You Are Not Alone in This

Trust in expertise is eroding everywhere. For the people doing this work, the strongest answer has always been each other.

The work is hard enough on its own terms. Then add the environment you are doing it in.

Trust in professional expertise is eroding. The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer found institutional trust falling into what researchers call the "distrust zone" across multiple sectors. Science is politicized. Evidence is contested. Practitioners in fields that touch public controversy find their clinical judgments dismissed before they are heard.

ATSA members know this firsthand. You work with people the public fears. You apply a research base the public largely does not know exists. And you do it inside systems that were often built on assumptions the evidence has since overturned. That is an exhausting professional position, and it is one most colleagues outside this field will never fully understand.

Which is exactly why the colleagues inside it matter so much.

ATSA's board recently discussed Restoring Trust in Expertise, a whitepaper on trust and professional membership published by Association Transformation. One argument in it landed with particular force. In a time of epistemic pollution, the widespread contamination of public discourse with misinformation and low-quality knowledge, professional communities are not just a benefit. They are a bulwark.

In a time of epistemic pollution, a professional community is not just a benefit. It is a bulwark.

That is what this association is in the most practical sense: a community of people who have read the same research, wrestled with the same clinical dilemmas, and chosen to keep doing this work because it matters.

What that looks like in practice

It looks like a colleague who can help you think through a difficult risk assessment, because they have done hundreds of them. It looks like a conference session where someone names a problem you thought was yours alone. It looks like knowing that when you cite an ATSA practice guideline in a treatment report, or reference a position statement in a court proceeding, you are drawing on work your peers built and vetted together.

The field's evidence base did not arrive fully formed. It was produced by ATSA members, debated at ATSA conferences, published in Sexual Abuse, and refined over decades of collective practice. The whitepaper makes a point our field should take personally: peer-reviewed publication is one of the most powerful trust-building tools a profession has. A journal is not just a repository of knowledge. It is an instrument of accountability. When the science gets attacked, that community and that record are what make it possible to defend.

The ask is simple

Stay connected. Engage with the research when it comes through. Show up at the conference. Answer when a colleague asks a question in a workgroup. Mentor someone earlier in their career who is learning, right now, what it costs to do this work with integrity.

The erosion of trust in expertise is real, and it is not going away quickly. What holds against it is not any single practitioner's credentials or confidence. It is a community that keeps producing rigorous work, supporting one another, and refusing to lower the standard.

That is what ATSA membership is for.

References

Edelman. (2024). 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer. Edelman. https://www.edelman.com/trust/trust-barometer

Pratt, E., & Chamberlain, A. (2025, July). Restoring trust in expertise: The seminal role of membership organizations in an age of skepticism [Whitepaper]. Association Transformation.