I thought we should always hear from the victims before jumping to conclusions.
Saying "listen to victims first" isn't saying "maduro is a rapist" so why was it wrong of me to do so? This was before it was out that it was fake, we hadn't even heard from the kidnapped girl yet. I get it, it could be a CIA op. But don't we get mad at libs for assuming Reid was a Russian op?
Isn't it important to make a world where victims won't feel like their accusations are assumed fake before we even talk to them?
We live in a world were CIA ops to take down socialist leaders are more common than Russian ops to take down American/Capitalist leaders. People were just hedging their bets on it being fake rather than making an actual good-faith argument about the credibility of sexual assault victims. Ideally people would wait for all the pieces to fall before making a claim. But this is the internet, not a bubble of academics making carefully proposed premises and perfectly logical deductions.
But why mark people saying "wait for the pieces" as concern trolls? Why discourage people from wanting to good-faith?
I've obviously no idea what specific conversation you're referring to so I can't see what was said.
Generally I don't think it's ever wrong to request or hope for additional information, like hearing from the victim. So I think "trolling" is always inappropriate in that context.
But the mild criticism I would have to something like this is to the extent it implies that one cannot form a judgment or belief without that information. It's one thing to say "hearing from the victim could change my opinion" and another to say "you cannot form an opinion without hearing from the victim." I think the first is being open to evidence, and the second is a form of gate keeping someone's belief as being valid. So when you say "first before" that's the sense I get, whether you intend that or not.
I'm not saying you can't form an opinion on it but maybe don't post "this is fake" until you hear the whole story? I guess I'm more concerned about the message this creates for victims of abuse. That if we publicly claim their victimhood is true or false before we even talk to them maybe we are doing victims a disservice. Just like it was wrong of the media to post that this girl was a victim before talking to her.
It's already hard for people to talk about abuse openly, shouldn't we be working to ease that burden by making a narrative that consistently puts victims first?
No I don't agree with you. However you want to describe this (tone policing, slippery slope, false dichotomy), the message is the same I think. When someone says "this is fake" they're not in a vacuum. They're responding to a series of known facts, including the identity of the alleged criminal and the source of the information itself. To compare this generally to "victims of abuse" entirely ignores that nuance I'm not surprised you'd get shit on for that.
By saying something so close to "you can think that but don't share your belief" you're doing a greater disservice imo. It's gate keeping good faith beliefs and that's some lib shit.
There's a difference between:
- Believing a person who comes forward and claims they were sexually assaulted, and
- Believing a fascist government who claims the president they ran out of the country in a coup sexually assaulted someone.
We should absolutely believe people who come forward are doing so in good faith, and we should absolutely investigate such claims while ensuring the accused has due process, but at some point you have to have a bullshit detector. "This accusation isn't coming from the alleged victim, and is instead coming from an unreliable institution with an ax to grind against the accused" should set off anyone's bullshit detector.