← Betrayal Trauma Recovery
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, it's Anne. If you've listened to this podcast, you know I interview women who are dealing with their husband's lies, anger or infidelity. I've interviewed over 200 women and counting. If you relate to anything you hear in this episode, we can help you Today. I created our daily live group sessions because when I was going through it, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't find the help I needed. We know exactly how to help women in this situation. The entire BTR team has been through it. So we know how to anticipate the issues you're likely to face. And when you discover your husband's lies or infidelity, no matter where you are in the world, we can help you immediately. Check out our group session schedule@btr.org group I have Dr. Nicole Badara on today's episode. She's a sociologist and author of the book on the Wrong How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence. Her research broadly focuses on how our social structures contribute to survivors trauma and make sexual violence more likely to occur in the future. Nicole puts her work into practice as an affiliated educator at the center for Institutional Courage. Welcome, Nicole.
- [01:09]
B
Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.
- [01:12]
A
I am so grateful to have you on. I'm fascinated with your work, especially because you really focus on what happens after. And that is something that listeners to this podcast are all dealing with. They've found out that that they have been a victim of sexual coercion. In the case of my listeners, most of the time it's in the form of they were not given all the information that they needed. Their husband was actually purposefully keeping it from them. For example, they don't know their husband was soliciting prostitutes or using pornography or something outside of their sexual boundaries is extremely traumatic. And people don't view this as an actual act of emotional and psychological abuse. They don't see it as sexual coercion.
- [02:06]
B
So I did my research. A little bit different than other people have in the past. A lot of people focus on going to the police or a workplace. I really focus on what happens for students who are still in school. And the place that they report to most of the time is called a Title IX office. You might have heard about it in the news. It's been been kind of everywhere over the past 10 years, but it's quieted down a little bit recently. And a Title IX office is a little different from those other places. We can get into that if you're curious. But in terms of what I did is I spent a year inside one of those Title 9 offices interviewing the victims, the perpetrators, and the school administrators who had the most control over their cases. And so in that setting, the way that I found participants is they were people who were trying to come forward for help. All of them knew something was wrong. They might not know how to label it or how to label it in a way that the system would recognize. That's something survivors deal with a lot, especially since a lot of this stuff is just made to feel normal for women. There's this idea that this is just what you should expect when you go to college, or this is what you should expect in a marriage. And so there were some that they weren't totally sure what was going on, but they knew that something had affected, usually their education, or they felt unsafe and unsettled. And they ended up in my study because they went to their school for help, either through the victim Advocacy office, which on a college campus is a place that can help survivors with really whatever they need. But a lot of things that have nothing to do with the perpetrator at all, including things like they need an extension on an assignment, or there's a specific class that they want to take, but their perpetrator wants to take it. And so they're trying to coordinate, to figure out when they can take it in a semester that they won't be in the same classroom, things like that. Or they went through the Title IX office to try to report what happened to them, to try to seek some kind of safety or justice. So that's really who we're talking about in the particular book. But a lot of the themes are not that different from all the other places that maybe you've tried to report or you've considered going to for help.
- [04:10]
A
When a woman has a situation where she. She needs help, but she doesn't quite know where to go, it's so heartbreaking for me as I see this with wives who are trying to figure it out. We usually do couple therapy or maybe, like, addiction recovery or something along those lines, trying to figure out, how can I start to feel safe again in my marriage? When you're talking about on a college campus, they're thinking, how can I feel safe again on campus? Why do you think this idea of safety and how to feel safe again is just so hard for pretty much everybody to understand? For institutions or organizations, they're, like, having a hard time figuring this out. Like, what do you mean she feels unsafe? And what are we supposed to do about it, right?
- [04:59]
B
There are a couple of issues that we run into when victims are trying to decide where to report. One of them is that a lot of the systems that we think are going to help won't help. If you think about a college campus, for example, students are told, if you're experiencing sexual violence, sexual harassment, or any kind of gender discrimination, come to the Title IX office and they will help you. But that's not really what the Title IX office is concerned with. Their primary concern is, what do we do with this perpetrator? And sometimes doing something about the perpetrator would help if the school would, which they often hesitate to do so. But a lot of the time that's not really meeting a survivor's need in a real way. And that's the same issue that comes up if you go to the police or you go to a couple's therapist. I think a lot of people who've tried for help at any of these institutions has had an experience where you're coming in for something really tangible for yourself, right? So an example I gave earlier is you are, let's say you're a victim in a university setting, and you show up on the first day of class and you see that your perpetrator is in class with you and that the class is going to be discussing sexual violence as a topic. So this just feels completely impossible for you to be able to be safe in this environment, because it's going to be reminding you of your trauma. You might have to watch your perpetrator interact. It's going to be just a place where your body and mind are responding to the traumatic experiences you've already had.
