Outside of ActiveRain, It's No Holds Barred.

Inside ActiveRain, there are "guidelines" that keep things civil. This is true the vast, vast majority of the time. Everyone has a common objective and the community supports it's members. Personal attacks are heavily frowned upon. But they have been known to happen.

What Do You Do When Someone Goes On The Attack?

Last week we legally finalized the adoption of our two little girls. It was a joyous day for our family and my wife.  Later that day, after watching a show on Orphans in Africa, Rocky quickly put out a post entitled, Two Less Orphans In The World. I'm not sure she's ever used the word orphan to refer to our girls before, but she did it this time because of the context... legally, in California, our girls were termed orphans. And she did it because of the news story she had just watched before writing the post.

She was happy. She wanted to share her joy. She expressed her hopes for their future, as any parent might. It seemed like an innocent, feel good post to me. 

Until the first comment came.

"You represent everything I abhor in adoption."

Then the second...

"Adoption is meant to be all about the child - not all about what you want."

Then the third...

"Why not put $30,000 into improving their community and country instead of using it to pay they adoption agency? These children already have a family."

How would you react? What would you say?

Rocky came to me, hurt and angry. She was completely thrown off guard by the comments. Her instinct, was to attack back. She came to me because she knew that wouldn't be my approach.

She had several options:

• attack back
• delete the comments
• ignore the comments
• try to understand their point of view

Call me crazy. But I like the last option and that's why I'm writing this post.

It turned out her post had been commented on inside an adoptee forum that didn't like her use of the word "orphan." They only recognize the primary American Heritage definition of the term - someone who has lost both parents to death. We didn't know this at the time. And I can't do this justice here without you reading the comment strings, which include comments from Julie Ferenzi. But my advice to Rocky was this... "accept up front that they may have a perspective we can learn from and use this opportunity to find out what it is. Try to engage them in a discussion that will benefit everyone." She agreed.

If You Can Turn It Around, Everyone Wins. 

My goal with the advice was to respond in a way that was consistent with our values, that modeled how we would want to be treated and to try to draw in more readers for her blog in the process. 

If you read the entire string of comments you'll see that the "try to engage" strategy did not work on that single post. And after the commenter said to me, "you’re not a physically attractive person, I can tell by the way you write," Rocky decided to take the discussion off Mothers Fighting For Others and over to Muthahood.com. I even tried some humor.

What we found out by continuing to engage, without insulting back, is that others were watching, and writing on their own blogs, even if they weren't commenting. And the subsequent post by both Rocky and I drew a few comments from those who did not initially join the battle. Their comments led us to  great stuff. Posts like, Just Exactly WHY Nice People Swallow and The Perfect Storm. These were women who understood what the original commenter was feeling in her words and they articulated them in a way that made sense. 

The Aftermath Turned Into Something Very Good

Firs it turned into a better understanding of both sides of the adoption discussion. Rocky continued to try to engage by writing a follow up post, It's About Poverty. What was the result of a desire to understand where these comments were coming from? Of a desire to understand the other side? It was posts like this by other very insightful writers, Why Do You Think This is, Adoption And Poverty, and Open Mike: Orphanage or Adoption? 

And it also multiplied traffic to Mothers Fighting For Others. Visits were five time higher than normal during the discussions and the residual effect is that Mothers who may never have found the site, found it.  

Dark Clouds Can Have A Very Bright Silver Lining

If you blog for very long, you're going to get your share of ugly or harsh personal comments. If you're writing from your heart, it's inevitable. To get the greatest benefit from those comments, you have to have a sincere desire to see the other side, to try to understand the motivation for the comments, and a willingness to go the distance.

People are watching you, even if they're not commenting. They want to see how you handle yourself in these situations. Only one genre of responses creates the kind of positive impact you hope for in these situations. This time it worked out better than I could have ever hoped for.

But just as important as any of this... Rocky and I both know now how much pain a seemingly innocent word like "orphan" can cause and we've discovered a whole new world of information and resources.  Would it have happened without "You represent everything I abhor in adoption." I doubt it.

What would you have done?