Against trauma culture

Moral panics thrive on penalising emotional offence

Philosophy Bear wrote this insightful remark last week:

“A few hours ago, I listened to some people talking in a coffee shop. They agreed among themselves that all <18 criminal records should be sealed except for sex crimes. I’ve encountered this view before. A few years ago, I was very disappointed to discover a journalist on the left I otherwise have a lot of respect for was defending her work, trying to name and shame some 17-year-old rapists. My view, for what it’s worth, is that all crimes committed by children should be sealed(*). I am troubled by what seems like the increasingly popular idea that sexual violence offences should be exempt from the normal civil liberties procedures. This seems to me downstream of a broader idea- that sexual crime is incomprehensibly worse than other kinds of human misconduct. Sexual crime is awful, and it is awful in a distinctive way, but there are many things that are awful in a distinctive way, and no less bad.

The reason we seal the criminal records of children is that we don’t believe they are capable of committing crimes with the clarity of will that justifies marking them forever. At least that’s the rational reason to seal the criminal records of children- if the idea is that they’re more reformable, that’s probably not true- most evidence suggests child criminals are empirically less reformable than adult offenders- more like recidivate. Nevertheless, we take a principled stand that they are simply not capable of the kind of agency that should mark someone forever. If they were capable of that kind of agency, then we should let them vote, leave home etc.- but we don’t. There is no reason to think that as a crime becomes more grave, the capacity of a child to truly understand what they are doing as a fully developed moral being increases- on the contrary, if anything, the opposite seems more probable.

The best evidence tends to suggest that sexual criminals are not especially likely to reoffend, relative to other types of criminals- although these things are difficult to measure.

When I was raped, it happened like this. We started having consensual sex. I said, “Please stop.” I said it very clearly. He didn’t- saying “I’m almost finished”. Honestly, I think the idea that what he was doing was incredibly serious never even occurred to him. Make no mistake, what he did was incredibly serious, but I don’t think it was, for example, more serious than, say, getting drunk and punching someone at random because you want to start a fight. I recognise that what happened to me was in some sense, ‘on the low end’ of the rape spectrum, but that itself is part of the point- sexual violence, just like any other crime, comes in numerous different forms, degrees, etc, something that treating it like an alien horror occludes.

Treating it like an alien horror has another disadvantage. Precisely because of the aura it has accumulated, people have trouble recognising it. I think the guy who sexually assaulted me might well have trouble recognising what he did for the following reason: Rapists are horrific monsters. I’m not a horrific monster; therefore, I can’t be a rapist.

Part of what it occludes, I think, is just how common this stuff is. I’ve been groped on the genitals twice, and sexually harassed once, and that’s just by women. Serious incidents in my life involving men must number a dozen or more. Even the self-report statistics on perpetration - groping, harassment, sexual assault- even among women- are frightening- and keep in mind that self-report is riddled with people rationalising away their own behaviour, selectively forgetting, thinking ‘they don’t mean the sort of thing I did’ or outright lying.

Feminists quite rightly suggested that we don’t take sexual violence seriously enough. I would suggest that there is also a kind of non-seriousness in treating sexual violence as an alien evil, wholly unlike other forms of human selfishness and cruelty. The seriousness we need is a down-to-earth seriousness, not melodrama. There’s a tension here because, yes, ultimately, yes, I do actually agree, sexual violence is a form of cosmic horror, but in the same sense that all human wrongdoing is. Sexual crimes are grave, but treating them as wholly distinct distorts our vision in all sorts of ways.”

I concur. Indeed, sexual crimes are one of Donald Brown’s human universals for a reason. From the standpoint of natural selection, it is obviously optimal for a woman to yield full control over her reproductive capacities. Historically, if a man mated with a woman who was raped, he would effectively be risking an investment into raising a child of another man’s genes. Therefore, we would expect evolution to select for some defence mechanism on the female side to hedge against rape (in this case, ex-post distress), and on the male side (anger or disgust at rapists, and a desire to seek retribution).

However, it is vital to identify the reasons for having institutions of punishment in the first place. Traditionally, we justify¹ the implementation according to a list of four broad motives:

1. Deterrence. Easy enough for an economist to understand. Impose a cost to an act, and you disincentivise it.

2. Rehabilitation. We seek to change the behaviours of the offender towards prosociality somehow, whether that be via incentives or (at least attempting to) via changing a key trait correlated with criminality (for instance, meditation courses to improve impulse-control). Indeed, the extent to which rehabilitation is feasible, or to which the techniques used are effective, is debatable however. Nonetheless that is out of the scope of this post.

