You are listening to a podcast by the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. The NSVRC serves as the nation’s principle information and resource center regarding all aspects of sexual violence and its prevention. This podcast is part of the NSVRC exchange series where research and practice converge to end sexual violence. 

In today’s podcast we talk with psychologist Dr. Sarah E. Ullman about her most recent work. Dr. Ullman is a professor of criminology, law and justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her book, Talking about Sexual Assault: Society’s Response to Survivors published in March 2010 by the American Psychological Association takes a comprehensive approach to the issue of rape disclosure. By looking at both the different ways in which women come to disclose as well as the societal response to it.

So my first question is what made you interested in researching secondary response to sexual assaults?

I basically have seen the way female victims are blamed in society for their assault and felt that a response is needed to sort of combat the victim blaming climate that exists in society.

And can you talk a little bit about the research you did previously that led up to this?

You mean the book specifically?

Yeah.

Yes, I basically wanted to try to provide the public and professionals and graduate students who are training to work with survivors information from research that we know already about the disclosure of sexual assault, what victims go through, about the kinds of responses they get from both informal and formal helpers in society and try to propose some solutions for stopping some of the negative reactions that victims get when they try to talk about sexual assault.

And if you could highlight elements of your book that victim services should learn. What do you think is the main message of your book for victim services?

That really we need collaborative kinds of work, that all the systems and service providers need to collaborate and there are models that are developing to sort of try to do that better because victims have sort of separate experiences with all these different systems that aren’t always talking to each other or working together or mitigating sort of negative kinds of experiences they may have, but I think we could do better to minimize them having to have experiences of secondary victimization if there was more collaboration, but also I think the formal systems need to draw on and support and try to help the informal social network members of victims, family, friends, romantic partners, those that victims really are turning to for help most often after an assault.

You talk a little bit about the difference between clinicians and advocates. Would you mind just going into that a little bit?

Yeah, in my research advocates who I refer to as people who are working in rape crisis centers some of them were also doing crisis counseling, but also medical and legal advocacy for victims. Clinicians generally are trained mental health professionals with formal training of some sort that could be social workers, psychologists, other counselors who do therapy and I think both of these groups could have meetings or collaborate together maybe a little bit better around this population to learn better how to respond rape victims needs and maybe improve sort of systems of referral because in my own research rape crisis personnel they would like for mental heal professionals to refer victims to them more than happens and also reach out to them more, so maybe you need more venues to facilitate those types of connections between rape crisis and advocates still working in crisis centers.

That’s great. You just completely answered my question without me having to ask it. I was just going to ask how they could have a more positive work related experience with each other, but you just completely went – you completely went into that already. Can you talk a little bit about the idea of secondary victimization?

Yes. This really refers to the negative responses or reactions of service system personnel, often doctors or police, emergency room or medical personnel, but also to the informal support sources like family, friends and partners of victims. Now oftentimes the term secondary victimization has been used just to refer to systems, the social systems that victims interface with, but I think of this as also the negative reactions that victims get that just come from the people in your life and again I've termed those negative social reactions so the terminology is sometimes used a little bit differently, but we’re talking about the same things, sort of negative treatment and I have developed a questionnaire to assess positive responses victims get of support and health, aid, information and the negative reactions, which is sort of the secondary victimization part of blame, control, stigma, egocentric responses and that sort of distraction or discouraging victims from talking and the measure that I developed helps researchers to quantify the types and number of reactions victims who tell others get from them and also assess the impact of getting those reactions on their mental and physical health.

I mean it’s interesting because you’re talking about how it’s not only in like a clinical sense, but in a more social sense. Why do you think people have those reactions when someone comes to them with an incidence of sexual violence or assault?

I think that the reactions are – come from partly sort of attitudes and that we have about rape specifically and gender socialization more broadly, so I think there is sort of a – you can answer that on an individual level sort of how people feel and what their immediate way of dealing with that or responding is, but also I think some of those reactions individuals make comes from this sort of gender society where we have males privileged over females and the sort of value and power that we have to – we can’t really change these views of women’s inferiority or that women are sort of sexual objects for men’s use without sort of looking at that larger culture that we all sort of absorb those kind of ideas from. Obviously there is the broader culture of pornography, violent pornography, glorification of violence against women. I think we all sort of absorb that and those beliefs about rape such as rape myths false beliefs that really lead us to make more negative reactions to have negative views of victims that just think well they must be something about them or something that they did that caused this to happen which is a natural sort of belief that could lead to a negative reaction, but I think we need actually more research to look at that. We definitely do have some work showing people who believe rape victims more strongly, which is often what we see in some of those traditional service providers like medical, police, criminal justice. They do have more traditional attitudes towards women and they do believe rape myths to a greater extend and they show in general more of these negative reactions to victims. I'm not sure if I'm quite getting to clearly answering it.

No, that’s great. If someone does come to you with a like especially just kind of layperson who doesn’t really have a lot of training in sexual violence, sexual assault what are the good reactions? How is it best to handle that so as not to say something that victimizes the victim again? 

Yeah, I think that the best – first I would say I don’t think that I think that there is a formula because everybody is coming from a different place and it’s going to be different if they just had the assault or it happened many years ago and who is doing the response or the sort of relationship there that the person has if they have one with the person responding and the history, so I think there is unfortunately no one thing, but in general I would say just the best thing is to listen, to be calm, to be engaged, but not to overreact, to express that one believes the victim and that her experience is valid and obviously not to blame them and to make any of these negative reactions and I think you can say that you’re sorry that this happened to her.  So that would sort of be one approach, but again, there is – we do have some research showing that certain reactions like blame tend to be uniformly perceived by victims negatively, but other reactions some victims may feel is helpful and another victim may not, so if somebody reacts very strongly emotionally who has a relationship to the victim some victims may see that as evidence that wow this person really loves me, they’re so effected by it. Others may feel like oh my God they’re so caught up in their reaction they’re forgetting all about me and that’s sort of what I term a more of a ego – one of the egocentric reactions, so I think we have more work to do to sort of look at that, but definitely avoiding the negative reactions and listening, that sort of thing is helpful.

All right, my last question is what can rape crisis centers and advocates do to get victims in contact with the right resources?

I think that one of the issues with rape crisis centers and I think you sent me this question initially is just that they’re viewed as a crisis source and so many victims just don’t think to go to them because of the type of assault that they have. They don’t feel like it is one, a crisis and they sort of see that as well for a stranger kind of rape and so I think that word and other people who have worked in the field for a long time have said having it called rape crisis unfortunately communicates that this is only for a certain kind of rape experience, the more stereotypical stranger rape experience, so I don’t know if we want to think about changing the terminology or more education that victims can come to crisis centers and people around them dealing with trying to support them can even if it didn’t happen recently and even if it wasn’t a stranger because I think that I've seen that a lot in my work and the workers see that too that I think that there is just not an understanding that these services are there, that they’re free, that you don’t have to have a specific type of experience to go. I think there is just still too little resources and too little information out in the media to the public about sexual assault and about what is available to victims. We’ve sort of done that more with domestic violence and we really need to do and I know your organization and many do, do this, but we need probably even more resources to really get the word out of what is available, but also to build up those services for victims because there are – there isn’t enough out there to really have an adequate response for this problem. I'm not sure if that answer-

Great, yeah, that was a great answer. So that’s it. That’s kind of I think we’ve covered most of my questions, so thank you so much for doing this. 

Great.

This was a wonderful experience. Thanks very much.

Thank you.

For more information on the NSVRC please go to www.nsvrc.org or call toll free at 877-739-3895. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center was founded by the Pennsylvania Coalition against Rape and is funded in large part by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Music by Link.