Our rock is the truth

October 24, 2018October 24, 2018

by Stephanie Krehbiel, Executive Director

It began with an email that several faculty members from a small liberal arts college shared with me. It was from their school’s Title IX Coordinator, shared with all faculty and staff of their school, informing them about the school’s mandatory reporting policy* for sexual violence. The pitch of the letter was pretty simple: “If you see something, YOU MUST REPORT. If you hear something, YOU MUST REPORT. If a student tells you something, YOU MUST REPORT.” That was the message to faculty and staff.

“Does this seem right to you?” they asked me.

***

One challenge with working in sexual violence advocacy in 2018 is that no matter what specific thing I’m trying to get done, 2018 just keeps happening. 2018 is the gift that won’t stop giving. As I processed my thoughts about that email and its injunctions, the backdrop was the brutal spectacle of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination and the public treatment of the women who came forward with stories about their experiences with Kavanaugh’s sexual violence.

On the subject of reporting sexual violence, let me speak briefly about what has been done to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who truly had no good options. Her anonymous report to her congresswoman was leaked and ultimately reported by The Intercept; she came forward with her name only when it became clear to her that nothing meaningful would happen if she didn’t. She also came forward because she felt a responsibility to do so. She wanted to prevent further harm being done. In that latter quality, she reminds me of just about every survivor who has ever come to Into Account for help.

I saw that he had this job with kids and I knew he was going to hurt them.

I knew if I didn’t say something and he raped again, it would be on me.

I just don’t want this to happen to anyone else.

Ultimately, Ford testified in front of the Senate—and the American public—with far fewer legal and personal protections in place than would be tolerable in a courtroom, despite the attempts of her lawyers to secure them for her. And at the end of that, the Senate demonstrated how little they cared by burning through every chance for investigation and due process and confirming Kavanaugh anyway. The outcome she risked her life to prevent came to pass, and her life is still at risk.

Americans have endlessly debated her credibility. Her personal life has been made public. She receives hate mail and death threats, and at such a volume that she and her family have essentially been forced into hiding. Her story and her personhood have been cruelly mocked from pulpits, in news rooms, and most shamefully, by the sexual predator who currently occupies the Oval Office.

The collective laughter of vicious boys and men, the thing that Ford has testified most powerfully marked her trauma, is haunting all of us right now. My own survivor trauma involves such laughter. I was a child, and the boys who assaulted me were my age, not more than seven or eight. My memory is patchy and I have no clean narrative of these incidents. But I have clear memories of the laughter, of how amused they were by my anger and my efforts to fight them off. Indelible in the hippocampus.

***

Reporting doesn’t put a stop to the laughter. Ask Christine Blasey Ford. Ask some of our clients. Ask any woman who has gone public and then endured the taunting of men who debate the veracity of her story by assessing her perceived physical attractiveness.

There’s the laughter, and then there’s the outrage, the how dare she. Ford has been accused of ruining Kavanaugh’s life, of inventing her story to serve a nefarious political agenda. She’s been called a liar, but by the insidious abuser logic that grips so much of our public discourse, she’s also been accused of making too much out of a thing that may well have happened but that she should have gotten over. It didn’t happen, but if it did happen, it wasn’t a big deal. She’s a liar, but if she’s not a liar, she’s being oversensitive. Legions of conservative white women on social media endeavored to be offended by her on behalf of their boys and men, whose lives, they speculated, could be so easily ruined by conniving women like Dr. Ford. At the reeking floor of this cultural cesspit is the assertion that all boys do this, all men do this, and it’s the job of the rest of us to put up with it. If we can’t, there’s something wrong with us.

The day of Ford’s testimony, one of our former clients posted her story on social media, about her sexually abusive ex-boyfriend, whom she reported through a university Title IX process:

People I had always liked and admired, people I thought were decent and level headed, sided with my ex. I was “crazy”, “wanted to ruin his life”, and “why hadn’t I said anything earlier”?

It was devastating. I had been taken to the court of public opinion, then executed in the town square. Of course, some people did ask for my side of the story, and it was exhausting to have to retell and relive my personal hell over and over again. But I did it, I felt like I needed to.

