There isn't time in the everyday world to contemplate our navels and think on every response we make seriously. But it's violent, and it hurts the other, because the other does have a real validity claim to make. This is an instance of the student not knowing how to make the validity claim. Or I can recognize the violence of laughing at and excluding one who asks for help, however ineptly. If I seek peace and non-violence, I must accept the validity of the request for help, and try to use my expertise to help understand the claim that lies behind the message I have trivialized by my violent response.
Theory helps with that.
Perhaps we need for Catharine MacKinnon to remind us again that we need to grant validity to pleas for understanding of what we're feeling. In its own way it is courageous. Lost, the student took the chance of asking for a help in an infrastructure that does not readily offer help. And the student tried to use my medium of preference, e-mail, to ask for that help. I do harm if I refuse to hear that plea in good faith.