise to it.

  We might just as well speak in terms of ‘toxic patriarchy’. Even if there was once a time in which the evolution of humanity depended on patriarchy for survival, as Camille Paglia would have it, even if it need be acknowledged that over its many millennia countless vital and spectacular accomplishments have taken shape, patriarchy has been rendered toxic, fused with powerful institutionalised religions, colonialisms, consumerist capitalism, the military–industrial complex and the medical–pharmaceutical complex.

  An article appearing on Triple J Hack in the wake of Funnell’s report featured one of the girls victimised on the site. She was sixteen, ‘young and stupid’ (her words) when she texted a nude photo of herself to some guy she doesn’t remember anymore. She never expected it to be shared without her consent and traded on a site dedicated to debasing schoolgirls, and when she was made aware of it; she contacted the police to file a complaint. The cop on duty laughed at her and told her that’s what she got for taking compromising photos and sending them out to men. ‘I just walked out crying,’ she said. It’s hard to know what’s worse: the blatantly sexist, victim-blaming and uncaring response of the cop, or the fact that this young woman automatically shamed and blamed herself, even as she rightly knew something criminal was taking place and appealed to an appropriate, if sorely inadequate and unethical, source of help.

  What chance do young women have to deflect this unearned shame and blame when they are told to carry it, not only by male cops but also by high-profile women who identify as feminists? Mia Freedman, founder of Mamamia, posted this tweet after Funnell’s story broke: ‘Taking nude selfies is your absolute right. So is smoking. Both come with massive risks.’ Feminist commentator Amy Gray promptly replied with a take-down. Gray tweeted ‘Dear Mia’ accompanied by a topless selfie with the words ‘Fuck off’ written on her chest. ‘Let’s talk about shaming women and marking them as complicit in being abused,’ retorted Gray, who elsewhere defended the consensual taking and exchange of nudies (nude selfies) as a ‘fun, sexy, liberating and radical act’. Challenging the assumption that nudies are essentially a self-objectifying, attention-seeking feminist fail, Gray continued: ‘Every time you tell women how to reduce themselves, how to avoid the act, how they could somehow behave as less than they are in order to avoid the criminal choices of others, you are making it easier for abuse and attacks to happen.’

  Sometime after I was raped, a couple of constables drove me down George Street, insisting I show them the pub where I met the man who raped me. When I had trouble identifying it, because I was drunk on the day in question, it was obvious they thought me a soused slut who had put herself in ‘harm’s way’ (note the subtle shift of language, the way in which men who do violence are backgrounded and the woman – her choice of outfit, her degree of inebriation, her location – is foregrounded). The similarity between my story and that of the young woman dismissed by the police is a disheartening reminder that for all the ‘post-feminism’ rhetoric, and a degree of actual progress, too little has fundamentally ch
anged. Remarkably, the article about the sixteen-year-old included the following update: ‘The Queensland Police Service issued a statement this afternoon saying it had so far found no evidence of child exploitation. ACT Police said those posting the images appeared to know the victims.’

  Twenty-six years ago I undertook an undergraduate degree in communications. Aged twenty-seven, I was admitted to university as a special-entry, mature-age student. Even so, I was no less bewildered than those fresh out of school. Perhaps more so: I was only a few years ‘clean and sober’. Pumped up by cigarettes and caffeine, I was reeling from both a life less medicated and my re-entry into institutional education. I made friends with another mature-age student called Vivian, a lesbian in a live-in relationship, who was in the same first-year Textual Theory class. The tutor was a middle-aged man. It was common knowledge he was married to another faculty staff member, a well-known writer. The tutor often came to the cafe and sat with students during the break. I didn’t know then, as I know now that I myself teach tertiary students, that his comments over coffee about how I should take up yoga because it might help settle my manic energy were not entirely appropriate, assuming as they did an uninvited entry into my private life. Although those conversations didn’t constitute sexual harassment, other uncomfortable and more overtly sexualised advances followed. The breaking point came when Vivian told me he’d gone to her house (I can’t recall the pretext of the visit) and kissed her against the fridge in the kitchen. We decided to take action and filed a complaint. I remember meeting with the head of school at the time, but I blank on what transpired thereafter. I do know the problem of sexual harassment at universities hasn’t gone away. Only weeks ago a young woman in my class came to me asking my advice on the behaviour of another (male) lecturer, who initiated private messages on Facebook and who had, on another occasion, chastised her for smoking because it was ‘unbecoming of a beautiful young woman’.

  A series of articles in The Guardian have detailed the prevalence of sexual harassment in Australian universities and sundry shoddy institutional responses (or lack thereof) to it. Melissa Davey wrote about a survey of 1,926 University of Sydney students, published in May 2016, which revealed that one in four students ‘reported having experienced an incident of sexual harassment or assault as a student, and 6% of all respondents had experienced an incident on campus or at a university-related event’. An open letter, written by women’s officers from the University of Sydney over the past decade, demanded action on sexual harassment and assault on the university’s campus. Anna Hush, one of the women’s officers responsible for the letter, was among those who welcomed the announcement of a long-overdue national survey on sexual assault and harassment at universities, initiated by Universities Australia and conducted by the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), but stressed the findings must be ‘followed up by concrete, well-informed action’. Hush also pointed out that this survey, which confidentially canvassed over 30,000 students from thirty-nine Australian universities, was critical because sexual harassment and assault ‘[goes] unreported 99% of the time’, for understandable and unacceptable reasons.

