Read Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren't Being Fooled Online
Authors: Jennifer Freyd,Pamela Birrell
In late 2010 the Service Women's Action Network and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs for their “failure to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests seeking government records documenting incidents of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment in the military.” The goal of the lawsuit is to “obtain the release of records on a matter of public concern, namely, the prevalence of MST within the armed services, the policies of the DOD and VA regarding MST and other related disabilities, and the nature of each agency's response to MST.”
A press release issued by the Service Women's Action Network (SWAN) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) noted:
“The government's refusal to even take the first step of providing comprehensive and accurate information about the sexual trauma inflicted upon our women and men in uniform, and the treatment and benefits MST survivors receive after service, is all too telling,” said Anuradha Bhagwati, a former Marine captain and Executive Director of SWAN. “The DOD and VA should put the interests of service members first and expose information on the extent of sexual trauma in the military to the sanitizing light of day.”
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The press release included this information:
“The known statistics on military sexual trauma suggest that sexual abuse is all too prevalent in our military,” said Sandra Park, staff attorney with the ACLU Women's Rights Project. “But we know that many service members who suffer from abuse are not receiving the treatment they need. The truth about the extent of this abuse and what has been done to address it must be made known.”
The realization that this is institutional betrayal is clearly part of the motivation for the lawsuit:
“The government is failing to care for the overwhelming number of women who so desperately need help coping with something as devastating as rape, sexual assault and harassment,” said Andrew Schneider, Executive Director of the ACLU of Connecticut. “These women have already put their lives on the line by serving their country. The least that the government can do is disclose the scope of the problem.”
Isn't one kind of betrayal bad enough? Isn't the betrayal of being raped by a fellow service member sufficiently terrible? To then have to endure lies and denial by the organization entrusted with protecting victims adds a whole new dimension of devastating betrayal.
Institutional Betrayal in the Courtroom
In chapter 3, we discuss the case of the girl who was abused on an airplane. The outcome in that case was ultimately good—justice was done—but it could easily have turned the other way, due to the public's misunderstanding about victim psychology. Indeed, the combination of insufficient legal clarity about the standards for consent and widespread ignorance about victim response opens the door for a defense that blames the victim and potentially holds her responsible for sexual assault, while leaving the perpetrator not accountable. This is a betrayal in a larger social context. It is thus crucial for justice that we do even more to educate the public.
Here are some of the things we learned from research in trauma psychology that are likely not sufficiently known by potential jurors or perhaps even by interested readers like you. You can educate yourself on these issues and, in so doing, help bring understanding and justice to victims of sexual assault, betrayal, and betrayal blindness.
Passivity during sexual assault is a common response of both child and adult victims.
Studies suggest that anywhere from one-third of adult rape survivors to one-half of child sexual abuse survivors display a passive, even frozen, response during the assault.
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Naturally, people wonder why and how this passive response occurs, but it is important to recognize that separate from questions of motivation and mechanism, we know from empirical scientific research on sexual victimization that such a passive response is quite common. In the scientific literature on sexual assault, this constellation of passive or freeze responses from victims is sometimes called “rape-induced paralysis.” There are research studies that attempt to answer the “why” and “how” questions regarding victim passivity. A number of factors (such as power disparity and betrayal blindness) are associated with victims having a passive response. These factors can range from victims making a conscious decision to be passive, based on their judgment that it is a wise course of action, given the dangers of resisting, to involuntary mental processes, such as dissociation and the involuntary physiological responses of paralysis or freezing. We discuss these in chapter 9.Sometimes victims forget all or part of their assault experience.
Numerous studies have shown that some percentage of trauma victims either display or later report a period of forgetting the event.
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Forgetting can occur even after a period of remembering.
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In 1997, Diana Elliott published her investigation of memory for a wide range of traumatic experiences in a carefully executed research study using a representative sample of Americans.
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Elliott reported that overall, for various types of trauma, 17 percent reported partial forgetting and 15 percent reported a period of complete memory loss (for a total of 32 percent who reported delayed recall) for various traumatic experiences. Rates of forgetting were higher for certain interpersonal victimization experiences (such as childhood abuse and completed rape) and lower for other noninterpersonal traumas (such as motor vehicle accidents). Forgetting is apparently more likely in cases involving a betrayal trauma, such as when the victim trusted, was very close to, and/or was dependent on the perpetrator.Often, victims do not disclose the assault at all or disclose it only after a delay. Sometimes victims retract a legitimate accusation. Numerous studies have discovered that nondisclosure, recanting, and delayed disclosure are common reactions to sexual assault.
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Most people who experience child sexual assault do not disclose it until adulthood, and many never tell at all.