- [06:26]
A
And the trauma you continue to experience because the likelihood of him gaslighting you, continuing to emotionally and psychologically abuse you through this whole thing is like, off the charts.
- [06:39]
B
It's pretty unlikely that if you're in that class with your perpetrator, you and your perpetrator are going to share the same public narrative about why you can't sit next to him in class. Right? And so you're right. Often this is a site of continued violence where the perpetrator might disparage the victim, might go and tell lies about what happened in their past as a way to avoid accountability. You're right. This is a place where more violence can take place. And so a big victim in that scenario reasonably is just thinking, I just want this guy out of my class, right? I just want this person out of my class. I want to be able to take the class that I want to take complete My degree on time, why is this affecting me in this scenario? I don't want to be unsafe. And so I would say that most people, if you think about it in a rational way, would say that's a really reasonable set of requests to just say I've, you know, you've already experienced a sexual assault. That's enough of a burden on its own. You shouldn't have to sacrifice your education to put. But in our current university system, there is no way to get that outcome. And so instead when a victim comes forward and says, this is what I need, the entire system is focused on, but what would this mean for the perpetrator? Is it fair to him? Is this going to be too much for him? And was there even violence to begin with? And this is one of the stories I start the book with because it's such a common one. And it is one that even if the system is working as it claims to, it can't fix it. There is no version of a sexual assault response in our society that can intervene on a perpetrator's violence in two weeks. We don't really have a version of that right now. That's a big part of why coming forward is so harmful. Because at minimum you're going to be told to wait and at maximum you're going to be re traumatized, you're going to be forced back into communication, into being in the same room with your perpetrator. Potentially violence could escalate, there could be retaliation. And our system really doesn't think about that because our systems primarily think about sexual violence as, as something that is about the perpetrator and we have to decide what to do with the perpetrator and the victim is really treated as evidence and not as a person.
- [08:44]
A
Through these systems, I help all sorts of women in all sorts of scenarios, right? But one that I'm thinking of right now is a woman who has a protective order and he continues to violate the protective order. And she keeps calling it in and then they have to have a hearing about it and the hearing isn't for like three months. So he has like 27 protective order violations that the prosecutor is like, okay, should we like put them all together? I don't want to prosecute him 27 times. What are we going to do in the meantime? There's no protection for her as they're trying to like, when's the date for the hearing? And for a victim that in and of itself is triggering. I'm sure you're going here that like to hear him Just talk about, like, the date of the court hearing rather than to hear somebody say, I care about you, we're going to do something so that he can't come around you anymore. That's what she needs to hear. But for some reason, that's, like, beyond their comprehension.
- [09:48]
B
I use this metaphor at the very end of the book when I'm talking about creating a better system, about how our current system is looking at a victim. And if we think of trauma as something physical, if we make a version of it where it's not something that can't be seen, but something we could see. The example I like to use is putting your hand on a hot stove. And right now, our systems just tell the victim, pretend it's not burning you. And if it is burning you and you can't handle it, there must be something wrong with you. But go ahead and take your hand off the stove. Maybe you should leave the kitchen while we figure out what we want to do about this stove that's burning people. Right. And a better system would say, well, let's just turn off the stove. Let's turn off the stove. Let's do it. In a way, you know, we're not going to break the stove. We're just going to turn it off, and we're going to take a minute to figure out what to do next. But we're not going to tell the person who's being burned to just keep being burned while we decide what to do.
- [10:41]
A
You nailed it. But this happens in marriages all the time. Because, number one, a couple therapist in general does not identify the psychological and emotional abuse. So she's going for help. She doesn't know she's being abused. It doesn't get identified. And the professional that she's going to for help or clergy or, you know, any number of people, because they don't identify that the stove is on, to use your metaphor. They're like, something's wrong with you because you're being burned for no reason.
