Rape myths are still alive and well: But abuse is still abuse

By Kieran McCartan, PhD, & David Prescott, LICSW

A recent high-profile rape case in Ireland has reinforced the ubiquity of rape myths in the legal system. During the trial, the barrister for the defence encouraged the jury to consider the nature of the victim’s underwear, a thong, on the night in question. The clear indication was that the nature of the victim’s underwear showed that she was “consenting” and that she knew what was going to happen. This approach, in conjunction with the rest of the evidence and arguments, resulted in dismissal of the case with a verdict of no rape. The fact that it was a jury trial suggests that the case reflects beliefs held across society. The trial reinforces that rape myths are alive and well in 2018, not only in Ireland but internationally.

Rape myths are attitudes and beliefs that reinforce sexual assault as acceptable and shift the blame away from the person who perpetrates sexual violence onto the person who is victimized. (See Cambridge Rape Crisis centre for a breakdown for these rape myths.) Often by shifting responsibility into the complexity of sexual relations, these myths reinforce actions that perpetuate victim blaming. The collateral consequences of rape myths are significant and normalise social attitudes around sexual abuse and toxic masculinity. These same beliefs defy logic; looking attractive is not the same thing as wanting to be violated. It’s like saying that the ducks wanted the hunter to shoot them or they wouldn’t have been flying so close to a lake, or that someone deserves to have their data stolen because their network lacks adequate protection against hacking. There is no evidence suggesting that wearing particular clothes increases risk for assault; those who work in the field know that there is no definitive profile of either victim or abuser.

Research indicates that rape myths are still prevalent in society (Breines, 2012) as well as in the legal system (Smith & Skinner, 2017; Temkin, Grey & Barrett, 2016). This acquiescence to rape myths is worrisome given their persistence despite being challenged in recent years internationally, including through the #MeToo movement and the recent exhibition of rape victims clothing in Belgium. Each instance has shown that rape myths are ingrained in our social norms and beliefs. Changing social norms and beliefs are difficult in the best of times, but this change becomes harder when it focuses on topics like sexual violence and harassment—topics that we, as a society, are not always willing to discuss in education or in communities more broadly.

We need to reconsider how best to (re)educate communities and individuals about rape myths and how we can all push back against victim blaming. As we and many others have noted, here and elsewhere, our communities will benefit from improved bystander training and community engagement. This involves shifting our focus from a criminal-justice approach to a public health approach towards sexual abuse. This is particularly important given the recent rise in the reporting, recording and sentencing of sexual abuse cases in the UK over the last 5–10 years as a result of increased trust in the system and a belief that their case will be taken seriously. Unfortunately, the persistence of rape myths and victim blaming undermines the victim journey and damages trust in the system.

The response to the Irish trial has been varied, indicating that people are pushing back on rape myths, including MPs speaking out in the Irish parliament, protests in Belfast, as well as online condemnation via the hashtags #IBelieveHer and #ThisIsNotConsent. Our challenge is how we change the social complaisance toward rape myths so that juries have a realistic understanding of them and can make better informed decisions, and that the system —particularly judges—can challenge inappropriate outcomes.

A final point that too often goes undiscussed in media accounts is that those who perpetrate abuse and society at large aren’t the only ones internalizing these myths. All too often, in our experience, people who survive sexual assault come to believe that they didn’t deserve better. And, of course, everyone deserves to be free from abuse.

 

Better Together – Address Race & Privilege

By Cordelia Anderson, MA

The theme of ATSA’s 37^th Annual Conference, “Better Together” felt desperately needed against blatant hate speech, and acts of racial bias that has become more prevalent, and supported, in our neighborhoods, as well as in our social media, news media, civil discourse, and politics.  I had all this in mind as I listened to Elder Gerald Oleman, one of the 2018 ATSA Conference keynotes. He drew from his personal experience and Indigenous history to address why racism is so important to understand, especially in our work that is so linked to treating trauma. Elder Oleman pointed out that Europeans have a different culture and explained, “when it hit ours, it was a tsunami that flattened us, and we are still trying to stand back up.” He described colonization as “complete political and economic control over indigenous people and their land”. He gave several examples of how this shows up with so many “images of indigenous people as less than.”