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Studies have also revealed a pattern of recanting and redisclosure.
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Nondisclosure, delayed disclosure, and retraction are particularly likely in cases in which the perpetrator is close to the victim.
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The same logic of betrayal blindness that can keep people unaware of intimate victimization can also motivate victims to keep silent. Later in this book, we discuss both the riskiness and the healing potential of disclosure.Assault by a familiar person is both more common and potentially more toxic that assault by a stranger.
Most sexual assault is committed by individuals who are known to the victims, which increases the likelihood of delayed disclosure, unsupportive reactions, and worse outcomes.
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Widely held stereotypes about “stranger danger” reflect perilous confusion about both the relative risk of assault and the likely harm caused by someone known versus not known to the victim. For instance, if a girl was on a plane next to a man she didn't know, and she fell asleep and woke up to him touching her and later explained that she felt too scared to do anything, would the defense attorneys attempt a consent defense? Would this have a chance with a jury? Our intuition is no, that this defense has a chance only if the victim and the assailant were acquainted. What is it about the fact that a victim knew a perpetrator that potentially opens the consent door, despite no prior invitation? Perhaps people believe that females enjoy being sexually touched by men they know simply because they know them and/or that because they know someone they have more freedom to object to an unwanted touch and/or that men have implicit rights to touch females they know. None of these ideas are at all correct. Women or girls assaulted by someone known to them are even more likely not to disclose the assault and to experience negative aftereffects than if the assailant was not known to them.Victims often display a constellation of reactions after the assault.
Responses to adult sexual assault and child sexual abuse are diverse. Some individuals display great distress, whereas others do not. Immediate reactions are likely to include fear, anxiety, confusion, and social withdrawal.
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Because of intense feelings of shame, victims often report not wanting to be seen by others, as well as a desire to shower or cleanse themselves repeatedly for days to months after the assault.
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Long term, these crimes increase the risk of a host of negative outcomes, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, suicide, and other mental health problems.
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As we discuss later, the probability of experiencing particularly damaging reactions is greatest in the case of betrayal trauma.When people react negatively to a victim's disclosure, notably by disbelieving and blaming the victim, this can compound the damage done by the assault. Disbelieving and blaming constitute additional betrayal and can be especially harmful to the well-being of victims of sexual assault.
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As Brian Marx explained, “In our society, the validity of reports of sexual violence is often questioned, and survivors are blamed for their sexual assaults. Furthermore, the consequences of these experiences are often trivialized or ignored by family, friends, police, legal officials, and sometimes even mental health professionals. Unfortunately, such social conditions further create stigma and shame for survivors, thereby compounding the destructiveness of their experiences.”
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This list of relevant research findings not generally known by the public is far from exhaustive. There is much more we know about trauma psychology in general and the response of victims to sexual assault in particular. If the public and thus potential jurors were better educated prior to serving on a case, expert testimony about victim psychology would not be needed. An educated public would help create a more equitable situation in both the criminal justice system and society more widely. An educated public would make it more likely that eventually the laws themselves would be improved to better reflect the reality of power dynamics and victim response. An educated public could more effectively defend our freedom from assault. The results of our research are often highly relevant to making fair and good decisions about the treatment and the responsibility for—as well as the prevention of—interpersonal violations. Knowledge of that research is also often highly relevant to how helpfully and successfully we interact with one another in society. We hope that your knowledge of these ideas will make a difference in the treatment of sexual assault victims.
Betrayal Blindness in Bystanders
One of the most perplexing aspects of our shared social world relates to our ability to ignore the injustice, oppression, treachery, and betrayal that are all around us. Although the betrayal blindness of bystanders is terrible in its way, it is also understandable. Just as victims may have a need not to see the betrayal they experience, so, too, may bystanders have such a need. We are each designed by eons of evolutionary history and a lifetime of cultural learning to be moral individuals. Morality is part of our human evolution and a central part of every culture and religion. A fundamental tenet of all moral codes is that of fairness. Another is that of caring for or not harming others. Although different traditions also have other moral concerns (for instance, obedience, loyalty, and purity), fairness and caring are central to all known moral systems. Both fairness and caring can be violated by others, and when that happens, it can create a sense of betrayal not only in the victim but also in the minds of bystanders, who experience a betrayal of justice, of
what is right
. Yet we may remain blind to this betrayal for all of the reasons we have already discussed—to see the betrayal might risk too much.
As Judy Herman has famously noted,
It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement and remembering.
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Implicit in this eloquent statement is the idea that bystander blindness protects the bystander by maintaining the status quo and helping him or her avoid risk, whereas to see the betrayal puts the bystander in the position of having to do something that can risk the bystander's status and comfort.