Many victims of emotional, psychological, and sexual abuse say they experienced even more trauma when they tried to get help. Where can someone who is being abused get help? Here’s what you need to know.

Author Nicole Bedera talks about what typically happens when abuse victims try to get help. If you need live support, attend a Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group Session.

If you’re wondering if you’re experiencing one of the 19 types of emotional abuse, take our free emotional abuse quiz.

Transcript: Where Can Someone Who Is Being Abused Get Help?

Anne: I have Dr. Nicole Badera on today’s episode. She’s a sociologist and author of the book, On the Wrong Side, how universities protect perpetrators and betray survivors of sexual violence. Her research focuses broadly on how our social structures contribute to survivors trauma and make this kind violence more likely to occur in the future. Nicole puts her work into practice as an affiliated educator at the Center for Institutional Courage. Welcome, Nicole.

Nicole: Thank you. I’m so excited to be here.

Anne: I am so grateful to have you on. You do fascinating work. Especially because you focus on what happens after. And that is something that listeners to this podcast are all dealing with. Where can someone who is being abused get help? They’ve found they have been a victim of coercion. Husbands don’t tell my listeners all the information they need most of the time. Their husband actually purposefully kept it from them.

For example, they didn’t know that their husband solicited prostitutes, or was having an affair. Or something outside their boundaries, which is extremely traumatic. And people don’t view this as an actual act of emotional and psychological abuse. They don’t see it as coercion.  

Nicole: I did my research a little differently than other people in the past. Many people focus on going to the police or workplace. I focus on what happens for students still in school. Victims report most of the time to a Title IX office. You might have heard about it in the news. It’s been everywhere over the past 10 years. New has quieted down quite a bit recently. And a Title IX office is a little different from those other places. We can get into that if you’re curious.

Inside The Title IX Office

Nicole: In terms of what I did, I spent a year inside one of those Title IX offices interviewing the victims, the perpetrators, and school administrators who had the most control over their cases. I found participants trying to come forward for help in that setting that way. They wanted to know where can someone who is being abused get help.

All knew something was wrong. They might not know how to label it, or how to label it in a way that the system would recognize. That’s something survivors deal with a lot.

Women have been especially made to feel a lot of this stuff is just normal. There’s this idea that this is exactly what you should expect when you go to college, or in a marriage. And so there were some who weren’t sure what was going on. But they knew that something had affected usually their education, or they felt unsafe and unsettled. They were looking for where can someone who is being abused get help? And they ended up in my study.

They went to their school for help either through the victim advocacy office, which on a college campus can help survivors with whatever they need. But many things that have nothing to do with the perpetrator. Including things like they need an extension on an assignment, or there’s a specific class they want to take, but their perpetrator wants to take it. They’re trying to figure out when they can take it in the semester that they won’t be in the same classroom, things like that.

Or they went through the Title IX office to try to report what happened to them, to seek some kind of safety or justice. So that’s who we’re talking about in the particular book.

Challenges In Reporting

Nicole: But many themes are not that different from all the other places that maybe you’ve tried to report or consider going to for help.

Anne: When a woman has a situation where she needs help, but she doesn’t quite know where to go. It’s so heartbreaking for me, as I see this with wives trying to figure it out. We usually do couple therapy, or maybe like addiction recovery or something along those lines. Trying to figure out how to start to feel safe again in my marriage? Where can someone who is being abused get help?

When you’re talking about on a college campus, they’re thinking how to feel safe again on campus. Why do you think this idea of safety and how to feel safe again is so hard for pretty much everybody to understand? For institutions or organizations, they’re having a hard time figuring this out. What do you mean she feels unsafe? What should we do about it?

Nicole: There are a few issues that we encounter when victims are trying to decide where to report. One of them is that many systems that we think will help won’t help. Administrators tell students to go to the Title IX office for help. If they experience violence, harassment, or any kind of gender discrimination. But that’s not what the Title IX office is concerned with.

Their primary concern is what do we do with this perpetrator? Sometimes doing something about the perpetrator would help, if the school would. Which they often hesitate to do. But a lot of the time, that’s not meeting a survivor’s need in a real way.