In May of 2017, the ATSA Prevention Committee started to discuss various ways that addressing privilege and race fit with strategies to prevent sexual violence.  The discussions included the research showing that entitlement and dominance are core contributors both to sexually aggressive behavior (e.g., Knight & Guay, 2018; Malamuth, 2003) and to the maintenance of privilege and the continuance of racial prejudice.   Given the conversations in the public domain, ATSA has a unique voice to contribute to this conversation.  We also discussed that we may not be fully addressing this issue within our own work and that ATSA should be concerned with considering privilege and race not only as they impact the exacerbation of sexual harassment and sexually coercive behavior, but also as they affect ATSA’s therapeutic and prevention focus. (adapted wording from ATSA Executive Survey Summary, 2018).

At the October 2017 ATSA Conference, the Prevention Committee sponsored a well-received panel to discuss these issues.  During this past year, as a follow-up to this discussion, the Committee developed a survey to learn how ATSA members view these issues and their interest in ATSA taking further action. With 375 ATSA members responding, this is what we learned:

Ø  87% of survey respondents endorsed either “agree” or “strongly agree” to statements indicating that race and privilege had an impact on perpetration, survivors’ healing process, and prevention of sexual violence.

Ø  Surprisingly, respondents suggested that race and privilege had less of an impact on various areas of their own work (i.e., an average of 76%). This merits follow-up to determine if it reflects resistance to addressing this issue in their own work.

Ø  The majority of survey respondents affirmed the overall need for ATSA to address issues related to race and privilege (76%).

Based on the outcomes of the survey, the Prevention Committee made recommendations to the ATSA Board to explore ways that ATSA as an organization and in our membership can address issues of race and privilege in our work. Alison Hall, co-chair prevention committee and ATSA Board of Directors member, reported that ATSA’s Board of Directors has formally “recognized that race and privilege impact ATSA’s work, and the work of ATSA members. Furthermore, the board voted to ensure that ATSA commits to incorporate privilege and race issues into all its strategic goals.”  Each of ATSA’s committees will be looking at how race and privilege affect their work.  The Prevention Committee is further exploring member responses through a series of interviews that were conducted during the recent ATSA Conference.  We hope to be able to provide some of the resources that were requested during these interviews and through the surveys. 

The interest and ATSA’s Board of Director’s response are essential to shine a light on the intersection between entitlement, privilege and racism and the work needed to prevent sexual violence. Going back to Elder Oleman’s keynote, he explained that “People that lose their way start to harm people.”  He asked the audience “What can we do for the children to prevent this from happening?”  Part of what we can do is to continue to understand the privileges we each have and how they can be used in constructive rather than destructive ways. Prevention involves working to overcome the “othering” that allows people to be treated as objects or commodities that are less than. As we struggle to not be hooked by our fears, but instead to understand to build on our connections between prevention, research, policy, and treatment, between the voices of those harmed and those who created the harm and across races, cultures, genders, and sexual identities religions. We can bring depth and action to the conference theme; we are indeed “better together:”

Changes to the blogging team...

Dear Blog readers,

We have recently had some changes here at the Sexual Abuse Blog with Alissa Ackerman deciding to step back from active blogging. David and I would like to take this opportunity to thank Alissa for all her hard work on the blog over the last year. Alissa's blogs have always been insightful, critical and pertinent; she has brought a victim focus to the blog and insightful edge through her contributions. We wish her luck for the future and will always positively receive any future blogs that she would like to submit. So farewell, rather than goodbye!

 

Talk soon,
 
Kieran & David.

Even Folks in Our Field Get the Blues: When Implementation of Best Practices Goes Wrong, Part 2

By David S. Prescott, LICSW

This is part 2 of a 2 part blog, part 1 can be found here – Kieran

This post picks up where the last one left off. The context is that a participant in a training recently described frustration with implementing Motivational Interviewing in their practice.  This echoed a concern I’d seen expressed in social media. As the discussion progressed, another participant expressed similar experiences. Although small in number, their concerns were important: There can be side effects when adjusting to the use of positive, collaborative, strengths-based approaches such as Motivational Interviewing (MI) and the Good Lives Model (GLM). How can this be? What can we do?

Beyond the considerations mentioned earlier (context, status of working alliance, etc.), a factor that has often gone under-appreciated until recently is the effect of early trauma and other adverse experiences. From the outset, clearly trauma and adversity can be difficult concepts to work with. What is traumatic to one person may not be traumatic to the next, while many people (including professionals in our field) appear to develop extreme strength and resilience in the aftermath of abuse.

