Making room for difficult conversations online

…even the ones you are sick of seeing.

Enough already!

One week into the Ghomeshi scandal, that’s the key message of a growing number of online posts and comments. Some people are tired of hearing the sordid and often heartbreaking details of Ghomeshi’s alleged misdeeds, and they’re voicing their impatience on the very medium that’s exhauasting them: the social web.

Since the alleged incidents unfolded over the course of more than ten years, I don’t think it is too much to ask that we take more than a couple of days to digest this story.

One great benefit to come out of this nightmare is that more women and men are feeling like they finally have room to raise their voices and say, “this is something that concerns me”, and maybe even “this is something that happened to me”. Complaining about Ghomeshi fatigue is like telling those men and women that we don’t want to hear their stories or learn from their experiences…and is a great example of the dangers of forgetting that this is a deeply personal conversation for many participants.

If the sheer volume of these posts is suddenly overwhelming, perhaps it’s because so many people have held back those stories for such a long, long time. One of the key lessons of the Ghomeshi story is that both individuals and institutions provide too little room for people to report on or acknkowledge abusive behavior. Whether motivated by discretion, discomfort or willfull blindness, our reluctance to have conversations about sexual violence is a big part of what allows perpetrators to get away with abuse for years at a time.

So let’s begin by making room for that conversation online. If you’re getting worn down by the sheer number of disclosures — or if sexual violence is a subject you find painful — that’s nothing to be ashamed of. But it’s your job to take a break from social media, or to simply scroll past specific posts, rather than asking all those victims to hop back in the closet.

Indeed, that’s one of the great virtues of the Internet: because any of us can choose to scroll past or switch off, we can undertake difficult conversations without embroiling unwilling participants. But just because those conversations are difficult for some people doesn’t mean we should shut them down. In fact it’s precisely because it’s so difficult that we urgently need to talk about sexual violence…without being urged to move on to the next topic.