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1 " Victim status can buy special privileges and gives the green light to brand opposing views or even mild criticism as tantamount to hate speech. So "
― Claire Fox , ‘I Find That Offensive!’
2 " What also makes victimhood an attractive currency today is that it can gain sympathy, as though it is itself an achievement. And "
3 " complaining about trolls is increasingly deployed as a weapon in gaining further sympathy as a Victim with a capital ‘V’: ‘Being trolled by strangers on the net gives you the chance to show how hard things are for you, how right you were, and how noble and magnanimous you are in sharing your suffering with the world.’ How "
4 " Claiming to be a victim gives people perverse authority. Subjective experience becomes key: 'I am a sexual abuse victim. I am allowed to speak on this. You are not because you have never experienced what it is like to be...'. Victim status can buy special privileges and gives the green light to brand opposing views or even mild criticisms as tantamount to hate speech. So councils, who have become chief cheerleaders for policing subjective complaints, define hate speech as including 'any behavior, verbal abuse or insults, offensive leaflets, posters, gestures as perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated by hostility, prejudice or hatred'. This effectively incites 'victims' to shout offense and expect a clamp-down. Equally chilling, if a victim aggressively accuses you of offense, it is dangerous to argue back, or even to request that they should stop being so hostile, should you be accused of 'tone policing', a new rule that dictates: '[Y]ou can never question the efficacy of anger ... when voiced by a person from a marginalized background'. No wonder people are queueing up to self-identify into any number of victim camps: you can get your voice heard loudly, close down debate and threaten critics. "
5 " Harvard Law School professor Jannie Suk writes about how hard it is to teach rape law in an era of trigger warnings. She explains how women's organizations now 'routinely advise students that they should not feel pressured to attend or participate in class sessions that focus on the law of sexual violence, and which might therefore be traumatic' as they might "trigger" traumatic memories'. She describes the way many students appear to equate 'the risk . . . of traumatic injury' incurred while discussing sexual misconduct as 'analogous to sexual assault itself'. As a consequence, more and more teachers of criminal law are not including rape law in their courses: 'it's not worth the risk of complaints of discomfort by students' and they fear being accused of inflicting 'emotional injuries' in classroom conversation. "
6 " Today's offended students often show a marked degree of over-reaction to words that make them feel uncomfortable. They equate speech itself, and often the most innocuous comments, with physical violence. In this, they are simply extending how they were taught as children to respond disproportionately to damaging words. That's because the child protection narrative they have been raised on makes a particular feature of blurring the line between physical and psychological harm. For example, children's charities and NGOs constantly broaden definitions of abuse this way and, in doing so, actively encourage children to be suspicious of entirely harmless, informal, emotional interactions and tensions, even within their own families. "
7 " WHEN YOU HEAR that now ubiquitous but dread phrase, ‘I find that offensive’, you know you’re being told to shut up. It "
8 " [I]t's a con, at children's expense. When self-esteem advocates tell us to flatter the young about their views, in reality they ask adults to abandon the difficult task of disciplining them. Emphasizing that adults must 'express unconditional positive regard and acceptance for children' effectively destroys the inter-generational duty of passing on knowledge, setting boundaries for behavior and the broader task of socialization. It is not good for children and can mean adults indulging even the most destructive aspects of young people's behavior. In 2013, a self-harming pupil at Unsted Park School in Godalming, Surrey was given a disposable safety razor to slash himself with, supervised by a teacher. A spokeswoman from selfharm.co.uk justified this irresponsible collapse of adult judgement using the mantras of pupil voice and self-esteem: 'The best way to help is to listen without judging, accept that the recovery process may take a while and avoid "taking away" the self-harm' because 'self-harm can be about control, so it's important that the young person in the center feels in control of the steps taken to help them'.That's an extreme case but it touches on how focusing on the schoolchild's self-esteem can create the impression that the world should circle around pupils' desires. This in turn puts pressure on adults to tip-toe around young people's sensitivities and to accede to their opinions. Combined with student voice orthodoxies, this can lead to the peculiar diktat that teachers express respect for pupils' views, however childish or even poisonous. "
9 " Even terms of abuse are competitive. No sooner do we have 'mansplaining' than someone who declares the main problem is 'whitesplaining' or 'straightsplaining'. US writer Cathy Young argues this had led to a 'reverse caste system in which a person's status and worth depends entirely on their perceived oppression and disadvantage'. "
10 " When comedian Kate Smurthwaite appeared on the Today program to back up Yvette Cooper's campaign, she urged that the police set up a special squad to monitor Twitter and punish sexist trolls accordingly. But when feminists demand that the police arrest and even imprison trolls to create an online safe space for women, it is they who become the authoritarian silencers of others. They are legitimizing, in effect, 'thought crime'. "
11 " [O]ne of society's obsessions over recent years has been safeguarding children. It might have begun as a noble aim, but it has in the event institutionalized a climate of distrust and fear that undoubtedly has been internalized by those who demand safe spaces. Having grown up in an environment where their protection was the first priority, those children have become adults and are still demanding to be protected. "
