Sticks and stones

Let’s get this out of the way at the start: I do not believe that free speech is a fundamental right. Yes, I know, typical lefty cancel culture fascist trying to police other peoples’ thoughts. 1984 and all that. But let me explain. I don’t and neither do you, probably. Unless you think defamation laws should be repealed, bomb threats should be legal, yelling fire in a crowded Theater should be legal, death threats should be legal, verbal harassment should be legal no matter how severe. I don’t think most people, even those worried about the wokes shutting down free speech, would support these. So I think we pretty much all agree that speech has limits in our society, the question is where we draw the line.

There’s been a lot of debate raging online recently about proposed changes to our hate speech laws. I’m not going to get into the details of this, people who actually know what they’re talking about have done good columns on the substance of these proposals and what it would mean. What I want to talk about is that a lot of the opposition to hate speech being criminalised seems to stem from a perception that speech is less harmful than other actions. The old adage ‘sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me’. Often I think the opposite is true.

I think some of this perception stems from the fact that it is easier to quantify physical compared to mental harm. If someone is punched in the face, you can see the damage, and it’s reasonably easy to diagnose the physical harm. If someone is the target of hate speech and it makes them depressed, anxious, sad, traumatised, it’s much less obvious to others what the mental harm that has been done to them is but it is very real. People don’t wear it on their face, as much as they would being punched in the face, so to speak. Mental harm can often be more damaging and lingering that physical harm, it’s just often not seen that way.

Another driver of this is of course the stigma around mental health issues that makes people not want to talk about them openly, a cocktail of toxic masculinity that makes people not want to seem ‘weak’, the good old stoic Kiwi ‘she’ll be right’ mentality, and the perception that they are less ‘real’ than other health issues because they are harder to see.

National, ACT and the like have been pushing that hate speech laws should draw the line at ‘incitement to violence’. Not only does this ignore that environments where hate speech is tolerated leads to violence against minorities, but it is a complete minimisation of any consequences of hate speech that aren’t physical violence. Of the mental toll of having hate directed at you and whipped up against you just for being who you are and living your life. I don’t want to live in a society where this is tolerated. It has been especially appalling to see disgusting rhetoric against trans people dismissed as just ‘mean tweets’ or the like recently.

I don’t and can’t know what it’s like to have to deal with what POC and LGBT people have to every day. But I have dealt with, at times severe, anxiety and depression my whole life. I know how real and serious mental harm is, and why it shouldn’t be handwaved away as a consequence of speech. It seems some are more concerned with the ability of people to spew hatred than they are with the targets of it.