to not understand why a crotch grab would result in PTSD?

[BluePancakes]

Is it just that I've been so conditioned as a female that my body is not my own/it's other people's property that a crotch grab would be humiliating or embarrassing, but I'd move on pretty quickly? Whereas if a bloke had his crotch grabbed, especially by another bloke, it's so unexpected that it could affect their whole mental health?

Is the reason that "crotch gets grabbed" has made the headlines mainly because it's a man making the accusation, whereas there needs to be many more women making an accusation to make it stick? And whilst, I'm sure the media is in hyper-drive because these are famous people, I feel that if an average woman was to be grabbed by an average man, it would just be brushed under the carpet...

Apologies if there's a thread on this already, but I can't get my head around it.

(And though I hope it doesn't need to be said, I'm not dismissing the severity of any act of sexual harassment or assault, I'm just wondering more about how conditioned society is regarding the different treatment of the sexes.)

Sorry your DF had a minimising response to the JS episode. Do you see what I mean, minimising just encourages it to continue...

It didn’t cause PTSD with me, but I was grabbed by a bunch of men when I was 17 and had my crotch grabbed and breasts groped at work. I was extremely traumatised, and it took me many years to get over my fear of groups of men. I haven’t fully got over it if I’m honest and I’m 35 now.

Notreallyarsed
sorry to hear that happened to you

Mrsdraper1 thank you. It is never ok to forcibly touch someone, and I wish schools did more on this. Educating the next generation can only help, surely.

Notreallyarsed

What prompted this thread, was that I've been in a 'discussion' on another forum (not MN) with someone about sexual harassment, and he was minimising it, "it's only touching", "snowflakes", "nobody complained in my day" etc - and this was after the #MeToo.
Then, when this headline broke, I was confused about how something so expected [from a woman's pov] could cause PTSD just because it was done to a man.

I think SpongeBob's question is aligned with what I was thinking: The question should not be 'why has this man got ptsd, but why have we normalised it so much that people who have been sexually assaulted do not have (apparent) symptoms of trauma after it'

That makes sense, it’s as if society minimises it for women. As if we should just expect to be assaulted and put up with it. Sadly society and the media only seem to be shocked when it’s a man. Which is part of the problem.

Amanda?

Interesting thread.

As PP have said, every experience is different. Every person is different. I believe anyone who has PTSD, how awful it must be, regardless of how it was triggered.

I do think we minimise events, and grade them on a scale.

I had an abusive relationship. It was verbal. Emotional. Mental. Threatening to hit/hurt/kill me. Punching next to my head. Going to hit me but stopping just before to make me flinch. Driving too fast in the car to frighten me. Throwing things at me.

But my parents, and others, well they didn’t see any bruises, so it can’t have been that bad.

My parents are abusive. Not physically. But verbally. If I try to explain why we are NC, it’s hard. No one really gets it.

We are complex creatures. I wish everyone would accept that mental abuse is as evil as physical.

I also wish people would stop minimising. If whatever has happened, has resulted in trauma, then it doesn’t matter what the cause was. Believe and accept they are traumatised by it.

I don't think it is a generational thing (other than who talks about it more) but it can be an age thing. There is evidence that trauma experience as a child or young person is more likely to result in PTSD with those who experienced severe and/or extensive abuse under 18/25 (depending on the study, some do 25 due to increasing evidence of how brain growth works) appearing to be more likely to get PTSD and to have more debilitating or longer lasting symptoms.
Generally, we don't know enough about the brain or how PTSD happens to make a judgement even if we had far better information on the event.

For my opinion, media loves being salacious and the entire situation around the crotch grab likely would have a big effect on mental health afterwards so how the media is framing it is probably unhelpful and minimizing.

A lot of people think they have PTSD ... they don’t. It really weakens the case of people who really do have PTSD.

I am recovering from PTSD (simple single cause, not complex) my understanding of it is that it is caused by high levels of cortisol from a fight or flight situation which interferes with how the brain processes memory. All the literature I've read has stated that it is caused by a situation where you think that either you or a loved one is going to die or be seriously injured. It can emerge months or even years after the traumatic incident (in fact anything less than a month after the event is not considered to be PTSD ) and symptoms are triggered by events that have some similarities to the origional trauma (there are enough similarities that your brain thinks that maybe it can process the origional memory at that point and recalls the trauma in a flashback which can be visual, emotional, auditory or multi sensory) these links can be quite tenuous and for me weren't easy to identify initially. I can certainly see how being groped could trigger PTSD in someone with a past trauma (which they may not even remember) even if it was not the actual cause of the PTSD. I've never been in a situation where I've had my crotch grabbed, to comment on how traumatic or otherwise it may be and as others have said trauma is subjective to the individual.

Complex PTSD has a different mechanism and I believe is caused by a series of traumatic events (including neglect) over a period of time, but I don't know as much about that.

As others have said, different people, different responses, different circumstances. I also think there's a range of things that could be described as a crotch grab. All are wrong, obviously - but some could be surrounded by much more threatening and upsetting circumstances than others.

Even the same person who would brush off some dick in a club could easily be extremely badly affected by a person in a position of power over them behaving in a way that was the prelude to an attempted rape, for example. And vice versa, depending on the individual.

So if someone tells me they've got PTSD after being sexually assaulted when someone grabbed their crotch, it's easiest and kindest to just believe them.

There was a This American Life (I think) where a man had been robbed at knifepoint in his apartment and was mentally fine but developed PTSD after knocking his heavy air conditioning unit out of the window. No one was injured.

He explained that it was the lack of control in the second situation that caused it, whereas with the robbery he was actively trying to calm the situation.