  When the AHRC released Change the Course: National Report on Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment at Australian Universities on 1 August 2017, many who have laboured in universities, long aware of routine sexualised abuses in the not-so-ivory tower, felt momentarily vindicated. The report, which included personal stories and quotes from 1,849 written submissions (the highest number of submissions the AHRC has ever received for a single investigation) confirmed that one in four students – and 63 per cent of women – reported experiencing sexual harassment in a university setting, that women were at least twice as likely as men to be harassed, and that trans and gender-diverse students were more likely to have been harassed. It also states that 83 per cent of students reported the gender of the perpetrator of sexual assault as male, and 94 per cent of students who were sexually harassed and 87 per cent of students who were sexually assaulted did not make a formal report or complaint to their university. Half of the students who reported being sexually assaulted by someone they knew in a university setting identified the perpetrator as another student and, though strangers came in at second place, university staff were also implicated, as evidenced by the passage below based on a written submission:

  Amanda rode the bus to university with a university professor. The professor would sit next to Amanda or gesture at her to sit next to him. During the bus rides, the professor stared at her and complimented her appearance. This behaviour made Amanda feel uncomfortable. They usually walked together from the bus to campus, but one day Amanda told the professor that she was going shopping. As she walked away he put his arm around her and kissed her on the cheek. From that day, Amanda arranged for her sister to call and stay on the phone throughout her 20 minute bus ride to avoid interaction with the professor.

  Guardian journalists Sally Weale and David Batty report that experts – including Ann Olivarius, a UK lawyer specialising in the area of sexual harassment; Dr Alison Phipps, director of gender studies at the University of Sussex, who has researched the issue in a score of universities; and Ruth Lewis, sociologist and coordinator of the Universities Against Gender Based Violence network – are calling institutional leadership to account, asserting that the turn-the-other-cheek strategy of university bureaucracies comes down to self-serving whitewashing. For example, non-disclosure agreements essentially provide a loophole for alleged perpetrators by allowing staff to resign without further investigation and to relocate to another institution to potentially offend again, having been granted licence to represent themselves and their departure as they wish. If the abuse in the first instance doesn’t completely break the seal of trust between students and educators, these policies are chipping away at whatever remains. Confidentiality clauses in settlements, preventing all parties from discussing the offences publicly, designed to protect the reputation of the faculty and university, ensuring a cloak of silence around abuse, mirror the abuse around abuse that takes place in highly dysfunctional families. This systematic blind eye leaves thousands of students vulnerable and unsupported on this most basic aspect of student safety.

  Unsurprisingly, the problem isn’t confined to Australia. In May 2016 Sara Ahmed, celebrated scholar and self-declared ‘killjoy feminist’, announced her resignation from her post as professor of race and cultural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, in protest at the institution’s ‘failure to address the problem of sexual harassment’. Ahmed was privy to information about six investigations into allegations involving four members of staff. It was not, Ahmed pointed out in blog posts following her departure, that nothing at all had been done in response to complaints, but that the ‘enquiries have not led to a robust and meaningful investigation of the problem of sexual harassment as an institutional problem’.

  This might well be the central challenge that western, modernised and bureaucratic-driven society faces. Well-meaning and important efforts by pockets of individuals to tackle sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia and a host of other forms of discrimination are not enough. Good intentions and paper-thin policy cannot guarantee lasting change on a grand scale, because there is an absence of meaningful institutional investigation into, and understanding of, not only these specific manifestations but also their roots in patriarchy and its attendant traumata.

  The victims of the ‘toxic’ and ‘hyper’ masculinity Clementine Ford speaks of are not limited to attacks on girls and women, or to the male-on-male ‘interpersonal violence’ that is the leading cause of death for young men worldwide. Frequent headlines tell of those non-human animals, those other ‘feminine beings’ who bear the terrible brunt of the toxic masculinist destructive bent, though much of the damage done goes unrecorded. Even when heinous acts do make the news, the systems in place, such as the legal system, prove inadequate and fail to address the core problem.

  A lone baby wombat survives a
drunken rampage in which a group of men deliberately run over and kill a family of ten wombats one weekend at a Kangaroo Valley camping ground. Elsewhere, in South Australia, another group of men hunt down a kangaroo, torture it to death, then post gloating videos of the torture on Snapchat. In Melbourne, a four-hundred-year-old gum tree dies after two separate ringbarking attacks. ‘Who does this?’ asks one headline covering the wombat murders. Who indeed. We have at the ready at least part of the answer. Men. Almost always men. #notallmen, but some men, often in groups or pairs. We discuss these as isolated events, random aberrations in an otherwise healthy society, rather than as extremes of a socially constructed norm. We seem, collectively, institutionally, to fall short in the task of focusing on society’s complicity as a starting point to investigate how this toxic masculinity – a hardened or hyper-masculinity with an aggressive, violent, sexist edge – comes into being and what we need to do to prevent its circulation. So long as we participate in this collective denial and minimisation, we fail to reach those afflicted by it and encourage them into the fold of a community of care.

  ‘Who does this?’ Who gets a sick thrill from a cowardly kill? People demented by internal conflicts, people whose mood has been altered by addictive substances, and whose capacity to empathise has been eroded. Women are not immune to the toxic effects of history and social conditioning, but seem less inclined towards the kind of violent acting-out that men frequently perpetrate. Sugar and spice; everything nice. Gender conditioning goes some way to determining how trauma is transmitted: it’s not so much that women do it less, but differently. Feminist author and activist bell hooks calls patriarchy ‘the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body’, demanding that men ‘become and remain emotional cripples’. Patriarchal ideology, she adds, ‘brainwashes men to believe that their domination of women [and other feminine beings] is beneficial when it is not’. Women and men need to come together, she insists, in the understanding that the gendered ‘normal traumatization’ – a term hooks borrows from family therapist Terrence Real – within patriarchal societies wounds everybody, to greater and lesser degrees. Without exception.