Cyber attacks are sexual violence on a mass scale; wake up, Zoom!
The perils and possibilities of trauma processing and collective mourning
When my church was cyber-attacked during Zoom services with a child pornography video, my body reacted with a day of migraines and vomiting, followed by a day of crying, followed by weeks of insomnia. Although mental and emotional harm can be as serious as a physical attack, it’s difficult to get people to take it as seriously. In general, people prefer to blame the victim. Saying, “Did you set a password?” is a little bit like saying to a rape victim, “Did you wear a short skirt?”
At the time of the attack, my church was following similar security practices to those recommended by Zoom Chief Product Officer Oded Gal in a media interview addressing concerns about a cyber-attack on a Holocaust museum. Zoom has still not plugged their security holes, despite their promises in their May 1st newsletter; a sexual assault awareness event was attacked with child pornography on May 4th. I’m pretty surprised by people’s willingness to believe the promises of a corporation currently being sued by their shareholders for lying about their security practices.
Being forced to see an objectified body reminded me of the times I had been objectified. In the course of processing the attack on my church, I shared with a friend an allegorical poem I had written about sexual mistreatment, comparing my body to a garden that had been damaged and polluted by vandals. He suggested that the poem would perhaps be harmful to hold onto and perform. This was in contrast to another friend’s advice that performing the poem would be helpful activism.
So which friend was right? Both were, perhaps. Hearing words or seeing images that describe violence can definitely do violence to us. Content warnings (previously known as trigger warnings) are a system that was developed to mitigate this harm, by ensuring we engage with tales of pain and violence in a prepared and consensual way. The system is limited by the self-awareness of the listener to know their own limits and has a number of other problems.
In the wake of the cyber-attack on my faith community, content warnings didn’t help us much, because the warning was simply too similar to the content itself. Eventually, we decided to move discussion of the cyber-attack off our church’s Facebook group and into private spaces. Although I respected the rights of my fellow congregants to be protected from references to violent imagery, I also wondered: if evil is not discussed, how can it be fought?
When the discussion of crime is taken out of public spaces, we protect not only victims from being triggered, but we also protect the ignorance that gives criminals the freedom to continue crime. It is a shame that many communities, when faced with traumatic events, simply demand silence from victims. I am proud that our church funded therapy for victims of the cyber-attack, and also created a press release describing the attack. In this way we took care of the victims and protected our community.
The Bible, our holy text, discusses incest, rape, genocide, eating babies, martyrdom, depression, and torture without so much as a single content warning. (A “content warning” edition of the Bible would probably be twice as lengthy as the original tome; should someone write one?) Again, imagery and poetry about violence can cause actual physical harm to a person’s body, if the images hit you the wrong way.
So what is a way to discuss violence in a way that breaks the power of violence instead of amplifying it? How do we discuss suffering in a way that celebrates not the suffering itself, but our desire and ability to triumph over pain? I think the Bible is a redemptive rather than destructive expression of trauma because of how many voices of faith were woven into it, speaking together in a symphony of sorrow and hope.
My poet & comedian stage name is “Lady Dragon.” When I was praying about how to deal with my dark and heavy heart, I pictured my dragon flying up to a cliff all by herself and singing her terrible lament into the sky. As she sings her sorrow to the Heavens and her Creator, the ghosts of ancestor dragons, the tribes of present dragons, and the unborn spirits of future dragons come to soar and lament with her, sharing the burden of grief.
Sorrow cannot be born alone. When I was in the process of divorcing my abusive spouse, the worst part was the burden of silence and the loneliness it created. There were people who didn’t want to listen; people who didn’t have time to listen; people who listened and resented doing so; and a good number of stories I never told to protect others from the pain of listening. My God became more essential than ever to me during this time, because he held the parts of my pain that no one else wanted to touch.
I also wanted to protect my ex from repercussions and vengeance; I still do, which is why I don’t mention his name in this blog. The world is so constructed that when we name abusers we call down vengeance upon their heads; speech is violence towards evildoers, rarely successful, bitterly fought, seldom resulting in justice. Usually the choice to speak out results in great suffering for both the accuser and accused alike, honestly.
Although speech can be violence, silence can be violence too. For those who process through speech, to be required to practice silence is to live with a bleeding wound that can never close. We can prevent the spread of violent imagery by limiting the processing to private therapy sessions; but can the discussion of criminal events in therapy create a social atmosphere where crime is prevented?
I hope some cyber attacks are being prevented by the way our church is speaking out about Zoom. Even so, survivors of violence don’t owe anybody our speech or our silence. Both forced speech and forced silence are instruments of vengeance upon us — a further robbing of agency from a body that was already robbed of agency.
When I think about the image of all the dragons flying and lamenting together, it seems to be saying that our speeches and our silences — all the grand and terrible work of lament — is not a work that we should undertake on our own, but one that we must attempt collectively and with all the help from spiritual forces we can muster.
It is a shame that our culture’s capacity for collective lament is so limited. In Psychology Today’s article on recovering from trauma, I read, “Whatever inner resources people need to mobilize for recovery, they still can not accomplish the task alone. Depression and trauma are disconnective disorders. They do not improve in isolation. To fix them you have to be connected to others.”
The article concludes, “In the wake of crisis it is possible to learn and grow at rates 100 times faster than at any other time, because there is a door of opportunity. Growth can go at warp speed in every domain of life…. Those who have the courage to become part of the trauma tribe, to experience and share their pain, or to help them overcome their pain, also have the opportunity to share their growth.”
When I first read this article a couple or so years ago, I sent it to my friend who was constantly complaining about how many dark stories I told him. What he was doing by listening was difficult and took courage — but in sharing my journey, he was sharing my growth. Unfortunately, it is possible to hurt yourself that way too: by trying to grow too hard too fast. I still wonder about whether (or how much) I hurt him.
Another quote from a Psychology Today article on integrating emotional trauma explains the problem in more academic terms: “‘Recovery’ is a misnomer for the constitution of an expanded emotional world that coexists alongside the absence of the one that has been shattered by trauma. The expanded world and the absent shattered world may be more or less integrated or dissociated, depending on the degree to which the unbearable emotional pain evoked by the traumatic shattering has become integrated or remains dissociated defensively, which depends in turn on the extent to which such pain found a relational home in which it could be held.”
In other words, your shattered and broken sense of meaning gets folded back into a story of Greater Meaning, depending on whether you find a “relational home” for your pain. That “relational home,” can be in your community, your art, your practice, your God or your faith. The extent to which your community is able to participate in providing this “relational home” will depend on their own wounds. Which is why the attack on my church was so devastating; we were all wounded at once. And which is why we will recover so powerfully: we are all empowered to mourn together.