Classroom Trauma: Where Can Someone Who Is Being Abused Get Help?

Nicole: And that’s the same issue that comes up if you go to the police, or to a couples therapist. I think many people who’ve tried for help at any of these institutions have experienced coming in for something tangible for yourself, right? So an example I gave earlier is you are, let’s say you’re a victim in a university setting, and you show up on the first day of class. And you see your perpetrator is in class with you. And that the class will discuss violence as a topic.

So this just feels completely impossible for you to be able to be safe in this environment because it’s going to be reminding you of your trauma. You might have to watch your perpetrator interact. It’s going to be just a place where your body and mind are responding to the traumatic experiences you’ve already had.

Anne: And the trauma you continue to experience, because the likelihood of him gaslighting you, continuing to emotionally and psychologically abuse you through this whole thing is like off the charts.

Nicole: It’s unlikely that if you’re in that class with your perpetrator, you and your perpetrator will share the same public narrative about why you can’t sit next to him in class, right? So you’re right. Often this is a site of continued violence, where the perpetrator might disparage the victim. Might go and tell lies about what happened in their past to avoid accountability.

You’re right. This is a place where more violence can take place. And so a victim in that scenario reasonably is just thinking, I just want this guy out of my class, right? Where can someone who is being abused get help?

Systemic Issues In Universities

Nicole: I just want this person out of my class. I want to take the class I want to take and complete my degree on time. Why is this affecting me in this scenario? I don’t want to be unsafe. Most people say that’s a reasonable set of requests. To say, you’ve already experienced a assault. That’s enough of a burden on its own. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice your education too.

In our current university system, there is no way to get that outcome. And so instead, when a victim says, “This is what I need.” The entire system is focused on, but what would this mean for the perpetrator? Is it fair to him? Is this going to be too much for him? And is violence even involved? This is one of the stories I start the book with, because it’s so common. Even if the system works as it claims, it can’t fix it.

There is no version of a assault response in our society that can intervene on a perpetrator’s violence in two weeks. We don’t have a version of that right now. Victims experience so much harm by coming forward. Because at minimum, they tell you to wait. And at maximum, you will experience more trauma. They force you back into communication, into being in the same room with your perpetrator.

Potentially violence could escalate. There could be retaliation. Where can someone who is being abused get help? And our system doesn’t think about that, because our systems primarily think about violence as something about the perpetrator. We have to decide what to do with the perpetrator.

Protective Orders & Legal Challenges

Nicole: They treat the victim as evidence, not as a person through these systems.

Anne: I help all sorts of women in all sorts of scenarios, right? But one that I’m thinking of right now is a woman with a protective order. And he continues to violate the protective order, and she keeps calling it in. Then they have to have a hearing about it. And the hearing isn’t for like three months. So he has like 27 protective order violations. But the prosecutor is like, Hmm, okay, should we like put them all together? I don’t want to prosecute him 27 times.

What will we do in the meantime? There’s no protection for her, as they’re trying to set the date for the hearing, and for a victim that in and of itself is triggering. Where can someone who is being abused get help? I’m sure you’ll hear him talk about the date of the court hearing.

Rather than hear somebody say, I care about you. We’re going to do something so that he can’t come around you anymore. That’s what she needs to hear. But for some reason, that’s like beyond their comprehension.

Nicole: A metaphor at the end of the book when I’m talking about creating a better system, about how our current system looks at a victim. And if we think of trauma as something physical. If we make a version where it’s not something that can’t be seen, but something we could see. The example I like to use is putting your hand on a hot stove.

https://youtube.com/shorts/f42gMRWCYd8

Metaphor Of The Hot Stove: Where Can Someone Who Is Being Abused Get Help?

Nicole: Right now, our systems just tell the victim, pretend it’s not burning you. If it is burning you and you can’t handle it, there must be something wrong with you. Take your hand off the stove. Maybe you should leave the kitchen while we figure out what we want to do about this stove that’s burning people, right?

And a better system would say, well, let’s just turn off the stove. Okay, let’s turn off the stove. Let’s do it in a way, you know, we’re not going to break the stove. We need to turn it off, and we will take a minute to figure out what to do next. But we won’t tell the person who’s burned to keep burning while we decide what to do.

