Category: Trauma Informed

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Military Trauma Informed

Ignoring Due Process, DOD Climbs on to the Trauma-Informed Bandwagon

The Department of Defense (DoD) is collaborating with colleges and universities to promote an ideology that threatens citizens’ fundamental constitutional rights to the presumption of innocence and due process. Trauma-informed or “start by believing” practices infer credibility on complainants while compromising the rights of the accused. Over the past decade, this prioritization of belief over truth has resulted in investigators being increasingly encouraged to “reassure the victim that he or she will not be judged and that the complaint will be taken seriously” so they will not “suffer additional trauma” or be discouraged from reporting. Trauma-informed procedures represent an attempt to recast the neutral role of the investigator into that of an advocate and thereby systematically bias the criminal justice system.

Ethical codes, at the core of assuring our due process rights, mandate diligence, integrity, and impartiality in the conduct of criminal investigations. “This system of truth seeking and the imposition of appropriate sanctions rest on the discovery and production of evidence that is accurate, relevant, adequate and unbiased.”i Former Secretary of Defense Mattis declared that “the DoD must be the epitome of American values and ethics” and “doing what is right at all times.” Current Secretary of Defense Martin Esper recently renewed this commitment, requesting all military personnel and DoD employees to take “a solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution.”

Contrary to these pledges, the DoD is coordinating with colleges and universities to promote the use of a ‘Start By Believing’ or trauma-informed approach to sexual assault/sexual harassment as “best practice” in military criminal investigations and on college campuses.

On September 5, the Department of the Navy, in conjunction with the State University of New York (SUNY), hosted a regional discussion entitled “Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment.” The conference is a continued discussion from the National Discussion on Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment at America’s Colleges, Universities, and Service Academies held at the United States Naval Academy in April 2019.

Speakers included Secretary of the Navy, Richard V. Spencer and Ms. Melissa Cohen, Director, Department of Navy, Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office (SAPRO), among others.ii

Cohen explained, “By holding these regional discussions, we can learn from each other and work together to eliminate these criminal and destructive behaviors from the military and in society.” For many years, the DoD has used trauma-informed, victim-centered approach in criminal investigations, similar to those utilized in college Title IX investigations. However, the DoD appears to be even more aggressive in their attempt to eradicate sexual assault and sexual harassment so they can “rid our institutions of these crimes.”

Earlier this year, the military assembled a joint task force to study sexual assault accountability and investigation. In April, the task force issued a report, stating, “The military justice system is… quite unique in that it treats behaviors counter to good order and discipline as crimes, while providing comprehensive support to victims throughout the process.” This report’s highest priority recommendation is “establishing a specific criminal offense for sexual harassment as a stand alone crime. The over-broad definition of sexual harassment as “conduct that-involves unwelcome, unwanted or uninvited advances” means even a first time request for something could be considered unwelcome.

The task force concluded that making sexual harassment a crime would “more firmly reinforce the Department’s view that such conduct is immoral and unacceptable” and that “adding a specific criminal offense of sexual harassment” will “make a strong military-wide statement about the seriousness of these behaviors and the military’s zero tolerance for them.” The task force recommendation? Sexual harassment” is an offense subject to court-martial!

The DoD has also worked hard to push the concepts of ‘believe the victim’ and trauma-informed training in the military. There are many strong arguments as to why our military should not be teaming up with our colleges and universities to push the agenda of these guilt presuming, trauma informed approach’s to sexual assault and sexual harassment.

  • Serious questions and problems that have been identified with a “Start By Believing approach. “Assertions about how trauma physiologically impedes the ability to resist or coherently remember assault have greatly undermined defense against assault allegations. Science offers little support for a ‘Start By Believing’ approach.The US Air Force (USAF) rejected the use of Forensic Experiential Trauma Interview, (FETI) techniques, stating “Given the lack of empirical evidence on FETI’s effectiveness, and the large number of investigative, professional and scientific concerns regarding FETI and FETI training, the Air Force does not consider FETI as a viable option for investigative interviewing. We believe it would be inappropriate and irresponsible to discontinue the use of a robust, well-studied, effective, and empirically-validated interviewing method that is supported by the latest scientific research (the Cognitive Interview), in favor of an interviewing method that is loosely constricted, is based on flawed science, makes unfounded claims about its effectiveness, and has never once been tested, studied, researched or validated.” Military officers are being trained by the National Organization for Victim Assistance (NOVA). NOVA serves as a national forum for victim advocacy in support of victim oriented legislation and public policy.In the USAF rejection of FETI techniques, Officers of Special Investigations, Linda S. Estes and Jeane M. Lambrecht report that trauma-informed “reasoning became endemic in the therapeutic community decades ago as part of the “recovered memory” movement, which led to many false accusations of abuse.” Estes and Lambrecht question whether it is “prudent to present sensory details and emotion as “evidence” of an allegation” and shared concern “that using this terminology could lead our investigators to be discredited in court.”

