Archive for June, 2022

The case against the trauma plot

Tuesday, June 14th, 2022

illustration: Aldo Jarillo

“How to account for trauma’s creep? Take your corners. Modern life is inherently traumatic. No, we’re just better at spotting it, having become more attentive to human suffering in all its gradations. Unless we’re worse at it—more prone to perceive everything as injury. In a world infatuated with victimhood, has trauma emerged as a passport to status—our red badge of courage?”

Far too many people get their scientific “information” from best-selling novels and popular movies and TV shows. As a result, there is a vast misunderstanding of trauma and a concurrent belief in baseless theories, such as repressed memory. The consequences have been disastrous. For example, many innocent people are rotting in prison for committing crimes that never occurred.

In this essay, literary critic Paruh Sebgal argues that the reliance on trauma as a plot device has also led to a lot of over rated literary and theatrical fiction Read the entire article in The New Yorker.

The Real Monsters

Friday, June 3rd, 2022

“Public and political support for registries remains high. There is little evidence that attitudes have been impacted by a growing body of research showing that public registration, community notification, and residency restrictions do not decrease the incidence of sexual offense. Rates of sexual re-offense have been low both before and after registries, and sex offenses have lower recidivism than almost all other crimes. Further, decades of data consistently show that the majority of sex offenses involve non-strangers and those without prior sex-offense convictions. In other words, there’s scant proof that sex offender registries make us any safer.”

Read the article by NCRJ Director Dr. Emily Horowitz in Inquest, published by the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, housed at Harvard Law School.