My difficulty is to formulate this topic, in a language that is a foreign language to me, in such a way that not only native English speakers understand the meaning, but also those for whom English is also a foreign language. I hope you understand what I am trying to say.
@KRITAKOUGAR and @Katamaheen have put forward very good arguments against the relaxation, although they, like me, consider the general harmlessness to be a given (this is a paraphrase). However, these very good arguments, along with those of @AhabGreybeard, are then not taken up as arguments later in the topic.
Also @sooz’s argument that the term “harassment” is rather inappropriate here is definitely correct, but what do you classify something like this under?
If you’re wondering why I’m categorizing it and what I want from you in the first place, please be patient and understanding:
The underlying problem is a different one, it exists, and it is very serious, in my opinion.
The difficulties associated with emojis or the written expression of wanting to hug someone lie in an area that is rarely grasped in its scope and seriousness by people who are not affected by it.
The underlying problem is called “post-traumatic stress disorder” and, in relation to the problem discussed here, is mainly related to sexual abuse in terms of the number of people affected worldwide. Further affected persons can be people involved in acts of war (fighting soldiers, as well as civilians in the combat zone), (political/war/criminal) prisoners, survivors of abduction, and similarly severely and most severely traumatized people.
To get an understanding of the dimension and extent of this affected group: According to a large number of studies, on average over a third of all women, and about a quarter of all men, worldwide are sexually abused at least once in their lives. Of these people, a very large proportion develop a “post-traumatic stress disorder” in the course of their lives, a mental illness that is often, but not always, successfully treatable, unfortunately, at least 5% (if not far more) are considered incurable.* & **
Now, I assume that most of us have enough empathy and imagination to be able to imagine that a sexually abused person can have a panic fear of hugs and often any other form of physical closeness. And not only of the actual physical closeness of other people, even the suggestion of it is enough to lead these people, including myself, into the most serious crises. This means that at least 400 million people on this planet are chronically affected, and if you add to this the number of people who are currently acutely ill, we are probably talking about a good eighth of the world’s population, i.e. 1 billion people.
And this does not stop at the “door” to the forum, very probably we will also have an eighth of affected users here, but for understandable reasons, only very few talk about it. Be it because they are going or have gone through hell, because they don’t want to be recognized, whatever, many have good reasons not to speak up here in this topic because it is a risk for them.
In my eyes we should discuss, if we need these emojis in an art dedicated forum, this is not a dating community:
By the way, this is an even nore offensive hugging emoji of this forum:
In terms of considering whether the CoC and access to a few emojis in this area needs to be changed, I have these suggestions:
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“Without consent” means that you are not allowed to send hugs at all, because just asking for consent can make the asked person feel uncomfortable. This may not be noticeable to “healthy” users, but those affected will see it very differently.
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I believe, some of the emojis should be removed.
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the layout of the CoC is flawed, as the most important points are in a hidden text block. This was probably done to make it look “neat and tidy”. However, anyone reading the text using translation software will not be able to open anything in it, and what the triangular arrows mean in the original must not necessarily have been recognized.
Is it so tragic to “lose” a few pictures and not use a few phrases when dealing with complete strangers, rather than potentially causing psychological damage to users? After all, this is not only theoretically possible.
Michelist
P.S.: Sorry, I have to sleep now, I wrote the whole night on this one, and another one to our leaders. I actually wanted to say more about this, but I hope it will be understood.
*Ask your preferred search engine
** Quote from therapie.de, translated by me: “After a traumatic event, the probability of developing PTSD is 15 to 24 percent. However, it also depends on the type of event: After war events or r.a.p.e***, the risk is 50 to 65 percent, after accidents or natural disasters it is significantly lower at 5 to 10 percent.”
***Sorry for “masking” because of the word-filter.
is a perfectly acceptable thing to do.
