[WikiEN-l] The Second Rape: Victim-Blaming (was Re: Self-sensorship, how far should it go?)

[u/n - adrianm]

On Sun, 05 Aug 2007 11:32:07 -0400
  Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>>>>>> on 8/2/07 7:19 PM, Armed Blowfish at 
>>>>>>diodontida.armata at googlemail.com
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>> 
>Excellent point, AB. I was thinking in terms of 1-1 
>dialogue. But, you are
>right, in the larger scale of a public forum, the 
>hatemongers must be met
>head on, and with a group voice that is loud and clear. 
>Victims do feel very
>much alone; we, by our voice and our embrace, can assure 
>them they are not.
>> 
>Thank you for this.
>
>Marc
>

The analogy is fine, and one which I agree with.  If 
someone has been stalked many times over, it does have a 
lot of symptoms that are similar to being raped many times 
over.  The feeling of helplessness, of nobody 
understanding, of feeling like you are responsible, of not 
even feeling the power to be able to make a complaint. 
 Indeed, many kinds of crime engender many of the same 
kinds of symptoms - people who are bullied and beaten up 
many times by a school bully, people who are robbed 
multiple times, gays who kept getting beaten up and 
harassed for being gay, asians or people from a minority 
racial group who just accept that they are going to be 
racially abused, the list goes on.  It is different to 
rape as well, because obviously they don't have the same 
physical symptoms (there are physical symptoms of course, 
but they differ significantly).  There are also many 
psychological symptoms that differ greatly.  But you are 
right that the most painful and hence most important part 
of being raped on multiple occasions, which is shared by 
repeat victims of many types of crime, is that it is 
repeated.  Many rape victims, after they have been raped x 
amounts of times by different people (or in some cases all 
by the same person) don't even bother to complain about it 
anymore.  They don't try to tell anyone, and hide it, lie 
to themselves that it didn't happen, and so forth.  This 
is the ultimate tragedy of this kind of problem, and this 
happens with all of them.  Ultimately, it can lead to 
suicidal feelings, and this is the same for all of them.

Ultimately, to get out of this vicious circle the best 
possible way is to get justice for what has happened.  You 
don't necessarily need for every single person who abused 
you to go to jail, but you do need to have something 
serious that you can refer to that proves that you won, 
that sends a message out to every other one that comes 
after you that you aren't an easy victim, that you can 
win, that you can succeed.

For me personally, this happened thanks to a person called 
Bonnie, who amongst other things wrote a web site about it 
at http://www.toxicpink.net/  You can see my name on 
there, and this e-mail address.  This made a big 
difference to my coping with cyber stalking.

Now, the problem with what you are saying isn't your 
analogy.  If we were dealing with actual cyber stalking, 
the kind that I dealt with, and that many others have 
dealt with, then I am sure that not many people would have 
an issue with it.  The problem is that we are not dealing 
with real cyber stalking.

The person who produced the information was an 
investigative journalist who specialised in the Lockerbie 
bombing and was covering the recent major news that the 
Lockerbie bombing case was being re-opened because of an 
MI5 agent that had deliberately changed the course of 
events, something that Colonel Qaddafi himself was on 
record recently admitting.  The question that is being 
asked in the mass media now is who was that MI5 agent?

The over-riding issue has nothing to do with Wikipedia. 
 This was not a critic of Wikipedia, this was an 
investigative journalist who was interested in the 
Lockerbie bombing, who had never previously (or since) 
written anything about Wikipedia.  He looked through the 
research provided by Wikipedia Review and concluded that 
the MI5 agent responsible may have been *****, the person 
who was a former assistant of ABC journalist Pierre 
Salinger, who at the time was suspected of being an MI5 
agent.  Furthermore, he was able to conclude from looking 
through Wikipedia Review evidence that she had used 
Wikipedia to further this perversion of truth.

The issue was that MI5 was changing truth.  This is the 
issue that was being discussed.

Now, I am sure that nobody likes it when they are being 
researched by the major media, and they find it rather 
bothering, especially as it may eventually lead to 
criminal charges.  They probably feel harassed and upset 
about it.

But suggesting that this is akin to cyber stalking, when 
no personal details were released, and when Wikipedia 
Review redacted all of the names (at least prior to the 
names being revealed by the major media).  Is that akin to 
cyber stalking?

To compare the two is ridiculous, and it is very 
irresponsible and insulting to anyone who has ever been 
through something like that.  To suggest that Wikipedia 
Review are stalkers in general, when a number of them have 
been victims of serious stalking, myself included, is very 
hurtful.  Wikipedia Review has never engaged in stalking, 
and indeed never will.

If SlimVirgin alleges that Wikipedia Review has ever said 
a single thing about her that is true, then it has always 
been said that all that she needs to do is to prove that 
it is false and they will remove the untrue information. 
 As far as Wikipedia Review are aware, everything that 
they've ever said about her is true.  If not, it was most 
certainly not deliberately false.  It was an attempt to 
reveal true information about it.

This is a topic of utmost importance to Wikipedia, because 
there is evidence that facts have been altered on 
Wikipedia.

The fact that this evidence was oversighted from Wikipedia 
is disgusting in itself.  The fact that Jimbo Wales has 
lied that it was oversighted for privacy reasons is 
disgusting quite frankly.  None of the edits that were 
oversighted contain any private information whatsoever. 
 They merely indicate that SlimVirgin had never, at any 
stage, edited with a genuine purpose to help Wikipedia. 
 From the very beginning, she edited with an obvious 
agenda, both in terms of changing things from truth to 
untruth, and in terms of her manipulating people to her 
ends.  SlimVirgin did not inadvertedly reveal her true 
name - she inadvertedly revealed her agenda.

Why did Jayjg bother to oversight it when it had already 
been quoted on Wikipedia Review, if the concern was her 
privacy?  People can simply go to Wikipedia Review and 
read it.  The only reason to oversight it was so that when 
we get to this inevitable news story (which will 
undoubtedly get much bigger from this point on) then they 
have plausible deniability, because we can't prove that 
those edits were SlimVirgin's first edits.  We can prove 
that she made the changes, but Wikipedia can argue that 
she didn't do it from the very beginning.  If she'd done 
it from the very beginning, then it'd be evidence that she 
was a secret agent, someone with an agenda from the very 
start.

So Jayjg, restore those edits.  Show to people that there 
was private information.  Did SlimVirgin inadvertedly 
reveal her full name, address and phone number?  No, she 
didn't.  All that she revealed was an agenda.

Using this as "evidence" of stalking is disgusting.  To go 
further and to refer to Wikipedia Review as being the same 
as rapists, and to refer to ME as effectively a rapist is 
disgusting.  I am extremely offended at that.  

If you want to know what really happened, go and have a 
look at our blog:

http://blog.wikipediareview.com/

I would like please for people to cease referring to 
Wikipedia Review as stalkers.  You can feel free to refer 
to us as mad, crazy, loonie, conspiracy theorists, 
nutjobs, banned users or anything like that, but not 
stalkers.  It's not on.

Adrian