Category: Uncategorized

Community-Based Providers Open Doors to Law Enforcement Reporting after Sexual Assault

March 16, 2019

by Anne P. DePrince & Naomi Wright

Sexual assault remains one of the most under-reported crimes to law enforcement. Communities need information about practices that support women’s autonomous decision-making, particularly given how deeply personal and complex such decisions can be. In a forthcoming Violence against Women article, we asked whether women’s reporting decisions were affected by the kinds of social reactions they received after disclosing the assault to other people.

Here’s the short answer: Women who received more practical help from community-based service providers were more likely to report to law enforcement. The longer version of the answer is important, too, because this finding has implications for community-coordinated responses to sexual assault (that is, responses that involve community-based and criminal justice agencies). So, let’s dig in further.

As Dr. Sarah Ullman and others have documented, women who disclose sexual assault can be on the receiving end of both positive and negative social reactions from other people. Positive social reactions can include emotional support and tangible aid. Tangible aid involves actions such as helping women obtain information about coping, helping them access healthcare or the police, and providing information and options. Negative social reactions can include blaming women, taking away their control to make decisions, and treating them differently because of the assault.

Earlier work from the Traumatic Stress Studies Group documented that women get more negative social reactions after disclosing sexual assault to friends and family, compared to criminal justice system personnel or community-based service providers. Community-based service providers offered the most positive social reactions.

One of the questions we asked in the forthcoming study was whether positive or negative social reactions to sexual assault disclosures were linked to women’s decisions to report to law enforcement. To answer this question, we turned to interviews with approximately 200 women who were sexually assaulted in the last year who also disclosed the assault to a community-based service provider, such as a medical professional or counselor. Just over half (56%) of women had reported the assault to law enforcement.

When we first interviewed women, those who had reported the assault to law enforcement also said they received greater tangible aid from both informal supports as well as community-based providers. Because we measured whether they had reported the assault and the social reactions at the same time, at least two interpretations were possible. Practical help from family and friends or community-based providers might have increased women’s likelihood of reporting to law enforcement. Or, friends and family as well as community-based providers might have rallied to provide practical help after women have made a report to law enforcement.

Next, we tried to untangle whether tangible aid leads to law enforcement reporting or if it might work the other way around. Recall that 46% of women had not reported to law enforcement when we first interviewed them. Over the next nine months, about 10% of women made a report to law enforcement. For these women, we were able to ask: does earlier tangible aid from family and friends or community-based providers increase the likelihood that women will report the sexual assault to law enforcement later?

Women receiving more tangible aid from community-based providers were more likely to report the sexual assault to law enforcement at some point over the next nine months. This finding is a big deal for policy and practice: Despite sexual assault being drastically under-reported, when community-based providers provided practical help in the aftermath of the assault, women’s engagement with the criminal justice system increased through reporting. These findings validate the importance of investing in community-coordinated responses to intimate violence that bring criminal justice and community-based professionals together.

While our study doesn’t answer why more tangible aid from community-based providers led to law enforcement reporting, we see several possibilities. The tangible aid that community-based providers offer might include information women need about reporting (what’s involved, where to go, how to make a report). In addition, positive experiences with community-based providers may demonstrate to women that formal responses to the assault can be useful, which might encourage women to try engaging with the criminal justice system. Further, the practical help women receive from community-based providers may reduce barriers to reporting. (For women’s advice to providers from their help-seeking experiences, see our earlier post)

Communities need victim-focused, trauma-informed practices that facilitate women’s autonomous reporting decisions following sexual assault. This research points to the important role that community-based providers can play in keeping doors open for women to engage with the criminal justice system if and when they choose to do so.

P.S. We’ll update this post with a link to the forthcoming article when it is available!

***

Acknowledgements 

This research was funded by the National Institute of Justice [Grant #2012-W9-BX-049]. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views or the official position of the National Institute of Justice or any other organization.

Thank you to our community partners who made this research possible, particularly Denver’s Sexual Assault Interagency Council.