So often, when we report, when we come forward, this is how it goes. Yet we’re told that we must report. The responsible thing to do is report. If we report, people can do something about it, and if we don’t report, we can’t blame people for doing nothing.

We’re told that it’s our responsibility to make people do something other than nothing. For that, we should be willing to risk being blamed for everything.

***

Which brings me back to that Title IX email. Which I hated.

It’s not that the policy itself was a surprise to me. I’m used to dealing with reporting policies like this, and they’re not the fault of the relatively inexperienced Title IX coordinator who wrote this email. She may well have had the fear of God put into her about the school’s vulnerability to lawsuits, should they not be able to prove that they are receptive to reports of campus sexual assault. At colleges and universities across the U.S., policies that require all personnel to report any suspected sexual violence to the school’s Title IX Coordinator have become standard. In defiance of the accumulated wisdom of professional victim advocacy in the fields of sexual, intimate partner, and domestic violence prevention, these policies require such reporting regardless of the actual wishes of victims.

I’ll put this in the starkest terms I can think of. Imagine you are a trusted faculty or staff member for a student who confides in you that her boyfriend is hitting her and raping her. She wants to leave him, but he’s threatened to kill her if she does. Like many abusers, he has isolated her from her friends and family, and she doesn’t know who she can trust. She’s terrified, and she needs to talk through her options with someone who can help her find resources without triggering an administrative process that she could lose control of.

This is a student whose life is in danger. This is a student who desperately needs help that doesn’t strip away her own agency or decision-making power. She likely knows better than anybody else what actions–her own or the school’s–might set off a fatal response from her abuser. This is a student that a lot of empathic women faculty have had in their offices. This is not an occasion for YOU MUST REPORT. It is unconscionable to ask a faculty or staff person sitting in front of such a student to make a choice between risking that student’s life and risking their own job.

Contrary to popular belief, federal law doesn’t technically require these blanket reporting policies. Reporting campus sexual violence involves two broad areas of relevant law: one is civil rights law (Title IX) and one is campus safety law (Clery Act). Title IX regulations require mandatory reporting from “responsible employees,” a category whose federal definition is so ambiguous as to almost be circular. The Clery Act requires it from “campus security authorities.” For a variety of reasons–the ambiguity in these categories, for instance, and the newly vast for-profit industry of products aimed at helping campuses achieve compliance with these federal laws–blanket mandatory reporting policies have become the default setting in higher education, even though they are not legally required.

I’ve read and heard many perspectives on these policies from people in academia. They aren’t popular policies with faculty, for instance. I have faculty friends who routinely receive reports of sexual or domestic violence and flat-out refuse to comply with the mandate to forward these reports to their Title IX office, because these faculty friends cannot in good conscience take away a victim’s agency and would rather risk their jobs. I’ve also heard multiple people–people who are probably less likely to receive reports of sexual violence–refer to these policies as a “sex panic.”

But this isn’t a sex panic. It’s a liability panic. From a legal perspective, blanket mandatory reporting policies at higher ed institutions make perfect sense. The most cynical interpretation, which I believe is operative on some level in pretty much every institution that has these policies, is that the policies help to legally absolve schools of responsibility for any sexual violence that isn’t officially reported, while at the same time making it less likely that survivors will talk about sexual violence at all.

YOU MUST REPORT. If you don’t, that says, you’re not our problem.

***

In the weeks after the client I quoted above went forward with her report of her abuser, the blowback against her was gut-wrenchingly awful. This is when my fortitude as an advocate is always tested: I see the suffering of our clients at the outcome of an action they’ve taken, and I fight off the temptation to fantasize about omnipotence. If I indulge that fantasy, then I can believe that there might have been an alternative I could have encouraged that would lead to justice without all the trauma. I wish I could learn how to be a better advocate from that fantasy, but I know I can’t.

I remember one particular phone conversation with this client and Into Account co-founder Jay Yoder. Jay recounted to her the mantra that carried Jay through a similarly grueling period of communal attacks. It went like this: What happened is real. What happened is true. I am standing on a rock, and that rock is the truth.