Two independent reports issued in the past month refute Trauma-Informed theories as scientifically flawed and incompatible with constitutionally rooted notions of due process and fundamental fairness.

  • In early September the Center for Prosecutor Integrity issued a Special Report that analyzes and refutes many claims of Trauma-Informed proponents. Written by behavioral neuroscientists Sujeeta Bhatt, PhD and Susan Brandon, PhD, the report concludes:
    “Examination of studies across these domains did not reveal any evidence to support the notion that victims of potentially traumatic events require interview methods that are different from those that have been shown to be most effective for accounts of events that are presumably not traumatic.”

    In August the Association of Title IX Administrators – ATIXA – issued a Position Statement on “Trauma-Informed Training and the Neurobiology of Trauma.” The strongly worded report concludes,

    “we need to resist biased and biasing trainings and the temptation to allow evidence to be influenced by conclusions about the neurobiology of trauma that are not empirically supported.”

Trauma-informed approaches do not allow for the presumption of innocence, a neutral civil liberty, and our constitutional right. The concern to provide justice for “victims” seems to have trumped concern for avoiding wrongful convictions and the seeking of truth and facts! Our young men in the military deserve a fair process that honors our constitution and the military’s ethical codes. The DoD should not be waging war against its members who are fighting for our freedoms, but against unsound policies that seek to destroy what America is about.

Source: http://www.ifeminists.net/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.1459

Categories
Investigations Trauma Informed

‘Trauma-Informed’ Bulletin Is Replete with Misrepresentations and Mistakes: CPI Report

‘Trauma-Informed’ Bulletin Is Replete with Misrepresentations and Mistakes: CPI Report

WASHINGTON / September 3, 2019 – A new Center for Prosecutor Integrity report documents factual errors and faulty conclusions contained in a 2019 bulletin published by End Violence Against Women International. Titled, “Understanding the Neurobiology of Trauma and Implications for Interviewing Victims,” the EVAWI bulletin purports to summarize the research on the neurobiology of trauma and provide recommendations for law enforcement personnel who investigate allegations of sexual assault.

The new CPI report was researched and written by behavioral neuroscientists Sujeeta Bhatt, PhD and Susan Brandon, PhD.

“Trauma-informed” proponents claim that persons who experience sexual assault are unable to accurately recall the incident, and that inconsistencies in their accounts should be taken as proof that the assault occurred. But citing numerous studies, Bhatt and Brandon reject this theory, concluding, “The impacts of trauma on memories and recall are widely variable. The stress accompanying and resulting from trauma may produce strong memories, impair memories, have no effect on memories, or increase the possibility of false memories.”

Bhatt and Brandon argue that criminal investigators do not need to use special interview methods with purported trauma victims: “Examination of studies across these domains did not reveal any evidence to support the notion that victims of potentially traumatic events require interview methods that are different from those that have been shown to be most effective for accounts of events that are presumably not traumatic.”

Their critique is more fundamental, saying an “undue emphasis on brain science increases the likelihood of hindering an investigation” because it can promote confirmation bias and undue stereotypes. The new CPI report is available online (1).

Separately, the Association of Title IX Administrators (ATIXA) recently published a Position Paper on “Trauma-Informed Training and Neurobiology of Trauma” that sharply criticizes the assumptions, precepts, and methods of trauma-informed advocates (2).