- [11:15]
B
Right? Or let's try to evenly manage this. There's this real temptation in a lot of these systems to say, well, why don't both people come to the table and offer something? And so that would be akin in the same metaphor to saying, well, why don't we have the stove turn down the heat a little bit? And why don't we have the person with their hand on the stove stop complaining they're being burned? And that doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. One of the things that I talk about a Lot in the book is how we as a culture have gotten really comfortable with asking for more sacrifices from victims as long as it's in the name of giving an advantage to their perpetrator. But we know that abuse takes place when there is a power inequity. And so if that's the reason that we're saying both people have to do something or the victim can't get what they need because we want to give a benefit to the perpetrator, that is always going to deepen that inequity. It's always going to deepen that power disparity. And that can make the abuse get a lot worse.
- [12:10]
A
My eyes twitching. The other thing I think is interesting when it comes to either reporting or not reporting is that for me and a lot of women who have been through it, reporting wasn't really the issue. We just wanted to feel safe. So I didn't necessarily want my ex husband to go to jail. I just wanted him to leave me alone. So in my personal case, I had a protective order. He had a guilty plea for domestic violence and the criminal court was saying, do not talk to him. You have a protective order. But the civil court was ordering me to talk to him because we share children. So for eight years, I'm being abused post divorce by a man. I have a protective order against who I do not want to talk to. But the civil court is forcing me to talk to him because of my kids. It wasn't like I wanted to report his abuse so that he went to jail. Like, I think that's the thing that people have a hard time with, especially with custody cases where the judge is like, well, I can't take away custody because then I'd be calling him an abuser and then what? He'd go to prison. Victims just want to be safe. And in a lot of these civil cases, especially with kids, the safe parent, the mother, she's not trying to get the ex thrown in jail. She's just trying to make sure that her kids are safe and they don't have to go with an abuser. And same thing with the college thing, right? You're just asking that he doesn't go to this class, or maybe he transfers schools or something. I don't know. Maybe you can talk about options. But for some reason, the justice system sees this as like, we've got to give him due process before we. And then they equate it to prison.
- [13:57]
B
That's exactly right. And I want to say that this is a new problem. And the Title 9 debate is actually in the center of why this is happening throughout the rest of society too. So a little bit of history around campus sexual violence and campus sexual violence organizing. In 1972, there was a law passed, and that law said that sex discrimination is illegal on college campuses that are receiving any kind of federal funding. And that's all schools. To be clear, even Harvard accepts a lot of funds from the federal government to keep their doors open. They would have a very hard time keeping their doors open without those federal funds. And the law itself is it's just a single sentence. So it's not super clear about everything that's included and not included. So there were a series of court cases to try to figure that out. One of them was in 1980, Alexander Vl. If you're feeling really industrious and you want to look it up. And that was the first court case that said that sexual violence should be illegal on a college campus, that it should be something that schools should do something about and they should have their own internal proceedings to manage sexual violence. And the focus here wasn't about sending people to jail. That's what you could call the police for if that's what you wanted. This was specifically for scenarios where victims educations were impacted by their sexual assaults or intimate partner violence or stalking or whatever they were experiencing. And so what the Department of Education had argued is just schools need to do something to make sure that the violence doesn't interfere in the quality of education you receive from the school, including things like if there's a known perpetrator on campus, let's say that he's a professor, let's say he is withholding good grades unless students provide sexual favors, which is what that 1980 court case was about. Part of what Title IX would require is that that perpetrator is removed from campus because obviously no woman can get a fair education from that person. And so the focus really is on restoring those educational rights. And the issue was that schools just didn't do it. And so every few years, the Department of Education would remind schools that they had to do something about sexual harassment and violence, and they just didn't do it. And for the most part, it didn't capt much attention until the Obama administration.
- [16:12]
A
Was part of their justification for not doing their job. Like, well, if it was bad enough, she'd call the police.
