Resisting riptides of victimisation

I would like to clarify that this is not a “kids these days” story, and neither am I trivialising the intensity of the mental-health struggles. I am attempting to throw light on how these problems have to be critiqued and located in the socio-cultural-political context, which is pushing our children into these precarious precipices.

Social media shapes our language of distress: I have been in the field of mental health for more than 30 years. Along with being rather ancient, I also like to see myself as a bit of an anthropologist, always on the lookout for changes in trends in the way distress is expressed culturally, particularly in the way it is verbalised. With curiosity, I have seen the narratives change and morph into disconcerting patterns of distress. However, in the last five years, there has been a tectonic shift in youth mental health, which is nothing like I have witnessed before. The insidious social media messaging is engineering a steady dose of language of misery in the garb of social justice. Shazia shared with me that social media gave language to what she was experiencing, “I was nudged into taking the identity of the traumatised victim and everyone around me as my oppressors.”

Culture of victimisation and fragility: What Shazia called a “triggered generation”, fosters a narrative of youth as passive recipients of an unsafe world. It is a dangerous narrative as it deprives them of their sense of agency and strips them of their own belief in responding to life’s hardships. As Shazia put it, “I spent ages after the abuse, buying into this idea that I was fragile and needed protection from everything that would trigger me. Maybe, initially, I did, but then it became a habit, and my threshold of tolerance became so low that I would go into a panic attack if I even heard a loud noise. Everyone around me started to walk on eggshells. It was cancer that really shook me out of my victimhood and I realised that I was done with this and that I wanted to live.”

So, shifting a gear, what will help us stand up to this culture of fragility and victimisation? After countless hours spent in conversations with youths like Shazia, co-researching, reflecting and speculating, some ideas that might help us move forward are:

Exposing the matrix: A generation is being brought up in the echo chambers of social media, which indoctrinates hatred rather than love. We are subtly but persuasively made to take sides with, “If you are not with me, then you are against me!” There are multi-trillion companies which use dubious manipulations to encourage the riptides of victimisation with minimal regard to consequences. The worst thing is that we are not even aware of how we are being controlled and manipulated. As the computer scientist and ethicist Tristan Harris put it, “How do you wake up from the matrix when you don’t know you are in the matrix?”

Conviction in our robustness and agency: Saha*, a 21-year-old young trans non-binary person, would get extremely enraged to the point of threatening to leave home when their parents would misgender them or use their deadname. I was a little confused as I could sense that their parents were their strongest allies but were struggling with the unfamiliarity of the new language. In our conversation, Saha talked about years of discrimination and ridicule experienced in school and neighbourhood. They found solace in a US-based social media trans group, which gave them a sense of belonging but made them turn against their own parents seeing them as “tyrants”. Through our conversations, Saha realised, “I am not a victim as, despite all that I have been through, I have held strong to what I believe in. I am resilient, and it is my parents who have supported me at every step. I have to be patient with them as they are also transitioning – I am just a few steps ahead of them.”

Faith that people are more than the worst things they have ever done: If we continue seeing people in binaries of good/bad, oppressors/victims, then the world can become a very unsafe place to live in. However, if we were to reflect on our lives honestly, we can think of so many instances when we have been victimised and where we have, maybe inadvertently, been oppressive towards others. Many times, as we saw in Saha’s story, we assign intent to people’s actions on the basis of the impact it has on us — “Your words hurt me, so you are bad.” At every hint of a transgression, there is a knee-jerk outrage, and rather than seeing people as multicoloured and multistoried, we start seeing them in binaries of black and white. Unwittingly, even psychologists and psychiatrists end up taking sides, locating the problem in individuals and therefore solidifying victimisation rather than seeing it as a reflection of problematic social practices.

Enduring adversity and building solidarity: I was very curious to know how Shazia managed to step out of “victimhood” and step into her agentic self. She shared that the first thing she did was to minimise her use of social media, “I unfollowed most influencers and only used it to follow the work of some of my favourite artists. It was liberating!” She found peace in teaching small children, which helped her recommit to what she valued most in life – joy in small things, laughter and togetherness. She did admit that there were moments when, what she called “victimness”, tried to take centre-stage, but it was her tribe of family, colleagues and her love for her work that kept her aligned to her north star.

Conversations with Shazia and Saha reminded me how it is the human chains of solidarity that save people when riptides hit hard in the ocean. As Paulo Freire commented on revolutionary love, “Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is a commitment to others… and to the cause of liberation.”

* Pseudonyms used and stories shared with consent

Shelja Sen is a narrative therapist, writer, co-founder, Children First. In this column, she curates the know-how of the children and the youth she works with. She can be reached at shelja.sen@childrenfirstindia.com