Citations:

  1. http://www.prosecutorintegrity.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Review-of-Neurobiology-of-Trauma-9.1.2019.docx
  2. https://cdn.atixa.org/website-media/atixa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/20123741/2019-ATIXA-Trauma-Position-Statement-Final-Version.pdf

Press release is posted here: http://www.prosecutorintegrity.org/pr/trauma-informed-bulletin-is-replete-with-misrepresentations-and-mistakes-cpi-report/

Categories
Believe the Victim Trauma Informed

Highlights of New Special Report on the Neurobiology of Trauma

Recently the Association of Title IX Administrators (ATIXA) published a Position Paper on “Trauma-Informed Training and Neurobiology of Trauma” that sharply criticizes the assumptions, precepts, and methods of trauma-informed proponents. Now, the Center for Prosecutor Integrity has published a separate report that takes a deep-dive into the science behind trauma-informed theory, as expounded in a bulletin written by End Violence Against Women International titled, “Understanding the Neurobiology of Trauma and Implications for Interviewing Victims.”

Following are highlights from the CPI report titled, “A Review of ‘Understanding the Neurobiology of Trauma and Implications for Interviewing Victims:’ Are We Trading One Prejudice for Another?“, researched and written by behavioral neuroscientists Sujeeta Bhatt, PhD and Susan Brandon, PhD. A large part of their review, which contains 250 citations from the scientific literature, documents the “Over-Simplification and Errors in Descriptions of Brain Processes” of the EVAWI report:

  • “The impacts of trauma on memories and recall are widely variable. The stress accompanying and resulting from trauma may produce strong memories (McGaugh, 2000; McGaugh and Roozendaal, 2002), impair memories (Salehi, Cordero, and Sandi, 2010), have no effect on memories (Shermohammed, Davidow, Somerville, and Murty, 2019), or increase the possibility of false memories.” (p. 5)
  • “The  [EVAWI] authors describe one of the roles of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as being to integrate “memory data into narrative ‘stories’ (p. 9);” however, recent research shows that the neural networks involved in narrative formation are currently unknown.” (p. 5)
  • “The description of ‘attachment circuitry,’ defined as that “which allows us to connect emotionally with other human beings,”  does not appear to be based on current findings.” (p. 6)
  • “The authors incorrectly name and describe “habitual behaviors” demonstrated by sexual assault victims.” (p. 7)

Bhatt and Brandon caution that an “undue emphasis on brain science increases the likelihood of hindering an investigation”  because it can promote confirmation bias and undue stereotypes, and create a false information effect (pp. 7-9) More fundamentally, the authors argue that criminal investigators do not need to use special interview methods with purported trauma victims:

“Examination of studies across these domains did not reveal any evidence to support the notion that victims of potentially traumatic events require interview methods that are different from those that have been shown to be most effective for accounts of events that are presumably not traumatic. In fact, one of the most robust – and most studied – methods of interviewing victims and witnesses, the Cognitive Interview, was constructed specifically for such interviews, as part of a request to the academic and scientific community by the U.S. Department of Justice to construct an interview protocol that was different from the accusatorial protocols common to American police departments (Kelly and Meissner, 2015; Meissner, et al., 2014). Previous reviews of interview protocols purported to be especially useful to trauma victims (e.g., the Forensic Experiential Trauma Interview; Meissner, 2014) also have failed to support the assertion that memory processes (encoding, consolidation, or recall) are so unique in instances of trauma that special protocols are necessary or even useful.” (p. 9)

Bhatt and Brandon conclude their analysis with this stunning critique:

“Unfortunately, the neurobiology of trauma information provided in the Wilson et al. (2019) bulletin does not contribute in any meaningful way to justify the need for trauma-informed interviewing methods….research has indicated that resilience, use of psychopharmacologic substances (e.g., drugs, alcohol), and frequency and type of trauma all affect the subjective experience of trauma, however, none of these mitigating factors are described in the Wilson et al. (2019) bulletin.

“The meaning of our current understanding of the brain, as described above, for investigations of assault is difficult to ascertain because the impacts of traumatic experiences on memories and recall are variable, as noted. This means that an investigator who makes assumptions about the status of an alleged victim risks biasing the investigation in ways that increase the likelihood that either the innocent will be found guilty or the guilty will go free.