It’s this mantra I come back to when I sit in the pain of all my collected experiences and observations about what happens after survivors come forward, whether through formal processes or informal disclosure. There is all that pain, and then there is the reality that I still want survivors to speak, when they can. I still want survivors to come forward and say what has happened to them.

Because truth is a rock. That’s why. Not because I believe that individual survivors bear the responsibility to protect their communities from their perpetrators, or because I believe that the legal and bureaucratic processes available to survivors are truly designed to produce justice. It’s not because I believe I can save anyone from the re-traumatization that these processes so frequently deliver.

It’s because I’ve seen the power of the truth to heal. Lies may spread like wildfire, but truth is like a geological miracle. When survivors tell the truth about what happened to them, even as the flames burn around them, they’re standing on rocks that are expanding, searching, merging. Our rocks become a mountain range. We become summits, together.

I categorically refuse to concede the power inherent in the truth. I can’t control any community’s collective denial about its own sickness. But I can stand with you on your rock. I can bring you water. If you’re too tired to stand, or don’t have standing legs, we’ll sit. If you need to lie on the ground, we’ll lie on the ground. We’ll feel the solidity beneath us. We won’t know what comes next, but that’s okay. That’s the way of things.

What we will know, what I will remind you of when you need to hear it, is that all of our truths together have more power than we can fathom.

*What we call “mandatory reporting” at a college or university is materially different from mandatory reporting laws for child abuse. When you are a mandatory reporter as a result of a job that puts you in regular contact with children, you’re legally obligated to report any suspected child abuse to law enforcement, and failure to do so puts you at risk of arrest. When you’re a mandatory reporter at a college or university, you’re required to report any suspected sexual violence against a student to your school’s Title IX Coordinator, and failure to do so puts you at risk of losing your job.

#BelieveSurvivors means what, again?

October 11, 2018October 10, 2018

by Hilary Jerome Scarsella, Director of Theological Integrity

A lot of this angst in the news these days around believing women could be sorted, I think, with some focused attention on what belief actually is in day-to-day human experience. In current popular resistance to the idea of believing women and survivors of sexual assault, folks are treating belief as if it is a magical state entirely unwarranted by reason, like a child’s belief in Santa Clause or the Easter Bunny. But even these examples suggest that belief is more than that. Children who believe that these holiday characters are real actually do have good reason: the adults who they trust to help them learn about the world have, in most cases, told them so.

Belief, as in a child’s reasonable belief in Santa Claus, can be inaccurate. But let’s remind ourselves that thoughts and judicial rulings and data sets and scientific studies can be inaccurate too. The goal cannot be to reach a kind of certainty that is absolutely impervious to error, because that kind of certainty does not exist anywhere, with regard to any subject. Imposing it as the bar survivors have to meet in order to win your support is really just a disguised strategy for avoiding the reality of sexual violence. The goal, rather, is to have ***good reason*** to say we know or think or believe one thing as opposed to another. Belief is always accompanied by reason, and it is always accompanied by a way of being in the world that is shaped by that reason. You cannot get to belief separate from knowledge and action.

So when folks say “believe women” or “believe survivors,” it’s flat out wrong to interpret this statement as a prompt to give your cognitive assent to a position that is not warranted. It is, to the contrary, shorthand for making the argument that there ARE justified warrants for, in general, 1) considering testimonies of sexual assault truthful instead of untruthful, and 2) organizing relationships and politics and law accordingly.

It’s also a plea for folks to live out this belief day-to-day. Here is an incomplete list of what it means #BelieveWomen and #BelieveSurvivors in action:

Know what sexual violence is and how it works on systemic and interpersonal levels.
Know enough that you have the ability, in general, to recognize authentic survivor testimony when you hear it.
Speak & act up on behalf of survivors and others vulnerable to sexual violence.
Support survivors interpersonally, socially, and politically.
Respond to disclosures of sexual violence in ways that empower the survivor and hold those responsible accountable.

These are verbs, friends: know, recognize, speak, act, support, empower, respond. This is what it means to believe survivors.

