When Advocacy Teaches Fear

At NableU, our purpose includes protecting dignity, agency, autonomy, cognitive equity and cognitive sovereignty — not merely protecting people from unpleasant experiences.

The controversy surrounding Ben Harvey’s Perth Royal Show column, published on 4 October 2026, is interesting to us for a reason that has received very little attention.

The argument has largely been framed as one about offence: whether the writer's comments were cruel, whether people with disability were demeaned, whether an apology was required, and whether the offending material should have been changed.

We think the more important question sits underneath all of that.

What happens when advocacy repeatedly teaches the people it represents that the world around them is dangerous?

There is a style of modern activism — disability activism certainly does not have a monopoly on it — that increasingly converts disagreement into injury, offence into harm, discomfort into unsafety and objectionable speech into something from which vulnerable people must be protected.

Usually this begins from decent motives.

Sometimes people really are unsafe. Discrimination is real. Disability access failures are real. Abuse, exploitation, neglect and institutional exclusion are real. NableU exists in part because those problems remain pervasive.

But useful advocacy depends upon distinctions.

Someone making an offensive joke is not the same event as somebody being refused access to a building.

A columnist saying something insulting about the NDIS is not the same event as an agency unlawfully denying a person's support.

Being criticised is not the same event as being abused.

Feeling uncomfortable is not the same event as being unsafe.

When those categories are repeatedly collapsed into the same vocabulary of harm, violence, safety and trauma, something important happens: our alarm system loses resolution.

Psychologist Nick Haslam has described a related phenomenon as "concept creep": concepts such as abuse, bullying, trauma and prejudice have expanded both sideways into new categories and downwards to capture less extreme experiences. Haslam does not argue that every expansion is illegitimate; increased sensitivity to previously ignored harms can be valuable. But the expansion also risks pathologising ordinary experience and blurring meaningful differences in severity. Source 1: Concept creep.

For disability advocacy, that distinction is especially important.

If every insulting comment is treated rhetorically like discrimination, and every uncomfortable encounter like abuse, what vocabulary remains when somebody actually encounters discrimination or abuse?

That is the cry-wolf problem.

Not because the underlying concerns are imaginary, but because an alarm that sounds continuously stops communicating the magnitude of the danger.

Fear can be taught

There is another consequence which we think deserves much greater attention.

Repeatedly telling people that particular environments, conversations or ideas are threatening is not psychologically neutral.

Research into content and trigger warnings offers one illustration. A meta-analysis published online in 2023 found a small increase in anticipatory distress, without a meaningful reduction in emotional responses to the material itself. Most included studies examined short-term reactions. Experimental research on Instagram-style sensitive-content screens similarly found increased state anxiety and negative affect associated with the screens themselves. Source 2: Content-warning meta-analysis; Source 3: Sensitive-content screens.

This does not mean a disability advocate saying "this rhetoric is harmful" is clinically equivalent to a trigger warning. We should not pretend the evidence establishes something it does not.

It demonstrates the underlying point: expectations affect experience.

The much broader placebo/nocebo literature establishes the same principle in clinical settings. Expectations generated by verbal information, learning and social interaction can influence subjective experience and symptoms. Source 4: The nocebo effect.

These studies concern particular warnings, clinical expectations and online communication. They do not directly test disability advocacy, establish lasting harm from this controversy, or show that advocacy causes prejudice. They do give us reason to examine how messages about threat affect the people hearing them. What follows is NableU’s interpretation of that concern.

So consider what happens when a community hears, day after day:

This is dangerous.

This threatens your safety.

These people hate you.

You should feel attacked.

People like you cannot reasonably be expected to tolerate this.

Even where the original intention is solidarity, the cumulative message is one of environmental threat.

People can begin scanning their surroundings for evidence that confirms it.

And social media can make the perceived environment look considerably more hostile than it actually is. A 2023 Nature Human Behaviour study found that observers systematically overestimated the moral outrage felt by the authors of online posts. That error then inflated perceptions of collective hostility, hostile communication norms and ideological extremity. The effect was stronger among people who relied more heavily on social media for political information. Source 5: Overperception of moral outrage.

That gives us a much more useful account of why public discourse can feel increasingly neurotic without needing to diagnose millions of individuals as neurotic.

The information environment itself becomes hypervigilant.

Everyone sees everyone else apparently furious.

Everyone sees threats.

Everyone sees hostile groups mobilising.

Everyone concludes that they too need to escalate.

And eventually escalation becomes the normal language of participation.

Protection can quietly become paternalism

There is a particularly ugly irony when this happens in disability advocacy.

Historically, people with disability have spent generations fighting the assumption that we are fragile, incapable, dependent and unable to make decisions about our own lives.

Yet advocacy can reproduce exactly that model while using the vocabulary of compassion.

Scholars examining disability, vulnerability and agency have warned that defining disabled people primarily as "vulnerable" can justify paternalistic intervention and assumptions of reduced agency. Protection can become something done to people rather than power exercised by them. Source 6: Disability and vulnerability.