“In fact, assertions about brain processes in instances of trauma run the risk of leading an investigator to assume that he or she knows how the case should proceed, what the victim feels, or what should happen with respect to the suspect.” (p. 10)

In short, “Over-generalizations and assertions in the bulletin that cannot be supported by current science make some of these descriptions problematic for the intended audience(s)” (p. 5), and “As written, the bulletin does not provide sufficient evidence to support conclusions reached on the basis of the anecdotes” (p. 3).

Categories
Campus Trauma Informed Violence Against Women Act

Highlights from the ATIXA Position Statement on Trauma-Informed Methods

On August 22, the Association of Title IX Administrators – ATIXA – issued a Position Statement on Trauma-Informed Training and the Neurobiology of Trauma that exposes the many fallacies of “trauma-informed” concepts and methods: https://cdn.atixa.org/website-media/atixa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/20123741/2019-ATIXA-Trauma-Position-Statement-Final-Version.pdf

The Statement begins by quoting a claim that is often cited in trauma-informed training materials:

“Trauma leaves tracks on its victims. It is very difficult to fake or ‘act’ the sorts of symptoms [of trauma]. When someone displays these symptoms, this alone is evidence that they have been victimized.”

ATIXA delivers a strong rebuke to this claim: “Proffered as truth that a mere claim of trauma is proof of assault, this quote should be troubling to any rational mind. To assert that trauma cannot be faked is as flagrantly false a claim as asserting that trauma is proof of assault.”

The eight-page Statement goes on to address many of the flaws of the claims of trauma-informed proponents:

  • “Using a study of lab rats to reach any conclusion about the story of a victim of sexual assault is troubling..Do rats tell stories? Do they experience sexual assault?..there is science behind these ideas, but they are not empirical conclusions.”
  • “The ‘Neurobiology of Trauma’ should not significantly influence the way that colleges and schools evaluate evidence… improper use of trauma-informed methods turns trauma into evidence, which IS junk science and goes way too far.”
  • “application [of trauma-informed theories].. has gotten way ahead of the actual science… is being misapplied, and…some purveyors of this knowledge are politically motivated to extrapolate well beyond any reasonable empirical conclusions…”
  • There’s an “important distinction between practices that help an impacted party retrieve memory and avoid gratuitous re-triggering…and those [relying] on neurobiological theories to influence the interpretation of evidence.” Only the former is correct.

The ATIXA Statement concludes with this unequivocal message:

“The truth is that we understand perhaps 1/100th of 1% of what we need to know and may someday understand about how the brain responds to trauma. With such a nascent body of knowledge, most conclusions are premature. It is irresponsible to attribute much about how we interpret evidence to existing neuroscientific understandings of trauma, except to correlate scrambled memory encoding and retrieval with life-threatening incidents, and to see that flight/fright/freeze may be common reactions to such incidents. That is about it. Anything more than that is really theory, thus far unsupported by conclusive evidence.”

The ATIXA report may turn out to be a game-changer.

 

Quotes compiled by Cynthia Garrett, Esq.

Categories
Affirmative Consent Due Process Trauma Informed

Will the ABA Reject Due Process?

In August 2014 the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga deemed student Corey Mock guilty of sexual assault, finding that in the disputed encounter he failed to prove he had obtained “affirmative consent” from the accuser. According to Mr. Mock’s unrebutted testimony, the female student’s actions during intercourse led him to believe that she had consented to sex. Mr. Mock sued the school, and a Tennessee judge ruled in his favor. “Affirmative consent,” the judge wrote, “is flawed and untenable if due process is to be afforded.” The standard “erroneously shifted the burden of proof” to the accused.

Mr. Mock’s experience is hardly unique. State laws in California, Connecticut and New York require educational institutions to find against students or personnel accused of sexual misconduct unless they can prove the accuser gave “affirmative consent,” meaning a positive manifestation by words or actions of consent to each sex act during an encounter. In practice, as Janet Halley of Harvard Law School has noted, these statutes authorize “proceedings in which the decision maker effectively presumes guilt and requires the accused to disprove it.”

In the past few years thinkers and politicians of diverse ideologies have recognized the excessively punitive nature of the American criminal justice system. Against this backdrop, it’s incredible that the American Bar Association’s House of Delegates plans this week to consider a resolution that would urge legislatures and courts to redefine criminal sexual assault and apply standards like the one in the Mock case.