And here’s a final tidbit to consider:

‘Belief’ is one of the most rich and complex actions (yes, actions) that human bodies and minds can take. Centuries of religious and political history insist on this. Belief or refusal of belief in God or capitalism, for example, is informed by the convergence of countless kinds of knowledge (experiential, economic, social, historical, spiritual) and can influence everything from decisions individuals make about how to raise their kids to global levels of poverty and prosperity in a given era. Belief is powerful. It is an action that structures the world.

Christian folks, particularly those of conservative and evangelical persuasions, tend to hold religious belief in high regard. I’m not here to take issue with that, but I do want to suggest that we take a moment to observe that these same folks who hold religious belief supreme (and, here, I mean specifically those national political figures who cast themselves as conservative or evangelical Christians) are now, in the face of Kavanaugh’s confirmation, simultaneously flattening the concept of belief on the political stage in order to discredit it as an appropriate response to testimonies of sexual violence. Belief in Christian testimony to Jesus as Lord and Savior is defended as admirable sans objective evidence, while believing survivors’ testimonies to their own bodily experiences is cast as unreasonable in the absence of forensic corroboration. No doubt, the issue is more complicated than this single paragraph can address, but the double standard is clear. Either belief in the face of uncertainty has the potential to be rich and textured and warranted, or it must, as a rule, be naive. Folks can’t have it both ways.

I am in favor of preserving the notion of belief as having the capacity to be powerfully nuanced and transformative. Belief is not the same as certainty. But it is always accompanied by reason and it is always lived in action. To believe survivors is to accept the well-reasoned, thoroughly researched, evidence-based argument that survivor testimonies tend to be truthful. (Not familiar with the research? Time for you to whip out Google.) It means understanding sexual violence well enough to judge the evidence and recognize authentic survivor testimony when you encounter it. It means understanding the systemic dynamics that exacerbate sexual violence and tempt folks to distrust survivors. It means interrupting those dynamics and acting in solidarity and care with survivors and those vulnerable to sexual violence in the future. It means organizing family and society and the workplace and Congress and the Supreme Court in ways that structurally resist sexual violence and heed the truthfulness of survivors’ testimonies.

Institutionalized voyeurism, Kavanaugh, and linear narratives

October 2, 2018October 2, 2018

by Hayley Brooks

The past few weeks for me have largely been a series of remembering moments I’d like to consciously forget but that my body holds onto. The way the body recalls is often miraculous to me, but I also often wonder what my body is trying to tell me by remembering. Two weeks ago was the fourth anniversary of one of the most traumatic nights of my life. The morning following that night, I remember texting a friend about the “strange” night I had had, recalling humorous details in an effort to brush it off as simply another date. As the weeks progressed, more and more details became clear to me, triggered by small things—someone brushing up against me accidentally, driving past the bar where I was assaulted, someone touching my neck. Eventually I created a timeline of the night, from the moment I left my house to the moment I returned. This was the first time I had pieced together my own trauma, creating a narrative which the trauma had interrupted. I listened to the nightmares this time, something I had not done in the past.

There were circumstances in my life at the time that led me to interrogating this trauma in ways I had not learned to in the past — that I was taking a break from college for a semester and I had more tools to name my experience than I had ever had previously. I want to also be careful to name that this should never have happened to me, it did legitimately ruin my life. I know if it had not happened, the trauma I had experienced previously would resurface in one way or another. But because it did, I learned something seminal about my body: it remembers.

Over the last four years, I’ve told many people I love and trust (and many I do not) about this experience. There have been many who have asked for details about it, and those people have never been fellow survivors. I have watched eyes widened, as if in a sort of ecstasy, enticed by what we as a society have framed as “scandal.”

The morning following the 2016 election, I woke up in the same panic I remember waking up in following the night of my assault. The day of the Kavanaugh hearings conjured similar feelings. I did not report my assault, for many reasons, among them that I know that my assailants would purse their lips the same way Kavanaugh did in response to my accusations. That image of his pursed lips, tearful eyes: I know that anger, I’ve carried that anger for my abusers for the past four years. And I am in awe of Christine Blasey Ford’s bravery in transferring that anger to its rightful owner.