12 " This linking of bullying to mental illness and the idea that it causes 'life-long damage' really concerns me. I fear it is the anti-bullying industry that is the real threat to young people's state of mind. Rather than reassure, it adamantly stresses, indeed exaggerates, the harmful effects of bullying. Such scaremongering is impacting on young people's coping mechanisms and possibly exacerbating the problem. As such, it actually contributes to the young feeling overly anxious, and ironically creates an atmosphere likely to encourage symptoms of mental ill health. The headline should be 'anti-bullying causes mental illness'.The anti-bullying industry has made a virtue of catastrophizing, always arguing things are getting worse. With the advent of social media, bullying experts are quick to point out there is now no escape: 'Bullying doesn't stop when school ends; it continues twenty-four hours a day'. Children's charities continually ratchet up the fear factor. Surely it is irresponsible when Sarah Brennan, CEO of YoungMinds, declares that 'if devastating and life-changing' bullying isn't dealt with 'it can lead to years of pain and suffering that go on long into adulthood'.Maybe I am being over-cynical about the anti-bullying bandwagon, and there is a danger that such a critique will cause me to be labelled callous and hardhearted. Certainly, when you read of some young people's heartbreaking experiences, there is no doubt that it can be a genuinely harrowing experience to go through. But when we hear these sad stories, surely our job as adults should be to help children and young people put these types of unpleasant experience[s] behind them, to at least put them in perspective, rather than stoking up their anxieties and telling them they may face 'years of pain and suffering'. "
13 " [S]ome teachers are tempted to adapt to the increasing passive support for jihadi identity politics evident among pupils. This is especially true in parts of France. One French teacher recalled a student who had refused [to] keep the one minute's silence for Hebdo victims by saying, 'I'm not Charlie; I think the terrorists did the right thing'. The teacher's response was telling: 'Children have the right to say silly things, to even say offensive things'. That's true. This is a book defending that right. But arguing for free speech and political tolerance is not an excuse for this sort of cultural cringe in the face of abhorrent ideas. We need to confront pupils who say stupid things, yet too often these sorts of views are indulged: 'So you favor Caliphate and and think 9/11 is a Zionist plot? That's an interesting idea. Any other views?'. "
14 " While these young Muslims and young feminists may superficially seem to have little in common, they were indistinguishable from each other in demanding bans and apologies for what they considered offensive, dangerous ideas. Both groups agreed that my advice that 'sticks and stones might break your bones, but words will never hurt me' was an outdated misunderstanding of the fundamental damage that words can inflict on vulnerable individuals. "
15 " This trend, to be easily offended, is now exploding into public consciousness with the unraveling madness that has taken over so many American universities, and is now emerging on British campuses. Spiked's Free Speech University Rankings 2016 show that 90 percent of universities and students' unions censor speech. Rising from 80 percent in 2015, the vast majority of these censorious policies are carried out by students' unions. Barely a week goes by without reports of something 'offensive' being banned from campus. "
16 " It is tragic, too, that students now describe themselves as mentally ill when facing what are the routine demands of student life and independent living. The NUS survey reports that students' feelings of crippling mental distress are primarily course-related and due to academic pressure. In 2013, in response to that year's NUS mental health survey, an article cheerily entitled 'Feeling worthless, hopeless ... who'd be a university student in Britain?' listed one young writer's anxiety-inducing student woes that span the whole length of her course: 'Grueling interview processes are not unusual, especially for courses like medicine, dentistry, and veterinary science, or for institutions like Oxbridge'. And then: 'Deadlines come thick and fast for first-year students, and for their final-year counterparts, the recession beckons'. Effectively, the very requirements of just being a student are typified as inducing mental illness.It can be hard to have sympathy with such youthful wimpishness. But I actually don't doubt the sincerity of these 'severe' symptoms experienced by stressed-out students. That is what is most worrying--they really are feeling over-anxious about minor inconveniences and quite proper academic pressure. "
17 " Fifteen years ago, my ten-year-old niece came home in tears and, after coaxing, told me that she was being bullied at school. Was she being beaten up by nasty older kids? Having her dinner money stolen? Her head pushed down the girls' toilet? Eventually she revealed that some of her friends had gone to the cinema without her. I was relieved and started to reassure her: this wasn't bullying, we all fall out with friends and it is part of growing up, she would find better friends etc. However, she indignantly corrected me and quoted her school's anti-bullying policy on 'exclusion from friendship groups' and 'exclusion at playtime or from social events and networks'. "
18 " Everything from self-help guides to teen magazines regularly feature tips on 'being your own best friend' and 'reaffirming your self-worth'. Advice includes such gems as writing down 'amazing things about yourself every morning'. So if we wonder where Generation Snowflake gets its sense of self-regard from, the self-esteem movement must take some of the credit (or blame). It is an industry dedicated to creating ego-boosting, self-oriented youth. "
19 " Educating the young traditionally allowed new generations to join in the Great Conversation of civilization by furnishing access to the works and insights of previous generations of thinkers and writers from the dawn of history. Today it seems we only want to facilitate a conversation in which the young talk to themselves, about themselves.Treating the curriculum as a mirror in this way inevitably gives pupils a sense that they are the center of this universe. This is our mini-me Generation Snowflakers being told that thousands of years of literature, philosophy and historical insight should be sidelined to accommodate to their immediate interests. This inevitably feeds the idea that their own identity should be a trump card. "