The citation for the forthcoming article is DePrince, A.P., Wright, N., Gagnon, K.L., Srinivas, T., & Labus, J. (in press). Social Reactions and Women’s Decision to Report Sexual Assault to Law Enforcement. Violence against Women. Co-authors on the forthcoming article included TSS Group member Naomi Wright as well as TSS Group alums Kerry L. Gagnon and Tejas Srinivas. 

 

The Wrong Lesson: The Radical Re-Write of the Definition of Sexual Harassment in the Proposed Title IX Rules

January 25, 2019

Only a handful of days remain to make public comments on the problematic Title IX rules proposed by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos (comments have to be submitted by January 30). If you’re thinking about submitting a comment, there are resources available on writing an effective comment and plenty of reasons to get your keyboard. For example, the proposed rules will require survivors to submit to cross-examination by an advisor of the accused’s choosing and create significant barriers to reporting.

The proposed rules also include a radical re-write of the definition of sexual harassment that has serious implications for what we teach this country’s young people about why sexual harassment and assault matter.

The new rules require that schools dismiss complaints that do not involve “unwelcome conduct on the basis of sex that is so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively denies a person equal access to the [school’s] education program or activity” (§§ 106.30, 106.45(b)(3)). According to the new rules, then, sexual harassment only matters after severe harm has already occurred – such as after a survivor has already left school entirely. In this, the proposed rules say that harassment matters only because of the consequences to an individual survivor and not the occurrence of sexual harassment.

Here’s the problem – or at least a problem – with this approach. Imagine a man uses the same sexually explicit words and graphic images to abuse two different women. One woman leaves college; the other does not. Though the man engaged in the same behavior, what he did can be investigated as sexual harassment in one instance and not in the other. The proposed rule reverse-engineers the definition of harassment based on the way survivors react rather than the behavior of the harasser. This puts the onus of defining why sexual harassment matters on the shoulders of survivors: If they can’t demonstrate severe harm, it doesn’t matter that they were sexually harassed.

An enormous body of research clearly establishes that, on average, sexual harassment and assault result in short- and long-term physical, cognitive, emotional, interpersonal, and behavioral harm. Research also documents that the impact of sexual harassment and assault on survivors varies. Some women experience physical and mental health consequences; others don’t. Some women are aware of and able to describe the immediate impact of abuse, others aren’t. Saying sexual harassment matters only after survivors can demonstrate severe harm fails to recognize the diverse responses humans have to traumatic stress and perversely penalizes resilience in the face of abuse.

This is not to say that harm should not be considered in some contexts. For example, victims have to demonstrate that they suffered harm to get monetary restitution through the civil legal system following sexual harassment or assault. Having to demonstrate harm when asking for monetary restitution for harm makes sense. However, students who report sexual harassment and assault to their schools are not asking for financial damages – they are asking to learn in an environment where they are not sexually abused.

In my own field of traumatic stress, we have used research on the harm that results from trauma to make the case that that practitioners and policy makers should pay attention to traumatic stress. Studies in the 1980s and early 1990s, for example, were critical to documenting the psychological symptoms people often experience in the aftermath of traumas. That research led to establishing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a diagnosis as well as increased policy, practice, and research attention to trauma.

So, documenting the harm that results form sexual harassment and assault to survivors has helped make the case that health and legal systems should pay attention to these forms of abuse. However, the new Title IX rules throw into sharp relief the limits of harm-based arguments, particularly when applied to individual students. For example, we know from work on trauma-informed schools that narrowly thinking about the impact of trauma on one student fails to recognize how trauma affects the learning environment for all. If sexual harassment matters to our schools only because it causes severe harm, and a particular student does not experience severe harm, then the new rules say sexual harassment doesn’t matter. That doesn’t make any sense.

In our larger national conversations, it’s time to step back from harm-focused reasoning to re-ask: Why do sexual harassment and assault matter to our schools?

Our educational system plays a critical role in socializing young people into the norms and values upon which our communities and democracy depend. Sexual harassment and assault violate a fundamental social contract between human beings who share the halls of schools and streets of neighborhoods: that we will not abuse each other in the most intimate way possible. If our educational system defines sexual harassment as mattering only when it causes harm to a specific person, we teach that abusing a person isn’t the wrong part. Abusing a person who is harmed is. That’s the wrong lesson – for schools and for society. And the wrong policy.