Recent royal scandals have exposed how the language of trauma and abuse is being widely and cynically misused

We must reclaim the language of suffering for real sufferers.

I’ve had more labels given to me than are hanging in Kim Kardashian’s wardrobe. Sadly I’m not talking about the designer clothing type but the rather less desirable psychiatric ones. It started with ‘anorexia’ and then I acquired ‘OCD’, depression and PTSD. It then moved onto varying types of anxiety disorder, mixed states bipolar and most recently there’s borderline personality disorder. However a constant thread running through all of these, indeed the genesis and foundation of my lifelong struggle with mental illness, has been trauma. That’s why the last of the labels, borderline personality disorder, feels like a reasonable fit. BPD most often springs from childhood trauma or abuse, which I now realise that I suffered. However it took me until my 30s to accept that those words ‘trauma’ and ‘abuse’ applied to me. In my mind the people who were able to use such language to describe their experiences had been through far worse experiences than me. For example I wasn’t sold into child slavery or orphaned due to war. Yet there are many types of suffering. There will always be people who have suffered worse in life than you but that doesn’t diminish your own painful experiences. But my reluctance to accept my childhood as traumatic and containing abuse is not shared by those who subscribe to a new Woke ideology that exalts victimhood.

 I have written on the culture of victimhood before. https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/all-aboard-the-victimhood-bandwagon/   However recent events at Buckingham Palace have shown with horrible clarity how far the language of trauma and abuse has been degraded. It appears to have been unquestioningly accepted by the mainstream media that Ngozi Fulani, the head of a charity supporting domestically abused women, described a clumsy probe into her background as a ‘violation’ and ‘abuse’. Indeed her whole depiction of that experience at the Queen Camila’s reception is clothed in the language of domestic abuse, with her even saying she felt ‘trapped.’ Whatever one’s view of Lady Hussey’s persistent questioning one would think Fulani’s choice of language would be widely regarded as hugely disrespectful to the very women she has dedicated herself to supporting. At least that would be a reasonable assumption if we didn’t live in a world that has seemingly eradicated all proportionality in the language around harm. There is now an unthinking, widespread use of the most extreme words for anything from causing mild offence and discomfort to inflicting serious physical or mentally harm. The day after the now infamous ‘where are you from’ incident I heard a caller on Talk Radio compare Lady Hussey to an elderly Nazi war criminal who shouldn’t be allowed to use age as excuse for any actions. That echoed the depressingly large number of people on Twitter who felt it was appropriate to compare UK migrant detention centres to concentration camps. According to woke social media warriors illegal migrants choosing to flee France are being ‘abused’ and ‘traumatised’ and even parallels with Jews fleeing Nazi genocide were not too extreme.

   Ngozi Fulani told the media, ‘abuse doesn't have to be physical. But if you move my hair without permission, to me, that's abuse.’ https://news.sky.com/story/black-charity-boss-ngozi-fulani-says-she-felt-abused-and-trapped-12759325 Of course abuse doesn’t have to be physical, but should we really call unwanted touching of hair ‘abuse’? This reminded me of a Church of England scandal in which the former Dean of Christ Church Cathedral Oxford, Very Rev Prof Martyn Percy, was accused of sexual assault by a PhD student. Central to this alleged assault was her claim that he stroked her hair in the sacristy. Indeed that was almost the sum of her accusation, along with an over the top compliment, (both of which Rev Percy denies). https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/05/13/exclusive-victim-breaks-silence-reveal-alleged-sexual-harassment/  What words are left to describe a rape if touching someone’s hair and giving them an inappropriate compliment can be described as a ‘life ruining sexual assault’?

