I have been on the Internet for a full half of my life. I was twelve when I got my first computer. I am days from turning twenty-four.

I more-or-less grew up on the internet. I’ve been part of a variety of online communities. You definitely start to notice some commonalities. I think I’ve pegged the median life of an internet community around three years: after that time, drifting sets in, or conflicts create divisions, or original members have moved on and it feels like the essence of the community went with them, and so on. And there’s often one or two people from the group that you keep contact with over the long run.

I’ve gained so much from my time online. I’ve connected with some amazing people. I’ve made lasting friends. I’ve had space to grow, to explore. Making those connections online as a young teen actually helped me learn to socialize offline (contrary to the panic of traditional-media sorts as new media grows more prominent and the new generations make use of the technology available to them). I still had access to a network of support when I found myself unable to leave the home or socialize in-person. And access to information, the opportunity to learn things that might never have been in my reach otherwise — from sexual education to photography and design concepts to politics and social awareness. And I needn’t go into detail, I think, for most of my readers to understand the value of activism no matter where it happens.

For all the internet has to offer, it can also be a dangerous place. And I’ve watched it happen in a number of communities I was a part of. There are all kinds of people out there, and not all of them with a sense of understanding or respect for boundaries. And it only takes one person, out of hundred or thousands, to change the shape of the community they target.

It can happen in many ways. Some of you might remember that I met my husband online. The community we met in was a close-knit group of friends. Every year we planned a meeting, choosing a place close to some percentage of the group, and would go out together to museums, restaurants, theme parks, local/historical points of interest, and so on. We associated with one another with our real identities, for the most part. As far as we knew. Until one member faked his own death to us, for reasons unknown, and several people who had grown very close to him fell out of the community as a result.

There was another community, a much larger one, where members sorted themselves into sub-groups of friends. And one group was dominated by this particular woman. She made a point to be as inflammatory as possible. She wanted to see drama. And she would target any individual who raised her ire (whether they spoke against her or just happened to be in her way at the moment). Target with harsh words, target with customized insults, target with twisted stories or speculations about the person, designed to exploit their vulnerabilities, displaying knowledge of the target and hir situation — she had done her research — that was as much a personal violation as the infectious lies that she weaved into her attacks.

I’ve seen this happen in multiple communities. These toxic individuals who strongarm their way into prominence. In the beginning they are boisterous but nonthreatening. But their loud, commanding style immediately sets them into a dominant position, no matter how few people know them at first. They use their dominant position to reward people who make a show of flattering them. They make connections early, carefully cultivating supporters, rewarding them with insider status if they show themselves willing to play by the dominator’s rules.

This toxic person begins to gain prominence, in part because sie begins to sew conflict. Sometimes it is subtle, not overt or obviously conflict-seeking, but rather setting hirself up to be wronged, or finding a sensitive issue to exploit. But sometimes it is blatant: outright picking a fight with other people, seeking out enemies. Either way, sie becomes a person that no one can any longer ignore. Sie forces hir way into a place of importance and relevance to all community members; they have to pay attention, because otherwise they might stumble in hir path, or break one of hir rules inadvertantly, and suddenly find themselves in the middle of a shitstorm.

This is the point at which the shape of the community changes: this person is terrorizing the community. Hir supporters are no longer simply part of another sub-group of friends, but now become enforcers. They cannot believe that anyone would speak ill of this person who has treated them so well, and they make sure that anyone who does so is promptly punished. They make sure that no one breaks the dominator’s rules; they pick fights with others in an attempt to prove their loyalty to the dominator.

The really disturbing part is when the big fights break out: anyone who speaks out against this toxic person is swarmed. The toxic person may or may not be personally involved. Sometimes, sie sits back as hir supporters do the work of harassing the dissident, picking at all their flaws, manufacturing them if need be. But sometimes, sie will get involved — seeking this person’s greatest vulnerabilities, and exposing to all observers — knowing that sie does not need to say the nastiest things — someone else will step in and do the dirty work for hir.

And people get the message. It only takes one time, although it may happen well more than just once. People see what the consequences are for speaking out against abuse. And people, quite rightly, would rather protect themselves — even if they feel brave enough to speak up, they can see already that it’s not enough to make it stop. They might have seen a great many people speak out against the abuse, and each of them individually targeted for attack, and the dominator keeping hir place of influence in the aftermath. People may not be happy, anymore, but sie still holds this power.

This is highly damaging in any community. I’ve watched it happen, watched how the dynamics of the community change, observed the consequences of pushback. In one particularly extreme incident, the bully actually researched the real-life identity of an enemy and called around to anyone she could find, including the target’s in-laws and boss, with a fabricated story that was just plausible enough to sew seeds of doubt, and the target actually saw consequences at work because of it.