- [16:18]
B
That is certainly something that people have said in the past or they've said, this isn't a problem on our campus. There was a study. It was just a survey by Inside higher ed in 2015, where they asked university presidents at the time, do you think campus sexual violence is a problem on your campus? And the vast majority of vast, vast majority said, no, that's a problem. At other schools, we don't have to worry about it. Which is not true, by the way. We have yet to find a university that doesn't have sexual violence problem. And so, yes, that's part of how they justified it is just go somewhere else. We don't want to handle this. This is a criminal act, not a civil act. But that's not what the law said. And so the Obama administration sent out another one of these reminder letters. And for whatever reason, it became hotly politicized. And in that moment, a group of Harvard professors, law professors, wrote an essay saying that the Title 9 approach the Obama administration was requiring wasn't right because it didn't allow the same kind of due process protections that the criminal justice system does. So exactly what you're saying, that's, that's what they said. Well, and to be clear, a lot of these Harvard law professors were not specialized in issues of gender based violence or even criminal or civil law. I mean, I guess that's all the law. But, you know, they were people who specialized in any type of law. Some of them were probably doing things like corporate law who had absolutely no knowledge on this topic whatsoever. And the average lawyer gets very little training during law school about sexual violence or harassment, especially, especially in civil settings. So they were just wrong. They were just flat out wrong. But this argument captured the national attention. It went viral. And since then, we've started to see other judges and lawyers thinking that there are due process protections on college campuses that never existed before. Prior to this moment, if you were facing student disciplinary proceedings on a college campus, your only rights were to know what you were being accused of doing and what the violation would be and have some chance to respond. But there were no rules about how you would do that. So some schools did it in writing, some did a hearing, some would, you know, they weren't doing much of anything. They would just give you a chance. And a lot of people would say, you know what, I actually was plagiarizing. I don't even need to participate in this. Right. And so this new idea that anything involving sexual violence must be held to a criminal standard of due process, it really is only a few years old. It's not too late to reverse it, and we should, because the stakes are so different. In the book, I call it Accumulated Fantasies of Disaster, where when a Victim comes forward and they say, exactly like you're describing, I need one thing. And on college campuses, sometimes that is safety for their kids. There are married people living in student housing on college campuses with children living in essentially the dorms, but family dorms. And that's often what they're looking for, is, I am trying to escape an abusive marriage. My partner is still on campus, and we're still living in the same dorm. And is there another unit I can move into with my kids as I go through divorce proceedings, as I go through a custody battle? Essentially saying exactly what you are. Well, if we do that, then it could lead to all of these other issues for the perpetrator down the line. And some of the stories that I heard during my time in the field were really unreasonable. So one of those stories I start the book with is a woman who was sexually harassed by a guest speaker who came to campus. The guest speaker was CEO of a company that he, you know, owned. And he had been stalking and sexually harassing her ever since he met her. He had no other tie to the campus community. So from a legal perspective, the university had no obligation to him. They don't have to let him come back and speak again. They don't even have to let him come on campus if they don't want to, because he's not a student, he's not a professor. He has no rights to this space. But instead, the Title IX investigators wrapped themselves in knots to think of all of these horrible things that could happen to him if they took the victim's wishes into consideration, which was just, please don't invite him back to be guest speaker again. I don't want this to happen to anybody else. And they were saying things like, he could get a bad reputation, he could lose his job, he could be incarcerated. And it's not true, because a lot of these proceedings are private. And so any of the files that come from them, you can't just hand them to the police. That's illegal. That's not how it works. People have privacy rights. Educational documents in particular are really private. But that's what they're thinking. They're saying, if you come forward, every bad thing will happen to this person. And, yeah, we're talking about a CEO who's going to fire him himself. It doesn't make sense.
- [21:02]
A
Also, heaven forbid a bad thing happened to a rapist.
- [21:06]
B
I completely agree. I think that's actually one of the strengths of my book, is that because I interviewed the perpetrators, too. There. I think we all can see from Just examples in pop culture, you know, presidential races, whatever it might be, that men who have been accused of sexual assault tend not to have bad things happen to them. If anything, I argue they tend to get benefits. The Johnny Depp trial is a really great example. Oh, he's made an entire comeback after having. Yes, he was having a hard time finding work in Hollywood because of his own behavior on set. And now all of a sudden, he's getting this second chance. He's known as a perpetrator of domestic violence, which he never refuted, by the way. He never refuted that he had physically harmed Amber. Heard that is something he never said. And he simply argued that she deserved it, which works.
- [21:58]
A
Insane, right?
- [21:59]
B
It's wild. We should be able to see through it. But we don't because we come to a place for victim blaming first. One of the things that I found in my book is that there was all this concern about these, again, like, accumulated fantasies of disaster, of what can happen to perpetrators and how bad it'll be if we say out loud what they did. But I interviewed the perpetrators, and those things didn't happen to them. If anything, a lot of them tended to enjoy these accountability proceedings because, like, we're talking about, there's these contradictions in them that the victim's behavior is really constrained. The victim isn't allowed to do X, Y, and Z. It'll hurt their credibility while at the same time, they're forced to come into contact with the perpetrator on a regular basis. And that's something that perpetrators really enjoy. They.
