Automolestation

Automolestation names harm inflicted through the passive viewing of sexualised material, without direct physical contact. In Marsh's framework the injury is real without a physical act, because her model already treats coercive experience, not only physical touch, as capable of damaging a person's will and membrane. Sublation is the bending of one will beneath another, and violation is the forced breach of a personal membrane to extract from it. Marsh's account holds that sexualised forms of both inflict trauma through the experience itself. Automolestation extends this to injury done through what a person is made to see: exposure to sexualised material can produce trauma comparable to that suffered by victims of sexualised sublation and sexualised violation, and she identifies the harm as particularly severe for children, whose membranes and wills are still forming. The term's work is to insist that being made to view sexualised material is itself a violation with real and lasting damage, not a lesser or victimless category.