This is the national television coverage of the woman harassing her neighbors in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. I am hoping that our harasser won't be this hard core, but we won't find out how bad it will ultimately be until we get further into the process of dealing with it. As someone documenting past harassment, I found the documentation of THIS harassment both inspirational and instructional.
Harassment, as I understand it has several components; it is intrusive, it is unwelcome, it is persistentently recurring or obsessive, it is offensive and/or abusive, it obstructs normal activity.
While it can be focused on only one person or group of people, as with this woman, who is documented as having harassed other neighbors as well, it is often part of a larger pattern of conduct that is inflicted on multiple targets.
In the case of this woman who harassed her neighbors, the solution for some was to leave. In the case of blog harassment the solution is sometimes for bloggers to stop writing, at least for awhile, to escape the hassle of persistent unpleasantness. In the case of neighbors, it was a person who ruined people's enjoyment of their home; in the case of bloggers, it was no longer fun to write, and it interfered with other people reading the blog for pleasure, and suppressed comments from those people.
As I watch the video of this woman taunting her neighbors, over and over, it strikes me that there is something in taunting behavior which seems to be an addictive reward to the harasser. It seems to feed a need or a desire, to provide some kind of psychological boost that at least some harassers crave that is different from how most people would experience those actions. There has to be something going on inside these people who behave this way that is drives them to expend so much time and energy in being unpleasant to others. For most of us, that is not something we go out of our way to do, but rather is something we go out of our way to avoid. Given the pattern of persistence and frequency, I think some functional identification of what happens might be important. One cannot stop someone else who is acting irrationally with solutions that would work with rational people. If that worked, police visits, restraining orders, and previously having served jail time would have stopped this woman.
Significantly for our purposes here in writing about harassment, it is illegal; this crazy lady has already done jail time for her conduct, but did not change her evil ways. Either she chose not to do so, or she was unable to change. This woman had her current court date moved up to this morning, in Ramsey County. It also seems part of the pattern of harassment that the harasser tries to claim they are the person who is victimized by other people protesting or complaining about their behavior, because no matter how badly they act, they are angered at anyone stopping them from abusing others. As is the case with this woman, the abusers, the harassers, the stalkers like to inflate their accomplishments and importance; it speaks to an inherent arrogance, and a false self-image.
As a matter of observation, I am intrigued with how differently other people objectively see this woman compared to how she subjectively sees herself. It is as if she has her own alternate reality that overlaps the objective reality the rest of us inhabit, but which is in some ways, important ways, an alternative reality without the facts the harasser chooses to ignore or disregard.
Showing posts with label harassment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label harassment. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
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