Anne: You nailed it. But this happens in marriages all the time, because number one, a couple’s therapist in general doesn’t identify the psychological and emotional abuse. Where can someone who is being abused get help? She’s going for help, and doesn’t know she’s being abused. No one identifies the abuse.

And the professional she’s going to for help, clergy or any number of people because they don’t identify the stove is on. To use your metaphor. They say, something’s wrong with you. You experience the burn for no reason.

Nicole: Right, or let’s try to evenly manage this. There’s this real temptation in many of these systems to say, well, why don’t both people come to the table and offer something? So that would be a can in the same metaphor to say, well, why don’t we have the stove turned down the heat? a little bit? And why don’t we have the person with their hand on the stove stop complaining?

Power Inequities & Abuse

Nicole: And that doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense. One of the things I talk about in the book is how we have gotten comfortable asking for more sacrifices from victims. As long as it’s in the name of giving an advantage to their perpetrator. But we know that abuse occurs when there is a power inequity.

And so if that’s the reason we’re saying both people have to do something or the victim can’t get what they need. Because we want to give a benefit to the perpetrator. That will always deepen that inequity. It’s always going to deepen that power disparity, and that can make the abuse worse.

Anne: My eye is twitching. The other thing I think is interesting when it comes to either reporting or not reporting. Is that for me and many women who have been through it. Reporting wasn’t the issue. We just wanted to feel safe. So I didn’t necessarily want my ex husband to go to jail. I just wanted him to leave me alone. So in my personal case, I had a protective order.

He had a guilty plea for domestic violence, and the criminal court said, do not talk to him, you have a protective order. But the civil court ordered me to talk to him because we share children. My ex abused me for eight years post divorce. I have a protective order against him. I do not want to talk to him. But the civil court is forcing me to talk to him. Because of my kids. Where can someone who is being abused get help?

I didn’t report his abuse to have him put in jail. I needed medical treatment, and the doctor reported it.

Victims Just Want To Be Safe

Anne: I think that’s the thing that people have a hard time with, especially with custody cases. The judge is like, well, I can’t take away custody, because then I’d call him an abuser. And then he’d go to prison.

Victims want to be safe. The safe parent, the mother, isn’t trying to have her ex thrown in jail in many of these civil cases especially with kids. She’s just trying to ensure that her kids are safe and they don’t have to go with an abuser. And the same thing with the college thing, right? Where can someone who is being abused get help?

You’re just asking that he doesn’t go to this class or maybe he transfers schools or something. I don’t know. Maybe you can talk about options. But for some reason, the justice system sees this as like, we’ve got to give him due process before we, and then they equate it to prison.

Nicole: That’s exactly right. And I want to say that this is a new problem. And the Title IX debate is actually the center of why this is happening throughout society. So, a little history around campus violence and campus sexual violence organizing. Legislatures passed a law in 1972. That law said discrimination is illegal on college campuses. That receive federal funding.

And that’s all schools, to be clear. Even Harvard accepts a lot of funds from the federal government to keep their doors open. They would have a hard time keeping their doors open without those federal funds. The law itself is a single sentence. The law about what’s included is unclear. There were a series of court cases to try to figure that out.

Where Can Someone Who Is Being Abused Get Help? Title IX History & Legal Context

Nicole: One of them was in 1980, Alexander vs. Yale, if you’re feeling industrious and want to look it up. And that was the first court case that said violence should be illegal on a college campus. That it should be something that schools should do something about. They should have their own internal proceedings to manage it. The focus here wasn’t on sending people to jail. That’s what you should call the police for, if that’s what you wanted.

It is specifically for scenarios where perpetrators impacted victims’ education by their assaults. Or intimate partner violence, or stalking, or whatever they were experiencing. The Department of Education argued that schools need to do something. To ensure that violence doesn’t interfere with the quality of education you receive from the school.