Further, what can appear as traumatic to the person who experiences it may not be in the eyes of others. This becomes especially difficult to understand when the experience(s) took place at an early age, when the client had not yet developed the necessary language skills to describe his or her experiences. As one person once stated it, “From the outside looking in, it’s hard to understand, and from the inside looking out it’s hard to describe.”

Finally, in some cases, the uncertainties involved in sexual development can combine with mental health conditions to create unusual situations. For example, one ATSA pre-conference workshop several years ago focused on a person on the Autism spectrum who had somehow been deeply affected by watching cartoons while masturbating, with the end result being a very rare form of sexual disorder in early adulthood. Although a statistical outlier, a deep understanding of how the events in his life had affected his development was critical to understanding him and providing treatment.

Any of these scenarios can combine to make clients appear challenging, unmotivated, or written off with such language as, “He just doesn’t get it.” Consider the following statement from a person in a community-based residential program. He has a history of trauma who was found not quite competent to stand trial. When asked to describe a seemingly innocuous event from the preceding week, he says: “I can’t… Ummm…. It doesn’t matter… Look, never mind.” Imagine that this has actually been similar to past responses to questions about his current status; discussing his past behaviors has been virtually impossible, and when it occurs ends in his experiencing shame and hopelessness.

In this client’s case it can be easy to assume that he is unwilling to participate meaningfully in treatment despite his statements that he wants to do what he needs to complete the program and return to the community. It’s easy to think that his statement translates directly into “I don’t want to talk with you, and I am not going to let you know that. Instead, I’m going to feign being upset.” While this translation may be partially true, it likely isn’t the entire story in this case. This pattern of responding might also translate as, “The only reason I’ve survived my life up to this point is because I am constantly evaluating my environment for evidence of threats. Now you are asking me to look inside my own experience, and I’ve never developed meaningful skills for that. Also, my words have been used against me much of my life, and I don’t understand how you can expect me to trust you so quickly. On top of that, I’ve never developed the kind of language skills to express to you how hard it is for me to view the world as anything but a dangerous place. You want me to talk. I can’t do that safely right now. The only option I can see is to shut down. If you keep pushing, I may need to become violent.

Ultimately, the move to trauma-informed care is not about helping people feel as though they are passive victims of a cruel world. It’s about understanding how events shape people at the individual level, one client at a time, and designing interventions that they can respond to, in adherence to the responsivity principle of effective corrections. 

ATSA Annual Conference 2018

By Kieran McCartan, PhD, David Prescott, LICSW, & Alissa Ackerman, PhD

The annual ATSA conference took place from the 17^th – 20^th October in Vancouver. The conference was a real mix of research, practice and engagement with international colleagues from 16 different countries including the USA, Canada, UK,  Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Germany, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Belgium and Israel to name a few. In this blog we are going to take you on a whistle stop tour of the event.

 

For Kieran, the highlight of the conference was Ruth Mann’s opening plenary in which she discussed the challenges of developing an evidence base. Ruth’s presentation focused on what the risk, consequences and impact of being evidence based are in the real world, and more specifically in a public arena; especially if the evidence base negates your current working practices. Ruth discussed the recent changes to sex offender treatment in the UK and the government evaluation which initiated these changes (i.e., it indicated that previous programs had no impact or made people slightly worse, rather than better); reflecting upon the personal, political and policy fallouts. Ruth discussed the content of the report, her reflections of the impact of the report on systems as well as institutions, and report’s consequences for the management/treatment of people who have committed sexual abuse.  In closing, she reminded us that if we are to be truly evidenced based we have to be open to all forms and outcomes of evidence, even the evidence that indicates that what we are doing may not be best practice or achieving what we want it to achieve. To Kieran, this set the tone of the conference as ATSA has always been about sharing good practice and reflecting upon problematic practice.  

 

The engagement event at the 2018 ATSA conference was based around bystander intervention and had colleagues from Simon Frasier University (Ashley Bentley) and community action groups (Katheren Szabo) talking about the work that they were doing to prevent sexual abuse. The fact that the speakers were coming from different parts of the community, used different approaches and engaged in different activities (from campus sit in’s, to poetry readings and gardening clubs) really indicated the range of activities and novel ways that we can engage different “communities” around sexual abuse prevention in ways that are meaningful to them. The engagement event this year was targeted at people involved in professions at the frontline of safeguarding and community participant (i.e., teachers, volunteers, community workers, etc) and this resulted in some interesting and practical debates.  

