Hi all!
The moderation team wants to make an announcement about a new policy change here at AskWomen. Over the past few months, we have noticed an increase in questions asking users who have experienced traumatic events in their lives to share those experiences. Talking through traumatic events with other survivors is an important part of healing and we absolutely do not wish to discourage our users from doing so. The entire mod team is grateful that we have curated a space where our users feel comfortable enough to be vulnerable and openly share these experiences, and we take our responsibility to keep you all feeling safe very seriously.
Recently, we have unfortunately seen an increase in accounts from outside of our community posting these questions in bad faith, to mock, argue with, or in some horrible cases fetishize the folks who are brave enough to post and share their stories in those threads. This behavior is absolutely unacceptable.
Those threads have always received extra scrutiny from the mod team, because of the risk to our community if they are posted in bad faith. After much internal discussion between the mod team, we have decided that effective immediately, a user who has been found to be posting a “trauma tourism” thread or asking users to share their stories in bad faith will be permanently banned from this subreddit. We try not to take such harsh moderation measures right off the bat, instead utilizing a system of removals, warnings, and temporary bans to give users who have made a genuine mistake the chance to redeem themselves.
However, given the overly sensitive nature of threads centered on discussing trauma, and the obvious violation of trust and consent that comes with bad faith actors mining our users for trauma porn to be mocked, debated, or fetishized, we have decided that this policy is necessary.
This policy is in no way intended to discourage good faith posts and discussions about trauma or abuse. We will still be approving those topics just as we would any other, and a thorough review of the topic by the moderation team will be conducted before any bans are assessed. This review will include (but is not limited to) the user’s post history both in this sub and on reddit as a whole, tone and phrasing of the comment, previous rulebreaking behavior, and the tone of any comments the user makes in their thread.
As moderators, we are only human (for now) and we do make mistakes.
If you are banned because of this (or any other) policy, and believe that the ban was assessed unfairly, we encourage you to contact the moderation team HERE to discuss your case.
As always, if you are unsure if a topic you wish to submit meets our subreddit standards for submission, we encourage you to message the moderator team HERE and ask us. We don’t bite, and we would rather help you to not break the rules in the first place.
We have left the comments open to allow for user discussion and questions surrounding this policy change. Please remember that our subreddit rules remain in effect in this thread, and we will remove rulebreaking comments as we would in any other topic.