Including things like if there’s a known perpetrator on campus, let’s say he’s a professor. Let’s say he’s withholding good grades unless students provide favors. Which is what that 1980 court case was about. Title IX requires removal of the perpetrator from campus. Because obviously no woman can get a fair education from that person. And so the focus is on restoring those educational rights. And the issue was that schools just didn’t do it.

So where can someone who is being abused get help? Every few years, the Department of Education would remind schools that they had to do something about harassment and violence, and they just didn’t do it. And for the most part, it didn’t capture much attention. Until the Obama administration.

Anne: Was part of their justification for not doing their job, well, if it was bad enough, she’d call the police?

Misconceptions About Campus Violence

Nicole: People said this in the past. Or they said this isn’t a problem on our campus. There was a similar thing, a study. It was just a survey by Inside Higher Ed in 2015. They asked university presidents at the time, do you think campus violence is a problem on your campus? And the vast, vast, vast majority said, “No, that’s a problem at other schools. We don’t have to worry about it.” Which isn’t true.

By the way, we have yet to find a university that doesn’t have violence as a problem. And so, yes, that’s part of how they justified it. I’d just go somewhere else. We don’t want to handle this. This is a criminal act, not a civil act. But that’s not what the law said. And so, the Obama administration sent out another one of these reminder letters, and for whatever reason, it became hotly politicized.

And in that moment, a group of Harvard professors, law professors, wrote an essay. It said the Title IX approach the Obama administration required wasn’t right. Because it didn’t allow the same kind of due process protections that the criminal justice system does. They said exactly what you’re saying. Many of these Harvard Law professors don’t specialize in gender based violence, or even in criminal or civil law.

So then where can someone who is being abused get help? I mean, I guess that’s all the law. They were people who specialized in any type of law. Some of them probably did things like corporate law, who had absolutely no knowledge on this topic whatsoever.

Due Process Debate

Nicole: And the average lawyer gets very little training during law school about violence or harassment, especially in civil settings. So they were just wrong. They were just flat out wrong. But this argument captured the national attention. It went viral. And since then, we have started to see other judges and lawyers think there are due process protections on college campuses that never existed before.

If you faced student disciplinary proceedings on a college campus before. You only had the right to know your accusations. And what the violation would be, and have some chance to respond. But there were no rules about how you would do that. So some schools did it in writing, some did it a hearing, some would, you know, they weren’t doing much of anything.

They would just give you a chance, and many people would say, you know what, I actually was plagiarizing, I don’t even need to participate in this, right? And so, this new idea that anything involving violence must be held to a criminal standard of due process is only a few years old. It’s not too late to reverse it. And we should, because the stakes are so different.

In the book, I call it Accumulated Fantasies of Disaster. Where when a victim says exactly like you’re describing. I need one thing. And sometimes on college campuses, that is safety for their kids. Married people living in student housing on college campuses with children live in dorms, but family dorms. And that’s often what they’re looking for. I am trying to escape an abusive marriage. Where can someone who is being abused get help?

Where Can Someone Who Is Being Abused Get Help? I Need Safety For My Kids

Nicole: My partner is sick, still on campus, and we’re still living in the same dorm. There another unit I can move into with my kids as I go through divorce proceedings, as I go through a custody battle, saying exactly what you are. Well, if we do that, it could lead to all these other issues for the perpetrator down the line. And some stories I heard during my time in the field were unreasonable.

I start the book with one of those stories. A guest speaker harassed a woman on campus. The guest speaker owns a company and is the CEO. He had been stalking and harassing her ever since he met her. He had no other tie to the campus community. So from a legal perspective, the university had no obligation to him. They don’t have to let him come back and speak again.

They don’t even have to let him come on campus if they don’t want to, because he’s not a student. He’s not a professor. He has no rights. to this space. But instead, the Title IX investigators wrapped themselves in knots to think of all these horrible things that could happen to him if they took into account the victim’s wishes. Which was just, please don’t invite him back to be guest speaker again. So where can someone who is being abused get help?

I don’t want this to happen to anybody else. And they said things like he could get a bad reputation, he could lose his job, he could be incarcerated. And it’s not true, because a lot of these proceedings are private.