The resolution, originally advanced by the ABA’s Criminal Justice Section and Commission on Domestic and Sexual Violence, says that the law should “define consent in sexual assault cases as the assent of a person who is competent to give consent to engage in a specific act of sexual penetration, oral sex, or sexual contact” and “provide that consent is expressed by words or action in the context of all the circumstances.”

Due-process advocates have denounced the proposal. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers calls it a “radical change in the law” that “assumes guilt in the absence of any evidence regarding consent . . . merely upon evidence of a sex act with nothing more.” By “requiring an accused person to prove affirmative consent to each sexual act rather than requiring the prosecution to prove lack of consent,” the association contends, any law based on the proposal would violate the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and 14th amendments. Scott Greenfield, a New York criminal-defense lawyer, put the point more bluntly: It would “result in the conviction of innocent men.”

To be sure, rape and sexual-assault laws long were outrageously lenient. Husbands had legal rights to force sex on their wives, and many women were held not to be rape victims because they had not resisted fiercely, at risk of life and limb. Mindful of this history, NACDL excluded from its criticism a clause urging rejection of “any requirement that sexual assault victims have a legal burden of verbal or physical resistance.” But the rest of the ABA proposal would give prosecutors who cannot prove sexual assault an easy way to coerce guilty pleas from men who have committed no crime.

Advocates of the proposal cite dubious science in support of diminishing the constitutional rights of the accused. The report justifying the resolution touts “current research on the neurobiology of trauma,” including studies of “frozen fright,” which allegedly occurs when “a person confronted by an unexpectedly aggressive partner or stranger succumbs to panic, becomes paralyzed by anxiety, or fears that resistance will engender even greater danger.”

These claims are based on circular reasoning, as Emily Yoffe notes in a September 2017 Atlantic article. She notes the researchers argue not only that “the absence of verbal or physical resistance, the inability to recall crucial parts of an alleged assault, a changing story . . . should raise questions or doubt about a claim,” but that “all of these behaviors can be considered evidence that an assault occurred.” As Ms. Yoffe recognizes, this type of “science” already has played a prominent role in promoting unfairness in campus Title IX tribunals. The University of Mississippi, for instance, trained sexual-assault adjudicators that even lying by an accuser should be interpreted as evidence that the accused is guilty. By such logic, Ms. Yoffe writes, “the accused is always guilty.”

A more elite legal group, the American Law Institute, had already considered this issue. The ALI’s members voted overwhelmingly to reject affirmative-consent language proposed by activists who have for years sought to revise the group’s Model Penal Code. Rather than acknowledge this dramatic vote, the ABA report suggests that the ALI’s decision “is not yet final.” That characterization is misleading at best: A letter signed by more than 100 ALI members to the ABA’s president insists that moving forward on such an “obviously deficient” record would question “the essential integrity of the ABA.”

On Saturday, in a highly unusual move, the Criminal Justice Section—whose membership includes prosecutors and defense lawyers—voted unanimously to rescind its co-sponsorship of the resolution. But unless the Commission on Domestic and Sexual Violence reverses its position and agrees to pull the offering, the ABA House of Delegates will vote. If the resolution is adopted, it will stain the reputation of the nation’s largest organization of lawyers.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-the-aba-reject-due-process-11565559212

Categories
Trauma Informed

Why is Google Blocking Articles on Judicial Bias and Trauma-Informed Training?

There’s no question Google is manipulating search results, but it’s a much broader problem than just the presidential election.  Google is also altering search results on a broader front.  Consider the following:

An op-ed was recently published in a Nebraska newspaper that discusses the problem of politicized training for judges, police, and prosecutors under the title: “Biased Training for Judges Still a Problem.”  Among other things, the op-ed discusses the problem of “trauma-informed” training.

The article was originally published on May 24, 2019. One month later, an Internet search was conducted on the four major search engines. If you search on the term, “biased training judges,” you receive the following results:

  1. Duck, Duck Go – Three of the first four  “hits” picked up this article.  The first was from the SAVE website, the second was from the MassCentral website, and the fourth was from the Grand Island Independent website (the newspaper that originally published the article).
  2. Yahoo – The first three results picked up this article in the following order:  SAVE, MassCentral, and Grand Island Independent
  3. Bing — Three of the first four results picked up this article in the following order:  SAVE (2), MassCentral (3), Grand Island Independent (4)
  4. Google – The article does not appear at all…zero results!

