Month: January 2018

Women Around the World Warn of the Excesses of the #MeToo Movement

Post author By saveadmin
Post date January 29, 2018

PRESS RELEASE

Women Around the World Warn of the Excesses of the #MeToo Movement

WASHINGTON / January 29, 2018 – Numerous leading women around the world – including media personalities, professors, and commentators – have spoken out against the excesses of the #MeToo movement. Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) has compiled these statements for the benefit of lawmakers who may be considering legislation designed to address workplace sexual harassment (1).

These women come from all points on the political spectrum. Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet commented, for example, “My fairness concerns with the #MeToo phenomenon include the ready acceptance in many cases of anonymous complaints, and of claims made by women over conflicting claims by men, to terminate careers without any investigation of the facts.” (2)

Following are a few of the many statements critical of #MeToo:

Julia Hartley-Brewer: The #MeToo “hashtag claims to be about empowering women to speak out when actually it is turning women into perpetual victims.”
Wendy Kaminer: “#MeToo is the unthinking woman’s anti-harassment crusade.”
Faith Moore: #MeToo “is a betrayal of the women who’ve actually been raped or assaulted.”

Women from other countries have expressed their concerns in even stronger terms. These are a few examples:

Rita Panahi, Australia: “My greatest concern is that the #MeToo phenomenon creates a toxic narrative that casts every male as a potential predator and every female as a perpetual victim.”
Margaret Atwood, Canada: “In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated.”
Nathalie Rothschild, Sweden: The #MeToo is “normalizing the kind of mob behavior that is the most negative aspect of internet culture, and how it is eroding the presumption of innocence.”

SAVE emphasizes that victims of sexual misconduct should feel free to speak out, they should be treated respectfully, and their claims should be investigated objectively and thoroughly (3). But #MeToo should not be allowed to turn into a modern-day vigilante movement that ignores due process and eradicates the presumption of innocence.

Citations:

SAVE (Stop Abusive and Violent Environments) is working for effective and fair solutions to sexual assault, sexual harassment, and domestic violence: www.saveservices.org

Believe the Victim

Junk Science Behind Trauma-Informed Theories

Post author By saveadmin
Post date January 3, 2018

Stop Abusive and Violent Environments

Trauma-informed behavioral theories of sexual assault originated with anecdotal reports of how victims of forcible rape responded to their experiences. The concept of “rape trauma syndrome” (RTS) stemmed from a 1974 survey of 92 forcible rape victims’ self-reported symptoms.[1] Authors of the survey classified the symptoms into two stages: “fear or terror,” followed by efforts to “reorganize” their lives.[2]

The 1974 survey has been the focus of sharp criticism, highlighting “definitional problems, biased research samples,” and unreliability because “the inherent complexity of the phenomenon vitiate all attempts to establish empirically the causal relationship implicit in the concept of a rape trauma syndrome.”[3] The survey’s credibility is also compromised by its “failure to distinguish between victims of rapes, attempted rapes, and molestation.”[4] One legal expert concluded rape trauma syndrome is not “generally accepted by experts.”[5] Another found it “troubling” that theories of traumatic memory “continue to thrive as tenacious cultural memes” despite “very minimal” scientific support.[6]

But these criticisms have not deterred the accretion of even more symptoms putatively encompassed by “rape trauma syndrome,” creating a veritable chicken soup of quasi-diagnoses like “tonic immobility,” “fragmentation of memories,”[7] and “factual inconsistencies.”[8] One author predicted, “[i]f virtually any victim behavior is described as consistent with RTS, the term soon will have little meaning.”[9]

Despite research concluding that extreme stress may actually enhance the subsequent recall of stressful incidents,^[10] rape trauma theories have spawned an industry to teach investigators “trauma-informed” approaches. Rebecca Campbell, PhD, long-time victims’ advocate and psychology professor at Michigan State University, has popularized the “trauma-informed” approach through numerous publications^[11] and presentations to professional audiences across the country.

Campus investigators stand at the epicenter of trauma-informed concepts. Guidance from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights directed Title IX training to include “the effects of trauma, including neurobiological change”[12] — a phrase pregnant with hidden meaning. Although this guidance has been rescinded, many college Title IX programs continue to follow its admonitions.

The illusory evidence for trauma-informed theory is found in various training regimes, including a program on trauma-informed sexual assault investigation offered by the National Center for Campus Public Safety (NCCPS).[13] NCCPS’s Why Campuses Should Conduct Trauma-Informed Sexual Assault Investigations webinar repeats the same unsupported “trauma-informed” theories on memory fragmentation, and suggests it is normal for “victims” to engage in counterintuitive victim behavior such as communicating and “consensual sexual or social activities” with the alleged perpetrator.[14]

Journalist Emily Yoffe has characterized trauma-informed approaches as emblematic of “junk science:”

The result is not only a system in which some men are wrongly accused and wrongly punished. It is a system vulnerable to substantial backlash. University professors and administrators should understand this. And they, of all people, should identify and call out junk science.[15]

Harvard law professor Janet Halley has ridiculed the trauma-informed training employed by her university, noting the materials provide a “sixth grade level summary of selected neurobiological research” and are “100% aimed to convince them to believe complainants, precisely when they seem unreliable and incoherent.”^[16]

In sum, under the umbrella of “trauma-informed” theories, victims’ advocates not only recommend disregarding complainants’ inconsistencies or behavioral anomalies; they also insist such inconsistencies should be viewed as probative evidence of trauma. Illogically, this interpretation precludes consideration of a complainant’s incongruous statements or inconsistent behavior as evidence, resulting in an irrefutable argument that the victim’s fragmented or lost memories are certain evidence of trauma, with the implication that therefore the allegations are true.