Perpetrators’ Perspective

Nicole: And so any of the files that come from them, you can’t just hand them to the police, that’s illegal. That’s not how it works. People have privacy rights. Educational documents, in particular, are really private. But that’s what they’re thinking. They say, if you come forward, every bad thing will happen to this person. We’re talking about a CEO. Who’s going to fire him? Himself? It doesn’t make sense. Where can someone who is being abused get help?

Anne: Also, heaven forbid, a bad thing happen to a rapist.

Nicole: I completely agree. I interviewed the perpetrators. That’s actually one of the strengths of my book. I think we can all see from examples in pop culture. You know, presidential races, whatever it might be. Men accused of assault tend not to have bad things happen to them. If anything, I argue they tend to get benefits. The Johnny Depp trial is a great example.

He made an entire comeback after struggling to find work in Hollywood. Because of his own behavior on set. Now all of a sudden, he gets this second chance. He’s a known perpetrator of domestic violence. He never refuted that, by the way, never refuted that he had physically harmed Amber Heard. He never said that. And he simply argued she deserved it.

Anne: Which is insane.

Nicole: Right, it’s wild. We should see through it, but we don’t, because we come to a place of victim blaming first.

Results Of Perpetrator Interviews

Nicole: One of the things I found out for my book. There is all this concern about these accumulated fantasies of disaster. What can happen to perpetrators, and how bad it will be if we say out loud what they did. But I interviewed the perpetrators, and those things didn’t happen to them. If anything, many of them enjoyed these accountability proceedings.

Because, like we’re talking about, there’s these contradictions in them. That the victim’s behavior is constrained. The victim isn’t allowed to do X, Y, and Z. Or it’ll hurt their credibility. While simultaneously, they’re forced to contact the perpetrator regularly. And that’s something perpetrators enjoy.

Anne: Yeah, they like it.

Nicole: Yes!

Anne: Sorry, we need to focus on this. I created a Strategy workshop. It’s called The BTR.ORG Living Free Workshop, and it helps women see why abusers like this enjoy it. And what these types of abusers get out of it. So that women can use strategy to protect themselves. We’re not enjoying it, the victims do not enjoy it, that’s what you discovered. I’m like, yes, the perpetrators enjoy it. And it’s because they never lose. So where can someone who is being abused get help?

Nicole: Even if they lose, the losses are hollow. One student was expelled for intimate partner violence while I was on campus. I want to say this is very standard. There’s been a lot of research about how schools handle violence in the past few years, and the average university expels one perpetrator every three years.

Expulsion & Perpetrator Protection: Where Can Someone Who Is Being Abused Get Help?

Nicole: It is rare. I happened to be on campus that year, which is unusual. What that expulsion meant was because of this rush to protect the perpetrator, this rush to make sure nothing bad happened to him. By the time he was expelled, the Dean of Students helped facilitate his transfer to another university. It was close enough by, he didn’t even have to move apartments. They had slowed down the proceedings for two years.

Originally with the hope that he would graduate before they had to hold him accountable, but he didn’t graduate for many reasons I get into in the book. And instead, what that meant for the victim for those two years, she had to take a leave of absence. Because he was so violent and dangerous, she couldn’t safely be on campus.

And so they told her, the same thing we were talking about before. Until he’s been through this process, we can’t offer you any kind of assistance. So if you can’t handle being here, you’re the one who should leave. Where can someone who is being abused get help?

And that’s one of the big things that I hope people take from the book and all these conversations. Is that every time we do something like this to protect a perpetrator. Every time we say, I’m going to be fair to both people. I’m going to invite you to this place, and anybody who can’t handle it, don’t come. What you’re saying is the perpetrator will be here, and the victim won’t.

You’re not giving them anything possible. Victims can’t turn off their trauma and peacefully coexist. Even if they do manage to share space with the perpetrator, it always takes a toll, and that’s unfair.

Perpetrator’s Continued Abuse

Nicole: It’s not right. Everything is totally backwards. That’s actually what my literary agent called the book. Everything is backwards.