But even when the abuse is confined to the online community, it can have real effect. I’m not a person who believes that the internet is a somehow less-important space than physical proximity. We are all real people, and we are having real interactions and making real connections, medium regardless. Harmful behavior is harmful behavior, no matter how it is facilitated. And abuse is no less abuse because the abuser isn’t sitting in front of you.

To the contrary: the invasion of space, the assault on a person’s autonomy and integrity, the violation of a person’s freedom of association, are just as real when they happen over a data line. These spaces are important. They might be the only space you can interact with distant friends. They might be the only space you can interact at all, because you are dealing with disability or poverty that makes leaving the house (or bed) and socializing in person difficult or impossible. (Which is why it’s frustrating when people dismiss online spaces as somehow not-as-real or not-as-important.)

When I’m part of a community that houses one of these bullies, I live in fear of the person ever being clued in to my existence, knowing that I could not handle being targeted like that. I have had to leave communities I cared deeply about because I couldn’t keep subjecting myself to those conditions. I have had to break connections with people I cared deeply about because they had some connection to the abuser.

And not just with online friends.

After I moved to Pittsburgh three years ago, I lost contact with every friend I had in California, my closest, deepest soul-mates (in a BFF sense). You see, my mother started stalking me online, seeking out every social media account she could find, invading every space she could find me in. So I left them. All of them. For two straight years I never logged in to my Myspace or Facebook accounts because she would be able to see that I had; certainly I couldn’t have interacted with anybody on them because she would find out. The friends whose emails I didn’t have before, I lost contact with. The friends whose other contact information I did have were the ones in my home-town social circle — the social circle my mother had infiltrated. So now, 2500 miles away in a place I’d never lived, knowing no one but my husband and his immediate family, I was completely isolated from the only support system I had.

Abuse has real ramifications. On real people. No matter where it is carried out.

When it comes to online spaces, some people may not see much of a problem. It doesn’t feel threatening to them. Annoying, maybe. But not threatening. And they don’t see why people can’t just ignore it. It’s not that hard to get past, for them.

But there are some people who can’t just ignore it. People who have been through this before. People who have been primed by previous abusers, primed to respond to certain tactics. For these people, even if they are not the center of a conflict, just being exposed to those same dynamics again can be incredibly harmful. It might not be the same person, the same place, the same situation — but the same patterns are playing out, and it’s not just that you have flash-backs to previous events; it’s the way you return to the state of mind you were in during the previous abuse, the way your patterns of thought go back to how they were then, the way you react to things restored to its previous setting. You might find yourself becoming highly self-critical, questioning your own experience of things, doubting your knowledge of yourself and what happened. You might find the same problems with self-loathing come rushing back. You might be wondering whether you really deserve it. You might start to see yourself as a burden again, highly aware of all the ways you drag other people down.

You can’t just ignore it away. You can’t just Think Positive your way out of it. You can’t just tell yourself that all these thoughts are untrue; no matter how well you understand something intellectually, there is something about the human psyche that still follows those same self-destructive emotional patterns when exposed to the same kind of situation that originally set them in place.

Just because you don’t actually feel like the community bully is going to find you at your workplace doesn’t mean hir actions aren’t having real effect on you — no matter how much you fight it.

Survivors of abuse are everywhere. And they are not always known as such. They are often invisible. And the consequences they suffer are not always apparent to outside observers.

What disturbs me as I watch this play out in yet another community I care about deeply is that this community is different. It’s not just about making friends or sharpening your debate skills or sharing memes with each other. This is a community with a purpose, and it has real effect. Real change is happening because of the conversations that we have with one another, puzzling out the direction of a movement, examining systems and learning how to change them, working with one another to advance the theory behind the movement, to find relevance, to find need, and to fill it. A lot of people have been introduced to concepts they might never have encountered without a thriving network of communities dedicated to common purposes. And, as a believer in bottom-up change, I fully believe that the influence of this community will spread.