[1] Ann Wolbert Burgess & Lynda Lytle Holmstrom, Rape Trauma Syndrome, 131 Am. J. Psychiatry 98 (1974).

[2] Julian D. Ford, Christine A. Courtois, Rape Trauma Syndrome, Prevention of PTSD, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (2015) http://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/rape-trauma-syndrome

[3] Giannelli, Paul C., Rape Trauma Syndrome, Faculty Publications, Paper 346, p. 271 (1997). http://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/faculty_publications/346

[4] Robert R. Lawrence, Checking the Allure of Increased Conviction Rates: The Admissibility of Expert Testimony on Rape Trauma Syndrome in Criminal Proceedings, 70 Va. L. Rev. 1657, 1678-1680 (1984)

[5] William O’Donohue, Gwendolyn C. Carlson, Lorraine T. Benuto & Natalie M. Bennett, Examining the Scientific Validity of Rape Trauma Syndrome, University of Nevada, Reno, Psychiatry, 21 Psych. & Law, Issue 6, 858-876, 860 (2014).

[6] Robert A. Nash and James Ost, ed., Concluding Remarks; Malleable knowledge about malleable memories, False and Distorted Memories, p. 159, Psychology Press (2016).

[7] Stephen Porter and Angela R. Birt, Is Traumatic Memory Special? Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 15 S101-S117, S101 (2001).

[8] Joanne Archambault (Ret.), Understanding the Neurobiology of Trauma and Implications for Interviewing Victims, p. 25 (2016) https://www.evawintl.org/Library/DocumentLibraryHandler.ashx?id=842.

[9] Frazier and Borgida, Rape Trauma Syndrome: A Review of Case Law and Psychological Research, 16 Law & Hum. Behav. 293, 304-305 (1992).

[10] Richard McNally, Pres. and Fellows Harvard Col., Remembering Trauma, Harvard University Press, p. 180 (2005).

[11] See, for example, Campbell, R., Shaw, J., & Fehler-Cabral, G., Evaluation of a victim-centered, trauma-informed victim notification protocol for untested sexual assault kits (SAKs), Violence Against Women (April 24, 2017).

[12] Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, Questions and Answers on Title IX and Sexual Violence, p. 40 (2014), withdrawn by 2017 Dear Colleague Letter, https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-title-ix-201709.pdf; see archived 2014 Questions and Answers, https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/qa-201404-title-ix.pdf

[13] National Center for Campus Public Safety, Not Alone Report, https://www.nccpsafety.org/resources/library/not-alone-report/.

[14] Jeffrey J. Nolan, J.D., Why Campuses Should Conduct Trauma-Informed Sexual Assault Investigations (webinar) Trauma-Informed Sexual Assault Investigation and Adjudication Institute, Slides 23, 24 (2016). https://www.nccpsafety.org/training-technical-assistance/webinars/why-campuses-should-conduct-trauma-informed-sexual-assault-investigations#embeds

[15] Emily Yoffe, The Bad Science Behind Campus Response to Sexual Assault, The Atlantic, (Sept. 8, 2017) https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/09/the-bad-science-behind-campus-response-to-sexual-assault/539211/

[16] Janet Halley, Trading the Megaphone for the Gavel in Title IX Enforcement, Harvard Law Review 128 Harv. L. Rev. F. 103 (Feb. 18, 2015) https://harvardlawreview.org/2015/02/trading-the-megaphone-for-the-gavel-in-title-ix-enforcement-2/

Campus Title IX Victim-Centered Investigations

PR: SAVE Calls for Major Reforms to Campus ‘Victim-Centered’ Investigations

Post author By saveadmin
Post date January 1, 2018

Contact: Nasheia Conway

Telephone: 301-801-0608

Email: nconway@saveservices.org

Following USC ‘motherf—er’ Case, SAVE Calls for Major Reforms to Campus ‘Victim-Centered’ Investigations

WASHINGTON / January 12, 2018 – Superior Court Judge Elizabeth White recently issued a ruling regarding a sexual assault case in which she concluded the university’s investigative procedures lacked fairness and impartiality. Based on this case and similar ones at other universities, Stop Abusive and Violent Environments is now calling on college administrators to end the practice of using guilt-presuming “victim-centered” investigations.

University of Southern California investigator Patrick Noonan submitted an investigative report that omitted more than 150 pages of communications between the parties. The investigator failed to interview the man’s roommate, despite the accused student’s request. Noonan also organized the numerous text messages in non-chronological order, rendering their meaning difficult to decipher.

Following a subsequent teleconference between the university officials and the accused student and his advisor, neither party hung up the line. Thereupon Noonan and the USC Title IX coordinator chatted between themselves, referring to the male student as a “motherfucker” and commenting that the accuser was “so cute and intelligent.”

The expelled student filed a lawsuit against the university. Not surprisingly, the judge concluded the accused student was a victim of a process that was not “fair, thorough, reliabl[y] neutral, and impartial.” http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/40537/

This week SAVE is releasing a new Special Report, “’Believe the Victim:’ The Transformation of Justice.” The report traces the evolution of the “victim-centered” movement over the past decade and documents its incompatibility with recognized investigative methods that are premised on objectivity, neutrality, and fairness. http://www.saveservices.org/wp-content/uploads/SAVE-Believe-the-Victim.pdf

The report concludes, “Victim advocates’ efforts to assure serious consideration and respectful treatment for complainants are commendable. But demanding that investigators and adjudicators reflexively “believe the victim” places a priority on subjective feelings over objective evidence.”

A previous SAVE report documented how victim-centered investigations represent a liability risk for colleges and universities: http://www.saveservices.org/wp-content/uploads/Victim-Centered-Investigations-and-Liability-Risk.pdf

SAVE (Stop Abusive and Violent Environments) is working for fair and effective solutions to campus sexual assault: www.saveservices.org