- [22:42]
A
Yeah, they like it.
- [22:43]
B
Yes.
- [22:44]
A
We really need to focus on this. I created a strategy workshop. It's called the Living Free Workshop. And you can learn more@btr.org living free. And it helps women see why abusers like this, enjoy it and what these types of abusers get out of it so that women can use strategy to protect themselves. Because we're not enjoying it. The victims do not enjoy it. That's what you discovered. I'm like, yes, they enjoy it. And it's because they never lose.
- [23:16]
B
Even if they do lose, the loses are hollow. There was one student who was expelled for intimate partner violence while I was on campus. I want to say this is very standard. There's been a lot of research that's come out about how schools handle sexual violence in the past few years. And the average university expels one perpetrator every three years. So it is very rare. The thing that's unusual is that I happen to be on campus that year, but what that expulsion meant because of this rush to protect the perpetrator, this rush to make sure that nothing bad happened to him. By the time he was expelled, the dean of students had already helped facilitate his transfer to another university. It was close enough by. He didn't even have to move apartments. And they had slowed down the proceedings for two years originally with the hope that he would graduate before they had to hold him accountable. But he didn't graduate for a whole host of reasons I get into in the book. And instead, what that meant for those two years was that the victim had had to take a leave of absence because he was so violent and so dangerous that she couldn't safely be on campus. And so they told her, you know, the same thing we're talking about before. Until he's been through this process, we can't offer you any kind of assistance. So if you can't handle being here, you're the one who should leave. And that's one of the big things that I hope people take from the book and from all of these conversations, is that every time we do something like this to protect perpetrator, every time we say, I'm going to be fair to both people, I'm going to invite both of you to this place, and anybody who can't handle it, don't come. What you're really saying is the perpetrator is going to be here and the victim won't because you're not giving them anything that's possible to do. Victims can't turn off their trauma and peacefully coexist. Even if they do manage to share space with the perpetrator, it always takes a toll. And that's unfair. It's not right. Everything is totally backwards. That's actually what my literary agent called the book. Everything is backward.
- [25:11]
A
Yeah. Well, the other issue that people don't recognize is that he is still going to be abusing her at that event. You know, I don't care what it is. It could be a basketball game, whatever. The way he acts, the way he's lying about her, the way he's like, oh, she's so crazy. That is abuse. It's abuse. And he's still doing it right now. So you haven't stopped the abuse. It's not like this happened in the past. It's happening right then, you know, and.
- [25:39]
B
I would argue that even if nothing happens, right, that that still is a continuation of the abuse as well. Because I think of all these scenarios where the perpetrator and victim are forced to share space. Again, kids are a really common scenario that that happens. And everybody watching is wanting to see this cartoon villain of a perpetrator that doesn't exist. And so instead they say, he seemed nice. He was friendly to you. You seem like you're the one who's overreacting. And that's part of the plan, too. One of the things that I've said about perpetrators for a long time is they don't abuse everybody. And a big part of that abuse is showing that they can follow social norms, treat people appropriately outside of their victim. And ultimately, it still leads to often, in this case, other people trying to control the victim, blaming them, questioning their legitimacy. And that's a lot of what perpetrators do in these proceedings is they just come in and they don't scream and yell. They're not physically violent in that setting. And so people think, oh, he must be fine.
- [26:41]
A
That is the abuse. That's what I'm trying to say. That is, it's called grooming. And grooming is abusive. So that is the abuse. And they don't realize that they're being abused too, because he's not being honest. He's not doing anything overt, but he's not coming in and saying, I did do this. This is the truth. Right.
- [27:01]
B
Like, that's the only thing that would be not abusive. Right. Would be a shared reality that abuse occurred. That is the only thing that would be fair to a victim.
- [27:11]
A
Yes. And it's the only way abuse would not be occurring. But you just said that. I just repeated sorry. But. Yeah.
- [27:17]
B
Well, that just makes you feel like it was a good point.
- [27:19]
A
It was. It was worthy of repeating. It's really huge when you're talking about institutional issues with. This is. The same thing happens with the courts every day with civil custody cases in the same way. And it's. It's so hard because that just that part where you said she helped him transfer his stuff to the new school. No one is helping the victims do these things. No one's helping her.
