Trauma Porn Is Not Activism
When things go viral, people rarely ask before hitting ‘share’: Am I contributing to collective liberation, or collective trauma?
Not too long ago, a video went viral — you might have seen it. A Black woman giving birth, clearly in excruciating pain. A white nurse sits beside her, unmoved, staring into a computer screen. People shared it instantly. Shocked emojis, outrage captions, and naturally, the wellness crowd sprinted to repost it: yoga influencers, New Age healers, folks who claim to live in “consciousness” yet somehow forget to use any of it.
I watched this unfold and felt that familiar wave of disbelief. Not because the violence is new, it’s centuries old, but because of how effortlessly we consume and redistribute it. We’ve become spectators at a global coliseum, except the lions are algorithms and the sacrifice is always someone marginalized. Call it what it is: trauma porn.
Trauma porn is not simply disturbing imagery. It’s the packaging of someone’s suffering as sharable content — stripped of dignity, context, and consent. It’s the belief that exposure equals education, even when the exposure itself retraumatizes the very people you claim to care about. It’s basically voyeurism labeled as activism.
I don’t know how you see it, but I would not want the entire internet watching me give birth under inhumane neglect. Giving birth — the most vulnerable experience someone can have — is intimate, raw, and demanding of care and dignity. It’s a moment of trust, of exposure, of life and death. And yet here it is, reduced to content, consumed by strangers for shock or outrage.
There are ways to hold up a mirror to society without turning living people into collateral damage. Especially Black women, whose bodies have been used for centuries in gynecological experimentation — the foundations of modern medicine carved out of their pain, without anesthesia or consent. Needless to say, Black women’s suffering is still dismissed in healthcare systems worldwide, and many have a deeply justified distrust of medical institutions.
You see, there’s the pattern. Always the same formula: shock, share, repeat.
Think back to the “charity” campaigns from the ’80s and ’90s. The ones plastered across entire cities with images of African children, distended bellies, flies on their faces. (And you can still see them today.) Fucking successful conditioning! Neuromarketing at its finest. Repetition works. You know what happened? A slow, methodical training of the global imagination to equate Africa with suffering — probably for the next few hundred years.
And now the same mechanism is applied to Black death, Black pain, Black bodies brutalized by police and healthcare systems.
Pain, unfortunately, performs extraordinarily well.
We say we’re shocked, heartbroken, outraged — and we are — but we also adapt. Little by little. That’s how desensitization works: what once made us gasp becomes background noise. And nothing could be more counterproductive to decolonial work. Numbing is not liberation.
This is why the compulsive, thoughtless (and, personally, I find it reckless) resharing of trauma porn horrifies me. And I want to say this very clearly: Think critically about what you share, how you share it, and whom it harms. Don’t repost something because you feel you “should.” Don’t confuse urgency with clarity.
When you shared that video, did you think about the Black women who would see it? Did you imagine the generational trauma it might ignite, centuries of medical violence, experimentation, and dehumanization sitting just beneath the skin? When you say we need to raise awareness… well, maybe a few people will suddenly understand something they didn’t before. But what’s the cost? How many others are hurt, retraumatized, pushed back into survival mode because their pain has once again been turned into public spectacle?
If your activism requires traumatizing the very people you claim to support, it’s not activism. It’s trauma porn. And trauma porn has never liberated anyone.
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