[imc-korea] article to publish

[Sudhama Ranganathan]

i have an article of international interest to publish









                                          The Power of an Induced Sense of
Betrayal











    When I was a student at the University of Connecticut, matriculated in
the landscape architecture program, I experienced three years of group
harassment.  I graduated and have thought long and hard about what happened,
how it happened and what to do in order to prevent it happening in the
future to other people.  Fortunately for me, I documented some of it through
video and audio evidence.  This, backed up with still images and
documentation, helped me to remember, recount and to make sense of it in
some ways.

    The harassment was due to my involvement in a violent student protest in
1990 combined with my race.  The protest was from 1990 as I mentioned, but
the harassment happened when I went to school at UConn’s Storrs campus
mostly between 2003 and 2006.  Those doing the harassment were using
emotions from post 9/11 trauma and trying to link Al Qaeda type terrorism to
what I did back then.

    But what I did was about the system of Apartheid in South Africa at the
time and perceived racial injustices.  It was specifically planned to be an
act of vandalism so no person got hurt.

It wasn’t about Islam or any other religion.  I wasn’t a Muslim then nor am
I now, not that that matters, because not all Muslims, just like not all
Christians, believe the same things.  The people who did that were religious
extremists, just like the people who did the Oklahoma City Bombing were
political extremists.  The people who harassed me weren’t given all the
facts about what happened when I did what I did, so none of what really
happened mattered to them.  They had decided, and they were out for blood.

    The harassment started in my sophomore year mostly from one professor
who spread this post-9/11 hysteria across the class I was to be graduating
with.  We were a group and his goal was to extricate me from the group.  It
was a small graduating class of 22 people and so it made containing an open
secret easy.

He first recruited those who found pleasure in such behavior, next were
those who would do it in exchange for better grades or time off with no
penalty etc. and for those who still were apprehensive, there came
retribution in the way of harassment, a lowering of grades etc.  Soon enough
all were ready to participate or at least stand aside when the various plans
to get me out were launched.

    Various techniques were implemented and they were usually woven into the
fabric of each new assignment.  One popular technique was for the professor
to break up the instructions for each new assignment and give some of the
responsibilities for handing out certain crucial pieces of the instructions
to certain students.  These students were always “on board” with things.

    They would either make sure to be gone before I could get the
instructions, or tell me to wait until they got back from lunch, dinner or
another class.  They would end up not returning to the landscape
architecture studios or something.  They would not return my emails or phone
calls, etc.  At first some other students who felt bad would give me the
pieces they received, then pressure was turned up on them and that ceased
also.

    This way, no matter how well I did I could never do well enough to
receive good marks in the group.  An incomplete assignment could never be
graded well, and no teacher could be punished for not giving a partially
turned in assignment a good grade.  This was one method for trying to get me
out from the group.

    The goal was to get me, the person targeted for harassment, to do
something which would facilitate my leaving.  They hoped I would leave the
group from all the stress and games.  If not, then they hoped the stress
would cause my grades to drop and I would just kind of flunk out, in what
seemed like a natural scenario, from the group.  If those things failed,
they hoped I would be removed from the group by doing something, due to the
stress, that would lead to my getting kicked out of either the program, or
the school entirely, and the people who wanted me out of the group would be
able to extract me from the entire group that way.  I graduated anyways, and
learned some things during the three years of psychological mind games
played on me.

    Of the things learned one was that a large number of the techniques
employed in the strategies used in the various ploys entailed inducing a
false sense of betrayal, or at least trying to.  The hope seemed to be that
by causing the person they wanted gone from the group (the person targeted
for harassment) to feel as though they had been crossed, they would feel
spurned or dejected and want to leave the group.  Often times after this
happened; the idea would be to not lend the person who was targeted for
removal from the group a shoulder to lean on, as it were.  At least, no one
from the group was supposed to.  This, it was hoped, brought about a feeling
of loneliness from being further betrayed isolated and not supported within
the group.