- [27:44]
B
And that was one of the most glaring disparities of all. And there's actually an academic concept that I introduced really early in the book in the first few pages that I think would be helpful to your listeners. And it's this idea of institutional betrayal. And institutional betrayal is defined as an institution's actions or inactions that exacerbate trauma. So when they behave in a way that makes the traumatic experience more traumatic. And that's one of the big things that this book really focuses on, is that how violent and how Traumatic an experience is for a victim is not set from the end of the violent event. It actually depends on everything that happens afterward. So, you know, if you tell your friends, do they believe you? Do they take your side or your perpetrator's side? Do you get control over what happens after the violence is over? Or is somebody reporting to the police against your will or putting you into these scenarios that you don't want to be in against your will? Abuse is ultimately a violation of autonomy. And so every time an institution violates our autonomy, again, that's going to trigger those traumatic symptoms. And in studies, we find that survivors that experience institutional betrayal show the same traumatic symptoms as a victim who was sexually assaulted a second time. It is an equal severity to that original act of violence, which is why it's really important that our institutions get this right and for our friends and families to get this right, too, because a lot of people find this really overwhelming. And I think it is overwhelming to think, wow, I thought the worst was over, but actually I could encounter something just as bad when I seek help is really overwhelming. But on the other hand, if we do get it right, then we actually have the capacity to make this violence less damaging to victims. And that's the place where I come out on a really hopeful side that survivors who, when they seek help and they get it, they have fewer traumatic symptoms. The traumatic impact of that original event is lessened. And so that's really got to be our goal here, is to step out of these damaging patterns just because it's the way things are or it's what we're used to, and, oh, it would take work and change, do something different. That's. Those aren't good reasons we should do the right thing because the stakes are really high and we could really help a lot of people.
- [29:59]
A
Just talking with the victims that I talk with on a daily basis, my eye twitches. When they are not helped by the police, when they're not helped by the civil court system, when they're not helped by their clergy, when they're not helped by a couple therapists. This is overwhelming and scary. We do have to speak out and we do have to take some action, which is what we don't want to do, which is what this podcast is about. Like, oh, why are we making victims do more? You know, it's such a catch 22.
- [30:29]
B
I want to say one of the things about institutional betrayal, too, and one of the reasons why I think it's really important that people know about how institutions can harm victims Is institutional betrayal can't happen to the same severity if we already have some distrust trust for the institution. One of the key components is going to get help and thinking you're going to get it and then not getting it. And so setting realistic expectations not to lower the bar for these institutions, to raise the bar. Actually.
- [30:59]
A
Yeah, no, I get what you're. Yeah. Because.
- [31:01]
B
Yeah, but to know what can happen.
- [31:02]
A
That'S what the Living Free Workshop is for. Anticipating. If you talk to clergy about this, this is likely what's going to happen. So instead of doing that, let's do this other thing. If you are going to report this, this is likely what's going to happen. And so instead of doing that, although you can report, but, like, know these things beforehand, the Living Free Workshop helps victims anticipate. Because this has been driving me crazy for years in my state. At the bottom of every single article about domestic violence, every single one, there's like a call the National Domestic Violence hotline and then call our state domestic violence hotline. And everyone thinks that's the solution. They think reporting is the solution. They don't realize that that's not the solution at all. In fact, one victim that I know, she recently had the department that oversees victim services, okay, contact her. And they were like, hey, we heard that you had a bad interaction with a police officer in a certain county. We're going to interview you. So she told them. She was like, hey, yeah, I've been working with this domestic violence shelter. I have a victim advocate. She told them the whole story. And she's been working with a victim advocate at our local domestic violence shelter for over two years. They, like, reviewed her case. They got back to her, and guess what they said? They said, oh, your case is really, really bad. You need services. Have you contacted your local domestic violence shelter?
- [32:25]
B
Oh, my God.
- [32:26]
A
So it was like a full circle. You know, the thing that I think people in general think all we have to do is put this phone number on the bottom of a newspaper article and problem sol and if she doesn't call that number, and then it's her fault because she didn't call the number.
