Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

Two seemingly unrelated stories made headlines today.  The first was that the Georgia Supreme Court struck down laws limiting jury awards for pain and suffering in malpractice lawsuits.  The second was that New York City settled a lawsuit involving roughly 100,000 strip searches of people who were charged with nonviolent misdemeanors.  The total settlement is $33 million.

The reasons for these headlines are different.  They happened in different states with different plaintiffs and different legal arguments.  Both, however, bring home a key point that sometimes gets missed amidst political rhetoric, and that is simply this:  pain and suffering is a real thing.

When we think about pain and suffering awards in lawsuits, we often think about what seem like frivolous or outlandish cases.  The term "pain and suffering" conjures up visions of people faking whiplash from car accidents or suing over burns from drive-through coffee.  It's easy to lose sight of what this type of award is supposed to be for, that is, to compensate people with money for the non-monetary damage that someone's wrong actions have done to them.

The New York case, although it does not specifically reference "pain and suffering" as far as I can see, illustrates these damages in a way most of us can probably understand.  The settlement is punitive -- that is, the city is paying as a punishment for doing strip searches when they shouldn't have (and in most of the cases in violation of a 2002 agreement not to).  Those who were searched will receive between $1800 and $2900 each, with two exceptions. 

Two women will receive $20,000 as part of the settlement.  These women, who were also arrested for nonviolent misdemeanors, were forced to undergo gynecological exams as part of their strip search.  The difference in the amounts given to most of the plaintiffs vs. these two women are not small, and they are not accidental.

Everyone who undergoes a mass strip search is humiliated.  Most of us are nervous getting naked in front of our physicians, let alone strangers.  The added indignity of having to lift or separate various body parts only makes it worse.  For some people, the humiliation is milder than for others.  Some may feel traumatized by the experience.

Undergoing a forced gynecological exam adds a whole other layer of trauma to the experience, however.  This goes beyond "they shouldn't have done that" and beyond humiliation, and into the territory of assault.  Many women find going to the gynecologist distasteful under the best of circumstances.  We swallow our pride and our nervousness and go because we know it's what's best for our health.  Being forced to do it as part of a search, however, is a particular kind of awful that I think men might guess at but only women truly know.  It's hard enough to give up enough control of your body to have an exam at the doctor's office.  Having someone take that control is traumatizing.

Which brings us back around to my earlier point:  pain and suffering is a real thing.  The city is not just being punished for what they did to these two women, they are being made to compensate them for the real, non-monetary effects of the trauma.  I don't know what post-traumatic stress symptoms these women had, but I can't imagine they didn't have any.  While you may not be able to put a price tag on that in terms of lost wages or doctor's bills, it was real.  That's why the law allows for awards for pain and suffering in the first place.  It's not possible to make people whole after something like this.  We can't untraumatize them.  But we, as a society, have decided that they deserve to get something nice to compensate for the awful.  Twenty thousand dollars, under the circumstances, seems reasonable to me.

You've all heard the story.  On October 30, 1938, CBS Radio aired an adaptation of H.G.Wells' classic "The War of the Worlds," narrated and directed by Orson Welles.  It caused widespread panic, because listeners thought it was real.  The first chunk of the show was in the format of news bulletins and there were no commercials, and people freaked out.

I bring this up because Imedi TV in the country of Georgia broadcast a "simulation" of a Russian invasion of Georgia last night.  They used actual clips of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev and footage shot during the Russian-Georgian conflict in 2008.  They, too, used simulated "news bulletins" to further the story.  They didn't announce it was fictional beforehand, and nothing at all on the screen let viewers know it wasn't real.  They noted it was simulated at the end of the broadcast.  People freaked out.

It's probably fairly tempting to think that there is no harm done here.  I mean, yes, they scared people, but now that people know it wasn't real everything's fine, right?  Wrong.  Fake trauma can be truly traumatic.  People can and are traumatized by the belief that they are in serious danger.  If you think you're about to die and then don't, you are (at least most people would agree) better off than if you think you are going to die and then do.  But you aren't necessarily OK. 

People who have experienced situations where they truly believed they were in danger exhibit all the same symptoms as people who actually have been in danger.  They have trouble sleeping, intrusive thoughts about the incident, difficulty concentrating, changes in appetite, irritability, and on and on.  They have increased fear of whatever the situation was that scared them (e.g. getting in the car if they thought they had a close call in the car).  What's more, because whatever scared them turned out to be fake, they are less likely to use the resources that help people in such situations, like talking to a friend or even writing their feelings in a journal.

So, given the history of "War of the Worlds," which I can't imagine they didn't know about, and the possible ill effects of scaring the pants off of people, why would Imedi TV do this?  Of course I don't know for sure.  The station is referred to as being "pro-government," which I guess is as opposed to "pro-Russian."  One can imagine the government doing this intentionally to stir up fear of a Russian invasion, and cause people to look to the government to protect them.  One can also imagine someone just being really stupid in making a programming decision.  Whatever it was, this shouldn't have happened.  It wasn't harmless.