    This way, all the negative emotions combined would, hopefully, be strong
enough incentive to get the person to go away from the group.  Sure they
could have tried many things and they did, but they had to always be careful
and seemed to always be mindful of carefully setting things up so as not to
get caught in their attempts to break the law to get what they wanted.

The perpetrators had a false sense of being righteous, and in their minds
this righteousness transcended the laws.  It was as though their breaking
the laws repeatedly for three years straight was in no way similar to my
doing it once, thirteen years prior, when I was a minor.  The funny thing is
that’s exactly the way terrorists seem to be.  They feel righteous, and that
that righteousness gives them free license to break whatever laws they want
because they know better – they are above the laws and beyond reproach.

In the strategy wherein pieces of information were handed out to students,
the technique of inducing a sense of betrayal could be used here also.  This
was aside from the over arching betrayal hoped to be felt by the targeted
person that the entire group just went along and did nothing.  That is to
say, the larger sense of betrayal, hopefully stemming from a sense that all
others in the group all participated and, thus, turned on them in the end.
It was hoped they would feel they had been betrayed by all in the group and
had no one left in the group to feel close to or count on.  Thus, they would
want to leave.

It was also employed in a more focused sense.  For example, here someone who
had been behaving as though they were a friend and someone the targeted
person could rely on would say, “don’t worry about asking anyone else, just
ask me and when I find out I’ll tell you” regarding the information on the
assignment handed out to different people in the class.   That person would
have previously told the target of the harassment they saw what was
happening, and that they thought it was wrong.  This way, they would build
trust.  When the target checked in with them, that person would then do
something like say to the target they never got the information.

When the assignments were graded, and handed back the person would walk up
with his grade in hand and ask the targeted person what they got, and when
they told them, they would show the target their assignment with a full
grade, and the part they said the night before they didn’t have would be
right there in front of the target in plain sight.  At that point there
would be some sort of display on the part of the person the target thought
they could trust, letting them know the person they trusted did it on
purpose and thereby rubbing it in the target’s face, for example.

This would be followed by some sort of ‘not too obvious’ display on the part
of the professor and certain members of the class letting the target know it
was all purposeful.  If the target questioned this all they had to say is
‘of course not.’  There was always plausible deniability built into the
games.

As mentioned earlier this game involved trying to induce a strong sense of
betrayal on the part of the person targeted for harassment as a means to
achieving the desired end result.  The hope was this very strong, intense
negative emotion, would eventually lead the person they had targeted for
harassment to associate the strong negative emotions with the environment of
the landscape architecture program, and thus compel them to leave the group,
stop working and flunk or react negatively and be kicked out from the group.


Though I felt those things sometimes, it was never enough to get me away
from the goal.  Those who wanted to force me from the group were
unsuccessful.  They were successful as criminals, because they didn’t get
molested by the law for their crimes, but they were unsuccessful in the end
because they were unsuccessful at getting me to leave.  They were like
terrorists who set the bomb, leave and never get caught, but he bomb ends up
smoking and failing in some dud-like fashion.

If they had been successful, I wouldn’t be here writing this tonight.  I do
so for anyone else out there who has been through group harassment or is
going through it.  It is difficult, but survival is possible.  Just focus on
your goal, and, like a Marine in boot camp, don’t allow yourself to quit or
mess up too bad.  Just keep going.  Let the heat temper your steel and make
you stronger.

The professor often told the group this happened in the professional world
and the workplace.  He would hint it was normal and could even help them to
do it in the future.  It is highly unlikely such phenomena are limited to
groups of people in classrooms and school settings alone.

I left out how I survived and usually do when writing articles like this
because every situation is unique, and thus, it may hurt you more than it
helps.  Use these observations if you feel you can and find your path to
survive and to succeed.  And, succeed is precisely what you do once the
people targeting you for harassment have failed.  Good luck and persevere.


To read about my inspiration for this article go to
www.lawsuitagainstuconn.com.
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