Anne: Yeah, the other issue people don’t recognize is that he will still be abusing her at that event. You know, I don’t care what it is. It could be a basketball game, whatever. The way he acts, the way he’s lying about her, the way he’s like, oh, she’s so crazy. That is abuse, and he’s still doing it right now. So you haven’t stopped the abuse. It’s not like this happened in the past. It’s happening right then. Where can someone who is being abused get help?

Nicole: And I would argue that even if nothing happens, that is still a continuation of the abuse. I think of all these scenarios where the perpetrator and victim are forced to share space. Again, kids are a common scenario. And everybody watching wants to see this cartoon villain of a perpetrator that doesn’t exist. So instead, they say, he seemed nice, he was friendly to you, you seem like you’re the one who’s overreacting. And that’s part of the plan too.

Grooming As Abuse

Nicole: One of the things I say about perpetrators is they don’t abuse everybody. And a big part of that abuse is showing that they can follow social norms and treat people appropriately outside of their victim. Ultimately, it still leads too often, in this case. To other people trying to control the victim, blaming them and questioning their legitimacy.

That’s a lot of what perpetrators do in these proceedings, is they just come in and don’t scream and yell. They’re not physically violent in that setting. And so people think, Oh, he must be fine.

Anne: That is the abuse. That’s what I’m trying to say. It’s called grooming, and grooming is abusive. So that is the abuse. They don’t realize they’re being abused too, because he’s not being honest. He’s not doing anything overt, but he’s not coming in and saying, I did do this. This is the truth, right? Where can someone who is being abused get help?

Nicole: That’s the only thing that would be not abusive, right? Would be if there was a shared reality that abuse occurred. That is the only thing that would be fair to a victim.

Anne: Yes, and it’s the only way abuse would not occur. You just said that, I just repeated you. Sorry, but yeah.

Nicole: That just makes me feel like it was a good point.

Anne: It was. It was worthy of repeating. It’s huge when you talk about institutional issues with this. The same thing happens with the courts with civil custody cases in the same way. And it’s so hard, because that’s just that part where you said she helped him transfer his stuff to the new school.

Institutional Betrayal: Where Can Someone Who Is Being Abused Get Help?

Anne: No one is helping the victims do these things. No one’s helping her.

Nicole: And that was one of the most glaring disparities of all. There’s actually an academic concept that I introduced early in the book in the first few pages that I think would be helpful to your listeners. And it’s this idea of institutional betrayal. And institutional betrayal is defined as actions or inactions that exacerbate trauma. So when they behave in a way that makes the traumatic experience more traumatic.

One of the big focus points in the book. Is the victim’s experience of violence and trauma not set from the end of the violent event. It actually depends on everything that happens afterwards. So, you know, if you tell your friends, do they believe you? Do they take your side or your perpetrator’s side? Do you get control over what happens after the violence is over?

Or is somebody reporting to the police against your will or putting you into these scenarios that you don’t want to be in against your will? Abuse is ultimately a violation of autonomy. And so every time an institution violates our autonomy again, that’s going to trigger those traumatic experiences. In studies, we find that survivors who experience institutional betrayal show the same traumatic symptoms as a victim assaulted a second time.

Where can someone who is being abused get help? It is an equal severity to that original act of violence, which is why it’s important that our institutions get this right. And for our friends and families to get this right too.

Hope For Better Support

Nicole: Because a lot of people find this overwhelming. I think it’s overwhelming to think. Wow, I thought the worst was over. I actually could encounter something just as bad when I seek help. This is overwhelming. But on the other hand, if we do get it right, we actually have the capacity to make this violence less damaging to victims. Where can someone who is being abused get help?

I come out hopeful, from the place where survivors who seek it get help. They have fewer traumatic symptoms. The traumatic impact of that original event is lessened. That’s got to be our goal here. It’s to step out of these damaging patterns just because it’s the way things are, or it’s what we’re used to.

And oh, it would take work and change to do something different. Those aren’t good reasons. We should do the right thing, because the stakes are high. And we could help many people.

Anne: Just talking with the victims I talk with daily. My eye twitches when they are not helped by the police, the civil court system, their clergy or couple therapists. This is overwhelming and scary. We do have to speak out and take some action, which is what we don’t want to do, which is what this podcast is about. Like oh, why are we making victims do more, you know? It’s such a catch 22.