The only way for Google to get zero results on a search that is in the top four for each of the other major search engines is for Google to be manipulating its algorithm.

Categories
Sexual Assault Trauma Informed

Trauma Informed Investigations Stole My Son’s Future

If you’d have asked me before my son was accused of sexual misconduct, I would have said that trauma-informed investigations were a good idea. Living through the ’90s as a female college student, then as a woman motivated to be successful in a male-dominated field, sexual harassment, inequality, and forcible rape happened. It still happens today. Then so many victims were afraid to come forward as they are now. However, in our rush for justice, we are bearing witness to the creation of a new class of victims on college campuses and in the criminal justice system: The innocent.

These new victims aren’t given the presumption of innocence. They aren’t entitled to know the accusation against them. Evidence is withheld from them and their lawyers. Police officers ask deceptively leading questions, and school investigators are both judge and jury making life-altering sanction decisions based on the presumption that a ‘victim’ never lies.

In my son’s case, he suffered through all of that and more. We were told to trust the system. That the system works. Hate to tell you, it only works for you if you have the will, courage, and financial resources to fight.

My son was accused of a felony sexual assault punishable up to 40 years in prison. What did he do? He accepted a woman’s invitation to lay on her bed. They were clothed at all times, and consumed no alcohol and no drugs. There was no sex, no fondling, no skin to skin contact, no kissing. She was on top of him and she was in control the whole time. We will never know what caused her to falsely accuse my son of assault.

Her accusation was fabricated and disgusting. All of her statements were lies, used to destroy my son or manipulate the truth. As campus employees, the police officer and the school Title IX investigator worked hand in hand with the district attorney’s office. Not once was my son told his rights. The entire time, I kept asking myself, won’t someone just look at the evidence? Talk to the witnesses? But in the well-intentioned battle against sexual assault, facts become irrelevant, and truth never seems to matter. 

What we witnessed is that once you start from a position of believing the purported victim, you never move from it, despite evidence that proves the accusation to be false. While there is value to treat potential victims with care, something that has often been lacking, if you start by believing, you start by assuming he is guilty.

  • My child endured terribly unfair treatment as a result of trauma-informed methods.
    My son was arrested and spent the night in jail based on a DNA collection warrant. The DNA test results were exculpatory; unfortunately they were ignored by the school and disregarded by the prosecutor.
  • His accuser was interviewed for 75 minutes and nothing was recorded or documented.
  • The Prosecutor continued despite knowing the accuser destroyed exculpatory evidence and lied on a police report.
  • The campus detective, while testifying under oath, stated that he did not use leading questions. Yet when interviewing my son’s ex-girlfriend, the first question asked to her, “Please tell me about the time xxx sexually assaulted you.”
  • The Campus detective admitted on the witness stand he did not follow proper police procedure.
  • Neither investigator nor the prosecutor interviewed the very first person to interact with my son’s accuser after he left her, the responding RA. The RA had evidence that supported my son’s innocence.

Even though all of the evidence pointed to a false allegation, my son was forced to endure four days of a trial. He faced a sentence of up to forty years. The jury acquitted him in less than one hour.

My family suffered significant, irreversible damage. Tears, anger, and heart-wrenching hate is a “new normal.” We do our best to push through the bad days. If the investigators would have done their jobs with integrity, my son would not have lived in fear for over a year in terror of just about everyone and everything.

The prosecutor can claim victory, though. Every time my son undergoes a background check it shows that he was acquitted of felony sexual assault, and he is judged guilty. Getting a good paying job is impossible. He will never get to live as an innocent person should. This is the result of a rush to believe, a lack of objective fact-finding, and the sheer bias with which my son was viewed. He did not break the law, his accuser did. And he will pay for it for the rest of his life.

* A. Pebble is the author’s pen name, used because the author’s son is still recovering from the psychological after-effects of the experience.

Source: http://www.ifeminists.net/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.1451