 

The international roundtable this year had a series of 8 minute talks from 9 different speakers, each from a different country, on public/media attitudes to sexual abuse in their country and how professionals are engaging in the debate. This was interesting as there were a lot of common themes across countries (i.e., “not in my backyard”, negative media stories and good/bad examples of professional and policy maker engagement) as well as some distinctive good practices in certain countries that we could all learn from internationally. The roundtable really cements ATSA as an international conference!

 

The entire conference was a high point of the year for David. Although pinpointing specific moments is next to impossible, three come immediately to mind:

 

First, I had the privilege of moderating a symposium with Tony Ward, Gwen Willis, and Roxie Heffernan. Tony and Roxie discussed many of their recent projects which involve looking at the processes underlying risk and protective factors. A down side to having so much research available to us regarding these factors is the temptation to reify them as discrete factors rather than viewing them as proxies for underlying processes which will be different for each person. Although on its own this is not a new idea, Ward and Heffernan have explored this in very great detail in their risk-causality method. For Tony and Roxie, this method provides a new level of explanatory depth to our knowledge of risk and protective factors. For Gwen and David, it provides rich areas of clinical understanding.

 

Second, Laurie Rose Kepros delivered a fascinating workshop describing the effects of experiences within the legal system on people convicted of sex crimes. Titled the process is the punishment, she explored how elements of these experiences can actually have a detrimental effect on engagement in rehabilitation efforts (e.g., engagement in treatment and with supervising agents). This is clearly a situation involving multiple perspectives. On one hand, the US Supreme Court has been clear that law enforcement officials can use deception as a part of the investigative process. On the other hand, this same deception can be devastating to others’ attempts to engage meaningfully with these people after their conviction, particularly when they view professionals as agents of the police power of the state. As one might imagine, the subsequent discussion was lively, with advocates of each perspective describing points for consideration.

 

Finally, Michael Seto delivered a moving speech as he accepted this year’s Lifetime Significant Achievement award. With his father and brother on stage, he described the important contributions of immigrants to the cultures who receive them. Originally from Hong Kong, Seto is a clear example of why this is so.

 

For Alissa, the Vancouver ATSA conference was among the best she has ever attended.

 

Along with Joan Tabachnick and Cordelia Anderson, Alissa co-led a pre-conference seminar titled Accountability and Responsibility in the Era of #MeToo. We quickly learned that this is an important issue that many clinicians are currently grappling with. The presenters lead participants in pseudo-restorative justice circles, which provided opportunities to experience the power of authentic human connection. By embracing and honoring a common humanity, clinicians and restorative justice practitioners can create safe spaces for those who have sexually violated others and those who have experienced sexual abuse to find common ground and healing.

 

Perhaps the best example of this was articulated by our Friday morning plenary speaker, Gerry Oleman, a First Nations man who has been involved in creating change for First Nations communities since the 1970s. Gerry spoke about the importance of connecting to language, to nature, and to each other. He spoke about the atrocities committed by colonizers, including the rape of First Nations people, the forced enrollment of indigenous children in residential schools, and the violent removal of indigenous people from their land onto reservations. Gerry spoke about the importance of healing, not allowing the pain, anger, and violence, stay on his heart. It was a lesson that everyone in attendance was privileged to hear.

 

One of the primary benefits of being an ATSA member and attending the annual conference is the opportunity to connect with friends, colleagues, and collaborators from around the world. This was true for Kieran, David, and Alissa who had the chance to present on a panel with Danielle Harris, Jill Levenson, and Gwenda Willis. On Friday afternoon, we presented a panel titled Are We Listening: Valuing All Individuals Impacted by Sexual Victimization.

 

We were each given ten minutes to present on one of the specific voices impacted by sexual victimization. None of us knew what to expect with this unique format, but the feedback we received from audience members reminded each of us about the passion inherent in our individual work that we then bring to the table when we work as a team. After all, we are all better together.

 

The primary take-away from these conference experiences for all three of us was the importance of working together towards common goals… “Better Together”, the conference theme, appropriately described it. In the end, we are all at our best when we can discuss the issues of the day, acknowledge differences, come together to establish new ideas and goals, and make them happen; next year it’s Atlanta, Georgia!!