Facing The Pain of Rape

The title might suggest that I know something about facing the pain of rape. The fact is that I cannot speak authoritatively on this subject. But I recently had an experience that brought me in to contact with a group of dedicated professionals who face the pain of rape on a daily basis. I came away from that experience with a more profound respect for people who have the strength to deal with these painful, tragic, and traumatizing events because it is there chosen profession.

I was privileged to get this experience in a rather round-about way, so please indulge me while I tell the story about what led me to meet this group of people. First you need to understand that my journey to this meeting is truly a family affair. Let’s start with my daughter. In spite of my repeated warnings, she ended up following in the old man’s footsteps and sought her education and her profession in the field of Social Work. You see, I’ve been in this profession myself for the last 37 years. During her college days and just after graduating my daughter Erin gravitated to working with government and non-profit agencies that served victims of domestic violence. She is now a real veteran of those services herself, having spent 15 years as a professional social worker and manager for these types of human services. About a year ago she became the Director of the SAFeT Response Team (Rape Crisis) at Lutheran Community Services Northwest. Lutheran Community Services is the designated agency in our area (population about 400,000) to respond to rape victims at the time of first contact with law enforcement or the hospitals after a sexual assault. Her team also provides support and advocacy for victims though the menagerie our the legal system. Other sections of her agency provide on-going treatment and psychological help.  

Being a supportive boss Erin recognized that some of her folks were beginning to suffer the emotional and physical problems that people sometimes suffer from daily exposure to horrendous events like rape. In a conversation with her mom a couple of months ago, Erin began to talk about finding resources to help her staff deal with the nearly inevitable effects of seeing traumatized victims on a daily basis. There are clinical terms for this condition, but I’ll discuss those later. This is where I enter the picture. Erin’s mom (my wife) suggested that it might be useful to have me address this group and share some of my limited wisdom with them. For 29 of my 37 years as a social worker, I worked in Child Protective Services or closely related child welfare services. That kind of work has its share of exposure to truly unpleasant aspects of human behavior and pain too. Since I hadn’t gone completely insane from it, my wife thought I might be able to relate to the work Erin and her staff do, and perhaps pass along some helpful advice. I mildly protested at first knowing that I am not an expert on self-care for rape victim advocates. But in the end I agreed to meet with staff at Lutheran Community Services and conduct a discussion about professional longevity and self-care for professionals who deal in constant human victimization and trauma. And that is my journey to meeting with these extraordinary people.

I won’t go into the all the specifics of our discussion. I had been asked to do this based on my personal experiences and lessons learned over a long career, but I also did a fair bit of research on the subject (admittedly) because of my huge fear of making a fool of myself in front of my daughter and her staff. It’s one thing to be supportive to your own kid, but quite another to make a real presentation to a group of professionals that she happens to lead. So the presentation blended those personal aspects of my career with what I had learned from the literature on the subject. I think it went OK.

I’m grateful to have had the experience because I got to learn new things myself, and because it gave me the chance to really focus on this world my daughter and her colleagues have chosen. It seems strange in some ways that my own daughter and I can have this kind of collaboration as we delve into the world of rape and horrible episodes of sexual assault. When they are little kids you just never imagine that any of those parent-child connections will involve such heinous aspects of life. (weird) But they grow up and have adult jobs. In truth, her mom and I are so very proud of how both of our daughters have turned out to be fully realized adults- making great strides in their respective professions.