And maybe it’s naive of me to expect better, but I rather do expect that groups of people centered around advocacy and activism would have some measure of awareness of abuse, how it works, how devastating it can be to the person/people targeted. I would definitely expect many of these communities to know that the abuser has often made sure to become in some way valuable or indispensable to the larger community, doing good things for other people, even as they do such harm to others. How often do people rally around an accused rapist and close in on the accuser, because they know what a good person the accused is and what good they are doing in [other area], so there’s no way they could be capable of something so heinous, and anybody who suggests something so patently ridiculous must have some sort of insidious motive…

You will see similar narratives play out in online communities — often without even the precept of an accusation. It is not the target who (publicly) initiates the conflict, in this case — the target may have been minding hir own business — but the abuser. All the abuser needs is a slightly modified version of reality — just plausible enough that supporters/enforcers and passers-by don’t bother to check for accuracy, but instead go on the abuser’s version of events — but just twisted enough to set up the target for harassment and humiliation, just something enough to suggest salacious details (real or manufactured) that a motivated supporter might dig up about the target, and just set up in such a way that any way the target might defend hirself would only create more embarrassment or incite escalation.

This is called manipulation.

What is most frustrating is that there are people who know that something is wrong here, people who are seeing red flags, but rather than choosing to back out of the whole conflict, they step in to question the target. Because maybe there are personal issues between the abuser and the target, they figure, but on the merits (as posited by the abuser), doesn’t the bully have a point? And then they unquestioningly accept the abuser’s terms of engagement, imposing those terms on the larger conversation, forcing the target to either engage on the abuser’s terms or not at all — which, of course, sets the target up for failure. And the conversation may not have proceeded on the abuser’s terms without the intervener’s assistance.

This is called enabling.

These people are willingly being used as tools. They are allowing themselves to be manipulated, for what reason I can only guess: sometimes, for the approval of the dominating person, for the points they win by staying on the right side of the conflict (“right” as in most dominant), or maybe they’ve had conflict with the target before too. Maybe there are other reasons, reasons I don’t understand right now, that aren’t as malignant in nature, even as they have a negative effect.

But it’s especially awful, when it happens that way — because it hurts so much worse coming from the innocent bystander, the person who had previously been a friend — it cuts so much deeper when it is coming from a person who generally acts in good faith, a person who generally acts with respect.

The target, then, is isolated: the people who see what is going on are too afraid to speak up, knowing that the consequences of showing any support for the target are having some of that scrutiny diverted their way. And it is understandable to protect oneself in that case, especially when past incidents have shown that even a great many people speaking up against the abuse cannot break down the power structure that the abuser has built.

And that is why the enforcers (whether willing or oblivious) are so frustrating. Because they are the ones who are defending that power structure. They are the ones who are making sure that even when the vast majority of the community is unhappy with the state of things, they cannot wrest back control of their space. The abuser, by hirself, could not win against an entire community that is sick and tired of hir actions. But when the abuser “has a point” — “does so much good” — when people would rather stay willfully ignorant to the structure they are reinforcing as they use it for their own benefit, because any position of influence is worth it because they would use it for good things –

And the system forges on.

How many voices have been silenced by this system we so casually reinforce?

How many people have been intimidated out of writing, building, working within the community?

The answer isn’t zero.

I’ve watched enough of these conflicts now to have lost count of the people who did speak up, who bore the consequences of doing so, and whose voices disappeared entirely after the storm passed. I’ve lost count of the people who became targets, and the campaign was a success, the person humiliated, and even when attention turned elsewhere they were too scared, too depressed or burned out, questioning whether they could ever contribute anything valuable — their voices quieted.

And there is no way to count the people who were observing silently, who might have joined the community, adding their voice to the conversation, contributing valuable perspectives and insights — no matter how small their circle of influence — who were too scared, having witnessed what can happen if they inadvertently step in the path of the wrong person — who decided it wasn’t worth the risk.

Again, this is devastating in any community. But particularly in this one — a community where we want people to use their voices — we want a diversity of perspective — we want a high degree of participation. This is a community where the entire point is to listen to these voices, and to engage with one another, to build upon each other — and no matter how small the voice, no matter how unknown the contribution — it still matters. A great diversity of small contributions makes a stronger, more stable foundation for a movement.

Every little bit is just as important as the next. And the higher degree of participation you have within a group — whatever commonality they share — the more likely the movement is to actually better their position in society, in life. The more you discourage participation, the more the movement becomes dominated by a few competing leaders. And the fewer people participating, the less relevant the movement becomes, for lack of a diversity of knowledge and perspective. The fewer people participating, the more the faults of the few leaders matter. And the more likely the movement is to eat itself inside out.

I don’t trust that it will make much of a difference, just me writing on my little blog. Especially when I am too fucking scared to name names. Especially when I already spent two days suicidal last week, and still don’t know whether I feel up to meaningful participation in this community going forward. Especially if that scrutiny comes back. I’m being fairly risky, writing about it outright like this. And it’s my own safety that I’m risking. And if I find myself targeted again, I might have to pull out of yet another community because of it.

But I will mourn this one a fair bit more. Because it’s more than friends lost.

It’s purpose.