Quote:
Originally Posted by zumby
Hold on there. Vorvzakone's argument is completely different to yours. E.g.
If the "effect is determined by its perception by the victim", how is Dawkin wrong to say that the lack of effect that he feels as a victim leads him to not feel able to condemn the perpetrator?
It may or may not be the case that Dawkins has a lack of effect from it, he may be playing it down for PR reasons or he may have an effective defence mechanism of denial which co-exists with damage that he does not attribute to the offence. Victims of sexual abuse are notorious for lifelong intimate-relationship stability problems: Dawkins is on his 3rd or 4th marriage, which may or may not be attributable to this.
This is really not my main point, however. I think you are confusing two crossed but distinct issues. The fact that in psychology, the effect of the action is mediated by the perception of the victim does *not* mean that the effect on the victim is the ultimate arbiter of the morality of the abusive action. The fact that Dawkins (maybe) didn't suffer serious effects from it is a stroke of pure luck. Do we imagine that the perpetrator for one moment at the point the abuse took place was weighing up the effects on the victim, thought it would be harmless so went ahead? He didn't give a f***, just like they don't today. Just that today, we're a bit more insightful about the effects, which what makes the indifference now slightly worse because they're choosing to be indifferent to even greater suffering.
Our whole system of ethics and law is based on these principles. Sure, we have laws against murder, cos it's nice to have people not getting dead from each other. But you're not dead from an attempted murder...so they walk free? They go to jail for 15 to life because of what they chose to do, not because of what happened.
The discussion is clouded anyway by talk of 'forgiveness' slightly. It's kind of a religious notion that doesn't have too much real meaning in the real world, save for a victim's ability to palm off or minimize the actions of an abuser in order to soothe the festering wound arising from the abuse.
Dawkins is in the .01 percentile of intelligent humans on earth. If anyone can find a way of thinking round what happened, it's him. Many people are of the mould where abuse doesn't affect them that much, because of the power of the healing mind, good counselling, social support, or similar. Still doesn't minimize the horror of the act and its ready ability to lay waste to entire lives.
Quote:
Originally Posted by zumby
Hold on there. Vorvzakone's argument is completely different to yours. E.g.
Separately, I think vorvzakone is mistaking Dawkins reporting his own feelings about his own abuser for Dawkins prescriptively telling other abuse victims how they should feel, which is not the case. Again, this whole article was in context of discussing his memoirs, not as a talking head for policy on sexual assaults. It would be like me saying that my parents divorce was traumatic for me and that I wish they had stayed together and you then saying "Zomg, zumby says single-parent families are worse than two-parent families and that divorce should be outlawed!"
It's hard to discuss because of Dawkins' dumb use of language. However he knows that talking about being abused is going to be a bombshell and heavily reported, he knows the press, he uses them, so he should be more careful for the sake of the victims in choosing expressions like 'mild paedophilia'. He may have done it to sell the book.
Gotta see it in context really, like I said, a major play by most abusers is minimization and justification...phrases like 'mild paedophilia' is music to their ears, and rightly provokes ire and anguish in those abused.
In his defence, he is a victim himself, so if minimization is his way of coping, then he's free to do so. Bit of respect for the suffering of others wouldn't go amiss.
Last edited by vorvzakone; 09-17-2013 at 12:45 PM.