Nicole: I want to say one of the things about institutional betrayal too. And one of the reasons why I think it’s important that people know how institutions can harm victims. Is institutional betrayal can’t happen to the same severity, if we already have some distrust for the institution.

Anticipating Institutional Responses

Nicole: One of the key components is going to get help and thinking you’re going to get it, and then not getting it. Where can someone who is being abused get help? And so setting realistic expectations, not to lower the bar for these institutions, to raise the bar actually,

Anne: Yeah, no, I get what you’re saying.

Nicole: Yeah, but to know what can happen.

Anne: That’s what the Living Free Workshop is for, anticipating. If you talk to clergy about this, this is likely what’s going to happen. So instead of doing that, let’s do this other thing. If you are going to report this, this is likely what’s going to happen. And so instead of doing that, although you can report, but like know these things beforehand.

The Living Free Workshop helps victims anticipate, because this has been driving me crazy for years. In my state, at the bottom of every article about domestic violence, everyone, there’s like: Call the national domestic violence hotline. And then call our state domestic violence hotline. And everyone thinks that’s the solution. They think reporting is the solution. They don’t realize that that’s not the solution at all. Where can someone who is being abused get help?

In fact, one victim I know recently had the department that oversees victim services contact her. And they were like, hey, we heard that you had a bad interaction with a police officer in this certain county.

We’re going to interview you. So she told him, yeah, I’ve been working with this domestic violence shelter. I have a victim advocate. She told him the whole story. And she’s been working with a victim advocate at our local domestic violence shelter for over two years. They like reviewed her case.

Where Can Someone Who Is Being Abused Get Help: Confidential Community Support

Anne: They got back to her, and guess what they said? They said, Oh, your case is really, really bad. You need services. Have you contacted your local domestic violence shelter?

Nicole: Oh my.

Anne: So it was like a full circle. You know, the thing I think people think is to put this phone number on the bottom of a newspaper article. And the problem is solved. And if she doesn’t call that number, it’s her fault because she didn’t call the number.

Nicole: So I think one of the questions I get is, if many of these systems aren’t trustworthy, where can someone who is being abused get help? Where can they go? And the response is to go to a confidential community like this one or a rape crisis hotline. That is different than a domestic violence shelter. You want one that’s confidential, because a confidential service won’t call the police. They cannot be subpoenaed in a court of law.

So if you have questions to try to make sense of all the options in your community, they can work through that with you without things snowballing out of your control. And so it’s step one. Obviously, that’s just a place to let you know what the options are and which ones other survivors think are the most trustworthy.

Things like that, but what I would say is make sure you’re going somewhere confidential, which will give you many options, not just one option. Anywhere that’s pushing you back to one option is probably not the right place. That’s a big part of why I wrote the book. I talk about campus violence. But I talk about these broader trends in how survivors lose the trajectory of their cases. Victims lose their autonomy, and are re-traumatized.

Red Flags In Institutional Responses

Nicole: Things you can almost treat like red flags. So things like being told one thing will happen, but you didn’t get the full story. And actually now everything’s moving in a different direction. Things like seeing your case broken into a bunch of pieces, where people only want to focus on one tiny part of it. And then they ignore everything else. Lots of things like that, where you can see these institutional red flags.

And one of them is one of the ones we’ve been talking about this whole time. Which is when people conflate punishment and consequences, when people act as if there are natural consequences to violence. And when a victim says, “I’ve experienced this, I’m dealing with these consequences. I need help with consequences.” Victims are recast as punishing, and everything focuses on, but that could be bad for the perpetrator. That is one of the biggest red flags.

Because you can’t just make that stuff go away. Like, trauma is trauma. It’s a physiological process. We can see evidence of it on the body. You can’t just say, oh, you’re right. I don’t want anything bad to happen to my perpetrator. So it goes away. And that’s one of the ones to think about is that conflation between addressing the consequences that are unavoidable. That are just going to happen due to the action of violence, coercion, harassment, or whatever it is you’ve experienced.

And acting as if recognizing those consequences is inherently unfair to the perpetrator. That I would say is one of the biggest red flags and coming forward.