3. Public safety. Locking up criminals means they can only harm themselves or the staff of prisons. The former is solidly in the out-group so who cares whether they get seriously harmed? They should have thought of that before committing x crime. The latter we sympathise with, although it is common knowledge that danger is in the job description, so they undergo the transaction knowing the risks.

4. Retribution. Emotionally, we yield a deontological attachment to the utility of punishment for its own sake². This stems from the evolution of our moralistic emotions³, to incentivise and select for prosocial behaviours, including cooperation and reciprocal altruism. I might also add that a formal legal system may be a superior substitute to crowd-out '“vigilante justice”, given our moralistic emotions.

In none of these cases, do we justify a sanction on the basis that someone's feelings were hurt. Usually, there is a tangible and easily measurable (independently of the subjective judgement of the victim) harm we seek to minimise. Even with sexual crimes, they impair the reproductive strategies and norms of mankind, so it is right that we regard them as highly serious offences. However, we should not criminalise anything solely on the basis that someone's feelings are hurt, at least if one cares about living in a free society.

Unfortunately, with sex offences, I notice a tendency to disregard all rational reasons for penalising them, and instead to default to some concept of “trauma” as our primary motive. Indeed, this is another means via which sex crimes are elevated to a unique position in the criminal world. Perhaps the underlying harms rooted in the theory of evolution are too abstract for most people to grasp, so they require a simpler concept of emotional harm to justify their repulsion. Yet this could also hold for property rights, yet we do not justify incarceration of burglars just because their victims were emotionally distressed. Even intellectuals, when pointing to why we should severely sanction rape, will usually default to the victim’s “trauma” as the reason.

Conventionally, we used to associate trauma to a highly restricted category of symptoms that severely impaired one's ability to function in daily life (think veterans post-combat for instance). Increasingly, trauma now includes any period of persistent emotional distress or negative affect after a bad shock. In previous times, this was regarded as an inevitable facet of life, yet now we elevate fluctuations in our (inherently volatile) moods to a mental disorder? As with autism, we are seeing diagnostic drift in PTSD.

Firstly, diagnostic drift negatively impacts the mental health of the public. Your mum died, and negative affect was expected. Today, you would likely qualify for major depressive disorder, and this would mean that most individuals undergo that at some stage in their lives. In a new workplace or city, and adjusting to a fresh social environment and set of interactions? You have generalised anxiety disorder! If via diagnosing negative affect into these disorders then medical treatment of them improved outcomes, then this would be an unequivocal welfare gain. However, there is a sense in which labelling oneself as depressed or anxious endogenously perpetuates that cycle. After all, depressed individuals believe their moods will never improve, whilst those ascribing such as temporary will. So if there is a higher probability of labelling temporary negative moods as depression, there is a higher probability that it lasts longer given more negative expectations. The same self-fulfilling feedback loop holds for the notion of trauma too.

Secondly, this likely is contributing to an unprecedented expansion in the definition of rape or sexual assault. Precedent established that such acts required the use of physical or verbal aggression (or threats of such), or surprise (such as drugging). Now consent is effectively defined by the aggrieved party, so many rape cases effectively boil down to a disagreement of whether the sex was consensual or not. Obviously, the answer is not unequivocal, or else there would be no need for a criminal trial to define if consent held in such cases - one would simply establish if the event took place instead. In Britain, even being reckless as to whether consent was granted, is sufficient grounds for prosecution. Simply put, anything less than affirmative consent, or any sexual act where drugs and alcohol were involved, is potentially criminal. If a woman initially consents then regrets it afterwards, the man could be held liable. If a woman remains silent as she is afraid of the consequences of verbally declining sex, yet otherwise goes along with it, this is rape, yet how is the man supposed to know if consent was denied? Therefore, the concept of establishing guilt beyond reasonable doubt goes out of the window, as in all these cases the party initiating sex is regarded with suspicion. In other words, the law is substantially weighed in favour of the plaintiff. The rights of the defendant become compromised.

