S1E2 Discernment, Judgment, and Why People Sometimes Don't Report Abuse
In the first segment, Stacie shares her background in American evangelicalism: the good, bad, and ugly. Then she explains why she got into yoga.
The second segment (about an hour in) is an in-depth discussion of research related to the psychological reasons people either minimize abusive behaviors or fail to report them. The most important thing here is that the research suggests that protocols and procedures, including enforced mandatory reporting rules aren't enough: we need to rethink the way we educate both students and educators. That's what this project is all about.
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TW: This show deals with sexual abuse in the context of people not reporting it. Again, we will not always be focusing on this topic directly, rather, in these first episodes we are trying to convey why training in critical thinking and trusting perceptions is important for individuals and, ultimately, the viability of institutions that were founded to serve individuals in the first place. As always, keep the Crisis Hotline text number handy: 741-741.
Here are the resources we cited:
John Gottman’s concept of Defensiveness: “defensiveness, which is defined as self-protection in the form of righteous indignation or innocent victimhood in an attempt to ward off a perceived attack. Many people become defensive when they are being criticized, but the problem is that its perceived effect is blame. It is usually a counterattack to a complaint, which is not criticism.”
Sandra Fernau," “Sexual Abuse by Catholic Clerics: Patterns of Interpretation and Coping Strategies of Victims in Light of a Religious Socialisation” in Dirk Baier, Christian Pfeiffer eds., Representative Studies on Victimisation: Research Findings from Germany (Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2016).
The following are the primary reasons why people don’t report, as taken from Fernau’s work:
Fear of stigmatization and negative reactions by the family and social milieu, and frequently a related fear concerning the anticipated loss of affiliation with the Church community.
Feelings of shame and guilt leading to self-blaming by victims.
Trivialization of the sexual abuse resulting in rejection respecting denial of the individual’s own victim status.
Legitimation of the incidents of abuse by adopting the offender’s interpretation.
‘Sacralization’ of the sexual assault in a religious revaluation of what happened.
We then used the following article:
Reporting child sexual abuse within religious settings: Challenges and future directions. Harper, Craig A.; Perkins, Colin; Child Abuse Review, Vol 27(1), Jan-Feb, 2018 pp. 30-41. Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
The following are the two frameworks, as taken from Harper and Perkins’ work:
1. System justification theory (SJT) (Jost et al., 2004)
Which “asserts that people are implicitly motivated to ‘justify and rationalise the way things are, so that existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be perceived as fair and legitimate.” (Jost and Hunyady, 2005, p. 260) [35]
2. Moral foundations theory (MFT) asserts that human morality is a multifaceted phenomenon. MFT is based on three clear premises.
First, we appear to take a dual-process approach to important or contentious decision-making. Harper and Harris (2017) called this process ‘feel first, rationalize later’ (p. 5).
Second, morality is a multidimensional construct. and suggest that human morality comprises six ‘moral foundations’ (Table 1). [38]
The third premise of MFT is that the relative importance of each moral foundation differs within each individual, giving everybody a distinct and idiographic moral composition. [38]
