I feel like it has turned into a tragic meme that Youtubers and Streamers groom minors on discord and other messaging platforms. Mostly because it actually IS that common. How do I know? I had the displeasure of finding out about one of these cases. One that didn’t end up being career ending when it probably should have been. I’m essentially writing this as a way to process the aftereffects of that.
Have you ever, by pure wrong time wrong place situation, found out something that changed your world in a very weird way? That was me finding heavy hints towards a certain creator online being a groomer. The person that I am, I tried to contact the victim to ask if they were the ones letting the info come out. No. Someone else was going rogue. The victim wanted this private for reasons I fully understood. They had partially moved on and healed already and didn’t want to rip open a wound.
That one part of my brain and a lot of you readers are thinking “but this has to be out, that’s a position of power!” Yes, I don’t disagree, but I feel like many people underestimate just HOW mentally fucked up it is to go through that already when the person ISN’T high-profile. It’s infinitely worse when they are. The potential damage to the victim often outweighs the offense of the creator, unless it is a known repeated offense from the creator. Often victims like this will be down to expose a person as soon as they find out there is another victim
There is no organization in this space that is just a place to go to as a victim that doesn’t want to expose stuff. There is no organization in this space for bystanders to go to. There is probably an organization that you can report to, sure, but that’s only if you want to actually report. The fact that some support is still needed when you are a bystander to this is completely unacknowledged, but it shocks me more that there is no safety and mental health organization for victims of content creators in general. The music industry and acting industry has it, why doesn’t the content industry?
It’s not rare either that a third party finds out about grooming implications and goes past the victim to share about it. That happens more often than you think and since these posts are often more easily shot down by the team of a content creator, the aftermath of a creator saying “there were allegations, they are obviously false” is heavy on ANYONE that knows they aren’t false.
“Just expose it with names censored.” Some of you will say as if we all don’t know how batshit insane the stalker skills of Gen Z are. You also don’t know if the victim isn’t already experiencing stalking (they often, surprisingly, are). In a perfect world you’d drop the information and safe the day. We don’t live in a perfect world. In a perfect world you drop all the proof and everyone agrees that something is foul. We live in a world where you drop evidence and a fandom will scream lies.
I’m partially writing this post, because I know I cannot be alone in the experience of being a bystander to a higher-profile person going unexposed or only partially exposed. I can’t be the only person that wants a space this can be talked about, even without naming names of perpetrators. I know safe spaces can always still create the exact people that go rouge and expose someone elses entire trauma story, but how has there been no Safe Space to at least share experiences. I created such a safe space in a different field but content creation seems to need it even more. We need community to cope with this and with more and more cases coming to light, this type of stuff will 1) get re-triggered in people and 2) people that have been through it helping and encouraging the people that are new to this particular kind of clusterfuck.
I’m still wondering how people can experience this information and in the days directly following still function normally. I get put into the most uncomfortable combination of freeze and fight response ever when I get info like this. And mind you, I work in sexual violence prevention and response in an entirely different field. I still react like that, because that’s human. I could honestly never ignore my nervous system enough to work in a hospital or a customer support position. In case you’re reading this and you are in a similar position and feel locked in an invisible cage: That’s normal. It’ll go away after a while if you have slower days and let your body just experience what it is experiencing. You’ll still feel the fucked up mental response whenever thinking about it in the future, but your entire body won’t make you incapable of moving anymore.
“Take it into your own hands to make an organization like that.” I already run one in a different space. You’d think that makes me more qualified to also do it for the content space. In technicality I’m certainly not unqualified with the experience I have. However, for this kind of work you need connections and a level of respect within a community behind the scenes. That’s hard to gain in the Youtube & Streaming space. I would so so so love to build something like I built in a subgenre of the music industry with someone well-connected in the content space. You don’t just need the social work and nonprofit background to create something like this. You also simply need people that are respected and known to be part of that change and that is only ever happening marginally. At least up until now.
I will keep occasionally writing about this, because this topic just naturally comes up for me a lot as someone that leads a safe space and as someone that consumes a lot in the online world while I work.
We need a safe space for the victims and bystanders of content creators because as I often mention, in a time of micro-fame, we don’t know nearly enough ABOUT that micro-fame to be able to build specified prevention systems yet and having these safe spaces would be a first step to figuring it out.
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