Tragedy of Nova festival survivor Shirel Golan shows the harm of online hate

On Sunday, her 22nd birthday, Shirel Golan made the decision to end her life after struggling for a year with post-traumatic stress disorder.After surviving the massacre at the Nova Music Festival on Oct.7, 2023, she suffered from disassociation and withdrawal, her family said, and was twice hospitalized with acute symptoms of PTSD-related stress.The brutal atrocities committed that day — and specifically at the Nova festival — were beyond imagination.

I do not know how anyone experiences these horrors and moves on.And the festival’s survivors, in addition to the agony of witnessing their friends hunted down, tortured, raped and murdered by terrorists, face an online world that refuses to believe them.Female hostages who have shared how they were sexually assaulted when in Hamas captivity have faced vicious denial and mockery on the Internet.“She is lying through her teeth and reading through a script,” read one of the more charitable replies to Amit Soussana’s testimony of being groped and forced to perform a sexual act on her captor.Other survivors see this.It makes healing — let alone sharing what happened — feel impossible.In her December 2023 mission report on the situation in Israel, UN Special Representative Pramila Patten wrote that “the national and international media scrutiny of those who made their accounts public hindered access to survivors of the attacks, including potential survivors/victims of sexual violence.”Campaigns to deny systematic conflict-related sexual violence are as old as the use of rape as a weapon of war.

And the modern ability to use social media to spread these messages to millions only compounds the spread of terror and suffering.Even more insidious is the use of campaigns to reshape the narrative — to not only disbelieve the survivors, but to blame them — to justify “rape as resistance,” and claim it was deserved.I have met with survivors who are dedicating their lives to sharing their story.They f...