In this moment, what is most troubling for me is the way the justice system and society has demanded details from survivors in service of sensationalism. Think about how many times we’ve seen the media frame the #metoo movement and public naming of abusers as “sex scandals.” On September 27, the New York Times published an article with the headline “Updates From the Riveting Testimonies of Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh.” This is such a disservice to survivors. Our stories are not tantalizing, they are horrific. And I understand morbid curiosity; I have my fair share of strange interests including cults and serial killers. But this isn’t morbid curiosity, this is a demand from abusers to frame their immorality and dangerous behavior as fascinating and interesting. Think about the industry of revenge porn, how popular Law & Order: SVU is, the fact that video games and movies use the same audio clips to illustrate both the violent murder and orgasms of women. We’ve been taught over and over again that our pain is what makes us interesting, that we as survivors must carry pain because our abusers do not deserve pain for their actions.

I do not offer the minute details of my trauma publicly anymore. I will offer the impact and what my healing process has been like because those are tools for other survivors to name and know their experiences. The only specific detail I do offer of that night, because it is important in naming the ways sexual violence is framed as tantalizing, is that one of my assailants continually asked my other assailant to kiss me throughout the night. There were moments when she (one my assailants) would say no for the both of us, but there were also moments when she would grab me and kiss me. His pupils dilated and eyes widened when she placed her hand on the back of my neck. I recognize those eyes when I am asked for the details of my assault. I can feel the gratification of both the asker and my assailant in my body, the fear it creates, the urgency I feel in my stomach.

And I could see those same widened eyes in the senators and the prosecutor who repeated details of Dr. Ford’s testimony back to Kavanaugh. This is institutionalized voyeurism. This voyeurism places the onus on survivors to report and seek justice, which inevitably demands that survivors offer minute-by-minute timelines that abusers can outright deny. Think about the way many murders are processed in the justice system: we eventually demand that the murderer create a timeline of their actions (except for murders of people of color by white police officers), that they offer a confession. We rarely if ever demand this from perpetrators of sexual violence. This is what rape culture looks like: cisgender men seeking satiation for their learned understanding of women/trans/non-binary peoples’ pain as their own pleasure, at the expense of understanding the true impact of this violence on survivors.

This is what makes Dr. Ford’s testimony so moving. She was forced to offer details, but she also offered the impact of this violence on her life for the past 35 years. We have Anita Hill to learn from and thank in this moment as well, for shifting the narrative from “scandal” to violence. We did not offer Anita Hill the justice she deserved then, but we have the opportunity to not make the same mistake again.

When we shift from understanding rape and sexual violence as scandal to what it actually is, violence, we also shift our attention from linear narratives to cyclical narratives of impact. Patriarchy largely employs linear narratives to understand and name history. Part of this framing includes a collective forgetting, moving forward in a straight line without looking back to understand the impact of what our histories have been. We operate out of these narratives so often we rarely name them. Kavanaugh has clearly employed this type of narrative for his life. Dr. Ford challenged that, challenged him to look back, and offered a cyclical narrative for his sins. The way the body processes trauma is cyclical, we move in and out of healing, we relive the experiences in our bodies again and again. And when we listen to our bodies, we reframe our trauma not as a singular moment in our life, but something that shapes and reshapes how we experience the world. This is where healing begins and where we shift from an abuser-focused understanding of sexual violence to one where survivors name and know themselves in spite of the scandal of abusers forgetting their crimes.

Hayley Brooks is a poet based in St Paul, Minnesota who received her B.A. in English writing from Goshen College. Her poetry focuses on reframing trauma and shifting from body/soul dichotomies to body- and gynocentric narratives. She has previous work published in Lavender Review, The Mennonite, Our Stories Untold and Lipstick Party Magazine. Visit hayleyjbrooks.com for more of her work.

Into Account

Support for survivors seeking justice, accountability, and recovery in Christian contexts

Tag: Sexual assault

#BelieveSurvivors means what, again?

by Hilary Jerome Scarsella, Director of Theological Integrity