   I know only too well that physical trauma doesn’t indicate the level of mental trauma inflicted. The doctor who assaulted me when I was 14 did not physically harm me. But it was true abuse by a doctor of a very vulnerable, mentally ill child. When combined with the months of preceding bullying and control through fear it left permanent mental scars which still cause me problems today. It took me years to tell anyone about what happened when I was in that room with that doctor and a nurse who made him stop but said nothing. I didn’t know what to call it. It was a therapist many years later who gently told me I had been assaulted and indeed abused. That is why the people who now appear to causally speak of their ‘trauma’ in reference to life stresses and even mere discomfort both baffle and anger me. Few people demonstrate this more than the prince and princess of Woke, Harry and Meghan. Prince Harry understandably speaks of ‘trauma’ in relation to his mother’s tragic death. Few people would argue with him speaking of the ‘trauma’ caused by having to walk behind her coffin while being watched by the world. However one might assume that this would make him less inclined to ‘sweat the small stuff.’ Instead he and Meghan appear to be fixated on elevating all their grievances into dramas and indeed some type of abuse. They are very much driven by a sense of being perpetual victims. Whether it’s speculation on the skin colour of their baby or the apparently groundbreaking realisation that the royal family has a hierarchy and expects certain protocols to be observed, they describe it in the most hyperbolic way and often refer to trauma. Meghan even claims she was close to taking her own life. No one except her can know whether that is true or not but the obsession with grievance minutiae doesn’t evoke a sense of credibility. Even the braking of a zip before Meghan’s first royal walkabout is portrayed as evidence of their self proclaimed suffering.

‘And then the zip breaks,’ revealed Harry, before his wife explained: ‘And he's like "Okay babe, safety pin. Just safety pin it."... "Ready?" "Yeah" "Okay". We just sort of went with it.’  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-11515749/Meghan-Markle-claims-didnt-know-walkabout-one.html

What hardship! Furthermore the use of footage of paparazzi scrums that were totally unconnected with the Woke duo in the trailers for their Netflix documentary reveals how desperate they are to convey victimhood. It’s a scraping of the bottom of a barrel that isn’t even yours type of desperation.

  The other day I came across a video showing Twitter’s former head of ‘Trust and Safety’ Yoel Roth describe his and his fellow Twitter employees’s ‘trauma’ at having to deal with the online fallout from the last US Presidential election. In particular Roth was referring to what he regarded as President Trump and others inciting the January 6th 2021 attack on the Capitol.

Michael Tracey @mtracey

Truly incredible -- former Twitter executive @yoyoel, who just got caught fabricating a fake justification for censoring a media outlet, says the decision to ban Trump after Jan 6 was impelled by the "trauma" he and other "content moderators" experienced online that fateful day

It is ‘odd’ at best and profoundly cynical at worst that he should claim ‘trauma’ from this. There is plenty of vileness on Twitter, coming for example from the Taliban, the Iranian Government or indeed trans activists threatening to rape women like me who want to keep males out of female only spaces. As an aside one might also observe that Roth has written a PhD thesis that suggests underage teens should have access to adult only internet services. He doesn’t appear that concerned about abuse and ‘trauma’ this might cause vulnerable children.

Elon Musk @elonmusk

@elizableu Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis:

Roth’s behaviour is now sadly the modus operandi of the Woke, i.e. using the language of ‘trauma’ and ‘abuse’ to further a personal or political agenda. As we saw with the sacking of Piers Morgan for questioning Meghan Markle’s claim to have been suicidal, one can not question the utterances of the ‘traumatised’, those with ‘mental health problems’, the ‘victims’. Trauma, mental health and victimhood are being used as a shield to deflect scrutiny and criticism as well as for both PR and political ends.

So where does this all leave the real sufferers of trauma and abuse? What language is there left for them to talk about and process their ordeals? If someone who works with women escaping domestic abuse feels able to describe an uncomfortable social encounter, however offensive, in the same way those women would describe their suffering then we should all realise there is a massive problem. If ‘trauma’ and ‘abuse’ become almost causally and routinely used words they lose all meaning in all contexts. This degradation of language means that real victims and sufferers are lost in a meaningless soup, pushed into the silent background, which is in itself a type of further abuse.