One may retort that the perpetrator should have known better, and should have not been so reckless, especially given the gravity of the situation. I would agree: accusations of such a serious nature generally do not just fall out of the sky. I also do not endorse the myth that the woman is often lying for some malicious motive, as false allegations are known to be rare (as one would expect given the distribution of dark triad traits in a population). In almost all cases, the woman genuinely believes her side of the story. Yet in many cases, the man genuinely believes he is innocent, and that consent was established. Now one of those tricky ethical dilemmas that philosophers love arises. Should the emotional harm of the victim here take precedence over the emotional harm of sending a man to prison solely on the basis of his recklessness given the ambiguity of the situation? If we care about due process, habeus corpus, and cases being proved beyond reasonable doubt, then the answer is clear…

MeToo ideology is expanding beyond its traditional realm of feminist causes, to cover alleged sex trafficking (despite the evidence that such is negligible), and to socially stigmatise hebephilia and ephebophilia (as can be seen in most commentary on Jeffrey Epstein). Once confined to the left, MeToo ideology is now the norm across the spectrum. In Britain, xenophobes are weaponising such to use the grooming gangs as an excuse to decry multiculturalism. Ephebophilia, and to a lesser extent hebephilia, is legal across much of the Western world. Given that, until recently, our lives were short, reproduction in adolescence was common, so arguably ephebophilia is a natural consequence of our biology. Hanania and Decker are at the forefront of the crusade against this moral panic, so I will not dedicate too much to this topic, and fight on where I am the unique individual pushing back against this moral panic in other domains. Nonetheless, MeToo fuels its expansion via a reliance on inventing new “traumas” that are becoming increasingly unfalsifiable, intangible, and subjective. If one is to oppose effectively the mass hysteria, then one must tackle the culture of trauma directly.

Perhaps MeToo moral panics, and the invention of new variants of trauma, is an inevitable consequence of progress? The quality of our matches are a normal good, and as society becomes richer and life expectancies grow, we invest more socioculturally in curating optimal matches? Maybe we focus more on the trivial as “luxury beliefs”? Perhaps, yet I worry about the implications of this culture on our ability to sustain reproduction at above-replacement fertility.

I think the decline in traditional monogamous norms plays a large role too. There is something to be said for a culture where you do not discuss sex, restraint and modesty are virtues, you stick to one partner for life, and dedicate yourself to your family, yet you are free to pursue your desires behind those closed doors. With the decline of this culture, you are freer to pursue one night stands. The promiscuous, sexual minorities, individuals willing and able to work in the porn industries and OnlyFans, and the polyamorous benefit. Yet casual sex is simply not feasible, as sexual jealousy is pervasive upon men to hedge against raising another man's child, and women tend to struggle not to emotionally commit to a sexual partner. Therefore, society must invent new norms and strictures to replace the old ones, hence the MeToo movement. Unfortunately these, paired with a focus on promoting gender equality via rewarding the more androgynous versions of the sexes (so deemphasing the role of sex or attraction in intergender relations), alongside their manifestations in civil and regulatory frameworks, create an even more repressive culture.

Ultimately, sex is now regarded as inherently suspicious. Is it any wonder we see so many incels, and the nascent proliferation in mating advice (indicating unmet demand for sex)? We have created an elaborate culture of traumas to curtail sexual activity, with little regard for the consequences or our other valued norms of proportionality or due process. If we made the tradeoffs explicit, and prioritised emotional harm via treating the subjective experience of the victim as absolute, then I may not have much to complain about. What I despise are the double standards that do not exist for other infractions, and the derision of those highlighting the tradeoffs as morally deficient. Let us not let a moral panic ruin one core activity that makes life worth living.

1. Intellectually, not emotionally, it is crucial to justify the use of punishment given the fact that it is obviously suboptimal after the infraction has already been committed. Nonetheless, for any deterrent to be credible, not only must it be enacted but all actors must know or believe it will be enacted. So all justifications must strictly be limited to ex-ante motives.

2. Interestingly, our emotional sentiments can also act as a limiting factor against punishment, to establish some “proportionality” - best summarised by the maxim “an eye for an eye”. Three of these reasons imply the maximum feasible penalty is optimal, yet we impose limits to the vengeance of society in the vast majority of cases. Given that in the past, we crucified petty thieves, this is a recent innovation. Perhaps liberalism, with its emphasis on universal rights, makes us more sympathetic even to criminals, to invoke Singer’s expanding circle thesis? Or if a penal system is not viewed as legitimate, then agents will deviate, and the rule of law disintegrates?

3. Empathy for others, anger to deter infractions, and guilt or shame on the part of the offender. One may add disgust too.