- [32:41]
B
So I think one of the questions I get a lot is if a lot of these systems aren't trustworthy, where can we go? And the response is to go to a confidential community like this one for a rape crisis hotline. That is going to be different than a domestic violence shelter. You really want one that's confidential? Because a confidential service won't call the police. They cannot be subpoenaed in a court of law. So if you have questions to try to make sense of what all the options are in your community, they can work through that with you without things snowballing out of your control. And so it's a step one, obviously that's just a place to let you know what the options are and which ones other survivors think are the most trustworthy, things like that. But that's what I would say is make sure you're going somewhere confidential. That will give you a lot of options, not just one option. Anywhere that's pushing you back to one option is probably not the right place. That's a big part of why I wrote the book is I talk about. It's about campus sexual violence, but I talk about these broader trends in how survivors lose trajectory of their cases, lose their autonomy and are re traumatized that you can almost treat like red flags. So things like being told that one thing is going to happen but you didn't get the full story and actually now everything's moving in a different direction. And things like seeing your case broken into a bunch of different pieces where people only want to focus on one tiny part of it and then they ignore everything else. Lots of things like that where you can see these institutional red flags. And one of them is one of the ones we've been talking about this whole time, which is when people conflate punishment and consequences, when people act as if there are natural consequences to sexual violence. And when a victim says, I've experienced this, I'm dealing with these consequences and I need help with these consequences and they're recasting as punishing and everything is focused on but that could be bad for the perpetrator. That is one of the biggest red flags because you can't just make that stuff go away. Like trauma is trauma. It's a physiological process. We can see evidence of it on the body. You can't just say, oh, you're right, I don't want anything bad to happen to my perpetrator, so it goes away. And that's one of the ones to think about a lot is that conflation between addressing the consequences that are unavoidable, that are just going to happen as the result of the action of sexual violence or coercion or harassment or whatever it is you've experienced and acting as if recognizing those consequences is inherently unfair to the perpetrator. That I would say is one of the biggest red flags.
- [35:11]
A
And coming forward, I was trying to explain this to someone once and I said, can you imagine if a man were. Had a business partner, and that business partner stole a. A bunch of money from the business, and the guy couldn't hold him accountable in court. And then everyone around him was telling him, you have to attend church with this guy. And people say to me, that's crazy. This is completely different. And I'm like, what I'm talking about is like 50 billion times worse.
- [35:42]
B
Yeah.
- [35:44]
A
Thinking about it in. In terms of a man having to be forced to interact with someone who hurt him, they can't even talk about that because they're like, that would never happen.
- [35:54]
B
Right. It's suddenly so clear. It's suddenly so clear that it would be unfair. And that's. I mean, gender is such a big part of it, right? It is.
- [36:02]
A
It's huge.
- [36:03]
B
Yeah. One of the things I found in my work was that when the roles on a Title IX case, you would call it complainant and respondents, that's sort of the civil equivalent of like, plaintiff, or I guess there's no version in a criminal trial where the victim is treated as a person and not evidence, but, you know, it's sort of the same as like plaintiff and defendant, but in a Title IX context is complainant and respondent. So when those roles are reversed, usually in the form of a retaliatory complaint, where a real act of violence happened, the victim tried to report it, and the perpetrator responds by filing a second complaint, saying, actually, I'm the true victim. So again, a really classic example of this is Johnny Depp versus Amber Heard, where he doesn't argue, no, there was never any violence. He says, she deserved it, actually, she's the abuser, and I think I'm the true victim. And the goal of these retaliatory complaints really is to muddle the narrative, to confuse any investigators, and to try to intimidate the victim into dropping their original complaint. That's really what's happening here. And then sometimes when we talk about cases like Debt v. Heard, there is that benefit we already talked about, which is, even if it is a second case, the perpetrator feels pretty confident nothing bad is going to happen to them, so they can just enjoy the forced contact with that victim who previously had gotten away. But in those cases of retaliatory complaints, what I found is that the university didn't really care about due process anymore, that when women were in the role of the accused, they faced a lot of consequences, a lot of, I would actually argue punishment because they didn't do anything. It can't be consequences. For their actions when all they did was report something someone else did to them. And it really is a gender issue. It really is that when it's a woman versus a man, there is a real sense that we should take the side of the man, no matter what he has done, because he is a leader, because he should have male privilege, you know, whatever it might be. He's the more important person, and so we should protect the more important person. And sometimes that comes out in really overtly misogynistic, obvious ways, and sometimes it's a little bit more shielded in something called hympathy. So this concept of empathy comes from a philosopher named Kate Mann, and what it means is excessive empathy given to men at the expense of women. Yeah, it's a great.
- [38:28]
A
I've never heard of this, and I'm liking this.