What is now also a professional association with Erin led to me her entire team, and gave me the incredible opportunity to share some thoughts. The first impression from meeting those folks was to sense (in them) the violence and trauma that their clients face. As I said above, I could never really appreciate the level of distress and victimization sexual assault victims experience. I had  exposure to these issues working in CPS- but nothing like the up-close and personal investment these brave individuals make to assist victims. They and their colleagues are literally there as the tears are still falling;the fear, horror, rage and confusion of rape is sinking into the marrow; and the sense of powerlessness permeates the very souls of rape victims. I realized how truly difficult it must be to do this work and to risk becoming traumatized themselves from the sheer weight of these daily tragedies. But that’s what we were there to talk about. So we discussed their personal victories and struggles to remain whole and healthy. We talked candidly about what the literature on this subject calls Secondary Trauma, Vicarious Trauma, and Compassion Fatigue. These are real experiences and real emotions clinically associated with doing the work they do. The symptoms of these unchecked conditions are similar to the stress-related symptoms (both physical and emotional) civilians might feel in an active, brutal war zone. Many times those who advocate and care for rape victims develop the same insecurities about the world that the victims themselves develop. It is called “the cost of caring”.

It takes very special people to do this work and I was honored to have their attention for a while to talk about the reality of a life spent in the midst of other people's pain. I was so moved by their openness about what it is really like for them and grateful that I could share just a few of the lessons I learned along the way. I won’t go into the details of our discussion on how to survive this kind of work, but I will say that each one there was keenly aware of the dangers this work creates for them and their families. Each one there realized they needed to care for themselves in order to continue the work they do. I’m confident each one will be there to show fierce compassion for the next rape victim they will meet.

The other major notion that occurred to me after this meeting was the profound and deeply troubling fact that rape victim advocates are still so badly needed. It was the 1970’s when social scientists, women’s rights activists, and legal authorities began to recognize that rape victims were being re-victimized by the legal system itself. I no longer call it the “justice system” because I know it’s rarely about justice. More than forty years have passed since these issues came to the forefront of our thinking about the crime of rape. But our system clearly has a long way to go in truly treating rape victims like victims, instead of treating them like accomplices to their own victimization. I admit it's probably better for sexual assault victims now than it was 40 years ago, but we are long way from real reform in dealing with these crimes. It just might be that our legal system has just gotten better at masking the institutional misogyny that permeates courts and other segments of our culture. Only this week a Judge in Montana made headlines by giving a teacher guilty of raping a 14 year old child a ridiculously light sentence because he believed the 14 year old girl contributed to her own rape. (And by the way that child committed suicide over the incident.) The Judge has since apologized for his comments, when confronted with a national tidal wave of criticism- but he didn’t change his ruling! He exposed what was in his heart-and too many other hearts. He exposed the reason why so many women never report rape- and he most definitely exposed why we still need rape victim advocates to protect the dignity and rights of victims in our legal system. There still seems to be a lingering, deep seated strain in us that views women and any hint of female sexuality (not that rape is actual sexuality) as corrupt or corrupting- giving some of those in “the system” reason to believe, in the recesses of their minds, rape victims were asking for it. Even though many States have Shield Laws, there are always the subtle questions of blame: What was she wearing? Why was she there? Did she lead him on? Who else is she having “sex” with. Those indignities may not be so blatant in our Courts these days- but they happen in criminal investigations, and behind the scenes all the time. 

Our religious traditions and cultural heritage have always held women to a lower status by making them somehow ultimately responsible for the humility and suffering inflicted upon them. Consider the biblical story of Adam and Eve. It was Eve who was the temptress- causing the corruption of Adam and therefore all men as the fable goes. Throughout our literature and folklore it is always the woman who uses her “feminine wiles” to lead men to wrongdoing. The list includes Eve, Medea, Bathsheba, Jezebel, Medusa, Lady Macbeth, and Lolita (an image that Montana Judge surely conjured from his subconscious- he as much as said so).  The portrayals of evil embodied in feminine characters are all (strangely) the constructs of men seeking to define "woman" as the source of all trouble. With this cultural heritage it is no wonder that women, children, and all victims need all the help they can get to deal with the crimes against them, and a system that often devalues and blames them.

I came away from my meeting with Erin and her team thankful that they are there to do the difficult work of facing the pain of rape every day in service to the women and children they help. There is no way to adequately express what they themselves go through in doing this work, but they deserve our heartiest support, deepest gratitude and respect.

To the SAFeT Response Team at Lutheran Community Services and my dear daughter, Thanks for letting me look in.