Consider the difference between these two messages:

"Someone has said something offensive about disabled people. Here is what they said. Decide what you think."

and:

"This rhetoric is harmful to our community and should not have been permitted."

The first gives information and preserves cognitive sovereignty.

The second supplies both the experience and the conclusion.

We should be extremely cautious about organisations deciding on behalf of people with disability which ideas they are psychologically equipped to encounter.

NableU's model of dignity requires more of us than benevolent protection.

It requires trust.

Then comes the backlash

Our concern is that this style of activism can weaken trust and create openings for people who exploit resentment. That is a possible pathway, not a demonstrated outcome of this controversy.

Research on psychological reactance offers one reason to examine how coercive messages are received.

Psychological reactance occurs when people perceive that someone is attempting to constrain their freedom of judgement or action. A review of persuasive health communication describes how controlling and dogmatic language can increase perceived threats to freedom, anger and counter-arguing. In some circumstances it can produce the opposite response from the one the communicator wanted. Applying that research to disability advocacy is an inference; it does not establish that activism causes bigotry. Source 7: Psychological reactance.

That does not excuse prejudice.

If someone becomes racist, ableist or misogynistic because another person annoyed them, responsibility for their conduct remains theirs.

But explaining a backlash is not excusing it.

If an advocacy strategy repeatedly attempts to shame people into agreement, dictates permissible language, demands apologies, treats questions as hostility and seeks institutional punishment for dissent, we should not be surprised when some people begin defining themselves in opposition to the advocates themselves.

Some people may disengage.

Some may become resentful.

Others may seek communities built around resisting the perceived coercion, including communities where resentment is exploited and hatred is encouraged. These are risks to examine, not inevitable steps or a claim that advocacy excuses hatred.

If the hateful fringe is then photographed, reposted and treated as representative of society, the perceived threat can grow further.

One possible feedback loop is:

Threat rhetoric can provoke reactance.

Reactance can feed resentment and hostility.

Visible hostility can appear to validate the threat rhetoric.

The perceived threat can then justify stronger rhetoric.

Nobody has to consciously design this system for it to emerge.

Outrage also has an incentive structure

Our concern is that online debate can reward outrage more visibly than moderation.

"My opponent made a crude remark that I strongly disagree with" does not mobilise a community nearly as effectively as:

"Our community is under attack."

The second statement creates urgency, solidarity and a clear moral division between protector and aggressor.

It can therefore become advantageous to interpret ambiguous events through the most morally severe available frame.

And because observers tend to overestimate online outrage and consequently overestimate group hostility, an ecosystem full of those signals can create a distorted picture of how hostile society actually is. Source 5: Overperception of moral outrage.

People then behave in response to the distorted picture.

This is one plausible route by which communities become increasingly frightened of one another while every side sincerely believes the other side started it.

We need advocacy strong enough not to catastrophise

NableU is not arguing for passive disability advocacy.

Quite the opposite.

If somebody denies a disabled person access because of their disability, challenge them.

If an institution refuses a reasonable adjustment, escalate it.

If abuse occurs, call it abuse.

If discrimination occurs, call it discrimination.

Use regulators. Use tribunals. Use courts. Change legislation. Publish evidence. Organise communities.

But precision is part of strength.

When something is rude, call it rude.

When it is ignorant, call it ignorant.

When it is offensive, call it offensive.

When somebody merely disagrees with us, call it disagreement.

Preserving those distinctions makes the serious words stronger when we actually need them.

And when somebody publishes a column we dislike, the answer should usually be more speech.

Challenge it.

Pull the argument apart.

Publish another perspective.

Laugh at it if it deserves ridicule.

Let disabled people disagree with one another.

Let some be offended and others not.

Let somebody read the same paragraph and decide that everyone else has misunderstood it.

There is dignity in being allowed to reach the "wrong" conclusion.

People with disability do not need fear manufactured for us

Perhaps the deepest problem with threat-amplifying activism is that it can accidentally teach helplessness while believing it is teaching solidarity.

We reject that bargain.

People with disability face enough genuine uncertainty, exclusion, bureaucracy and stress without advocacy organisations adding imagined dangers to the environment.

We do not need every insult converted into a threat.

We do not need every disagreement interpreted for us.

We do not need somebody continually explaining how frightened we ought to be.

We need access.

We need enforceable rights.

We need information.

We need tools.

We need communities willing to stand beside us when something actually goes wrong.

And above all, we need agency.

Good advocacy should make people harder to oppress, not easier to frighten.

Sources and further reading

This is NableU’s opinion. The research below informs the argument; its findings and the limits of applying them to advocacy are described in the article. Some publishers limit access to full text.

NableU Community Systems Incorporated advocates for dignity, agency, autonomy, cognitive equity and cognitive sovereignty. About NableU · Back to the article title