- [38:30]
B
Yeah, it's so good. That's another book you should get. You should get Entitled by Caveman. It's so good. But what this can look like in practice is somebody saying something like, well, you know, sexual abuse is horrible. It's already ruined the victim's life. The best we can do is try to make sure it doesn't ruin two lives instead of one. I want to make sure we do right by the perpetrator. People say it all the time. I have an entire chapter of the book about this. It's truly unbelievable if I didn't have the direct quotes from the administrator saying it. But it's. It's treated as this righteous thing, is this idea of, I'm a good person if I can empathize with even the most sort of deplorable people in our society. There's nothing worse than a perpetrator of sexual abuse. And so if I can empathize with that person, that means I'm the most empathetic person, and that means I'm the most moral person is what a lot of people are thinking. But it is totally backwards, and it's not hard to empathize with men in these cases. That's what we've been culturally trained to do. The difficult thing is to empathize with the victim instead of treating the victim like evidence in the man's story.
- [39:30]
A
Sorry, I can't even. I can't. No wonder people don't love me at church, because I don't sympathize with abusive men. I'm like, I don't care about him. And people are, like, so offended.
- [39:42]
B
Yeah, people are offended.
- [39:43]
A
And I'm like, why? Why are you so offended? He's a rapist. Why do you care about him?
- [39:48]
B
I think that's the place we need to get to, especially in this moment in society where most people are empathizing with the perpetrator. So this framework I was thinking about, where everybody's saying, oh, you know, I'm going to empathize with the perpetrator, because it's a hard thing to do. Something administrators would say is everybody's going to side with the victim because we all know rape is wrong. And so she's going to have everybody in her corner. He doesn't have anybody in his corner. So I'm going to be the person to show up for him. But the problem was, and everybody was doing that. And so what we need, at bare minimum, is a whole group of people that are going to show up for the survivor in that same way to recognize the real reality, which is the perpetrator has so many people in his corner. The victim is the person who's getting pushed out of her entire social group. One of the things that's so traumatic about sexual violence is a lot of people end up losing all of their friends, a lot of their family. They might have to switch schools or change jobs, because everybody is really focusing on being fair to the perpetrator. And I put fair and big quotes here because none of this is fair. If what we're doing for the perpetrator means the victim has to leave, it's not fair.
- [40:51]
A
There is no fair. The fair. No.
- [40:53]
B
This makes me think the. The next book that I want to write. And so, you know, I'm putting the feelers out there, if, you know, any publishers. But the next book I want to write is something with a sort of working title of something like the Responsibilities of Rapists. Because I think when we have an entire society where none of these systems are good at holding perpetrators accountable, and it's really hard for people to imagine what that looks like for themselves. It's hard to reinvent the wheel. Most people are not experts on sexual violence, but I do think, at a bare minimum, in our personal lives, when we know that we can't trust a lot of these systems, so we have to handle this as individuals and as communities. I think, at bare minimum, if we know that the main thing victims want is to never have to share space with their perpetrator again, that's the number one thing victims say they want. At bare minimum, I think we can ask that a perpetrator leaves a place where a victim is for the rest of their lives, that gives them the rest of the planet that they can be in. And that one spot where the victim is should always be that space. Because the trauma is going to leave a lifelong impact for the victim. It's never going away. And so if we look at the perpetrator and say, well, it's been five years. Why isn't she over it yet? That's saying that there's a time limit for how long the victim can be traumatized. And that's just not how it works. And I do think it's really reasonable to say if you perpetrated a sexual assault, the bare minimum of consequences is if you see the victim in the grocery store at your new job, that you turn around and you walk out and you go to a different grocery store, you get a different job. This is very, very reasonable to ask for. If anything, it's lenient 100%.
- [42:34]
A
You are so well spoken. You are amazing. I appreciate this conversation. Nicole. I'm so grateful that you're doing this work. Thank you so much for spending the time to talk to me today.
- [42:45]
B
Thank you so much for having me on. This has been great. These are the kinds of conversations that people need and I'm so glad I got to be here today.
- [42:52]
A
Thank you. If you've already purchased a copy of my book Trauma Mama Husband Drama on Amazon, please circle back and give it a five star rating. A lot of women are searching for books to figure out what to do about their husband and rating. Trauma Mama will also help them find this podcast, which is free to everyone. And of course, your donations help keep this podcast going. Go to btr.org, scroll to the bottom and click on support the BTR podcast until next week. Stay safe out there.