Anne: That’s really, really good.

Misogyny In Handling Cases

Anne: It’s so misogynistic. I was trying to explain this to someone once, and I said, “Can you imagine if a man had a business partner, and that business partner stole a bunch of money from the business. And the guy couldn’t hold him accountable in court?” And then everyone around him told him, “You have to attend church with this guy.” And I’ve had people say to me, that’s crazy. This is completely different. And I’m like, what I’m talking about is like 50 billion times worse.

Nicole: Yeah.

Anne: I think about it in terms of a man being forced to interact with someone who hurt him. They can’t even talk about that, because they’re like, that would never happen. Where can someone who is being abused get help?

Nicole: Right. It’s suddenly so clear. It’s suddenly so clear that it would be unfair. And that’s, I mean, gender is such a big part of it, right? It is. Yeah. One of the things I found in my work was that when the roles were on a title IX case, you would call it complainant and respondents. That’s sort of the civil equivalent of like plaintiff. I guess there’s no version in a criminal trial where the victim is treated as a person and not evidence.

But you know, it’s the same as plaintiff and defendant, but in a Title IX context is complainant and respondent. So when those roles are reversed, usually in a retaliatory complaint, is where a real act of violence happened. The victim tried to report it, and the perpetrator responds by filing a second complaint saying, actually, I’m the true victim.

Retaliatory Complaints: Where Can Someone Who Is Being Abused Get Help?

Nicole: So again, a classic example of this is Johnny Depp versus Amber Heard. He doesn’t argue, no, there was never any violence. He says she deserved it. Actually, she’s the abuser, and I think I’m the true victim. And the goal of these retaliatory complaints is to muddle the narrative, confuse investigators, and intimidate the victim into dropping their original complaint.

That’s what’s happening here. And then sometimes when we talk about cases like Depp vs. Heard, there is that benefit we already talked about. Which is that even if it is a second case, the perpetrator feels confident, nothing bad will happen to them. They can enjoy the forced contact with the victim. Who previously escaped him.

In cases of retaliatory complaints, I found the university didn’t care anymore about due process. That when women were in the role of the accused, they faced many consequences. A lot of, I would argue, punishment because they didn’t do anything. It can’t be consequences for their actions when all they did was report something someone else did to them. Where can someone who is being abused get help?

And it is a gender issue. It’s that when it’s a woman versus a man. There is a real sense that we should take the side of the man, no matter what he has done, because he is a leader. Because he should have male privilege, or you know, whatever it might be. He’s the more important person, so we should protect the more important person. And sometimes that comes out in overtly misogynistic, obvious ways, and sometimes it’s a little more shielded in something more, called empathy.

Empathy For Perpetrators

Nicole: So this concept of empathy comes from a philosopher named Kate Mann. Men receive excessive empathy at the expense of women.

Anne: Hmm

Nicole: Yeah. It’s a great concept.

Anne: I’m liking this.

Nicole: It’s so good. That’s another book you should get. You should read Entitled by Cate Mann, it’s so good. But what this can look like in practice is somebody saying something like, well, you know, abuse is horrible. The victim’s life is already ruined. The best we can do is try to make sure it doesn’t ruin two lives instead of one.

I want to make sure we do right by the perpetrator. People say it all the time. I have an entire chapter of the book about this. It’s truly unbelievable, if I didn’t have the direct quotes from the administrator saying it. It’s treated as this righteous thing. If I can empathize with even the most sort of deplorable people in our society, I must be a good person. There’s nothing worse than a perpetrator of abuse.

And so if I can empathize with that person, that means I’m the most empathetic person. And that means I’m the most moral person. That is what many people think, but it is totally backwards and it’s not hard to empathize with men in these cases. Culture trains us to do that. The difficult thing is to empathize with the victim, instead of treating the victim like evidence in the man’s story. Where can someone who is being abused get help?

Anne: Sorry, I can’t even, I can’t, I can’t. No wonder people don’t love me at church because I don’t sympathize with abusive men I’m like, I don’t care about him.

Support For Survivors

Anne: And people are like, so offended.

Nicole: Yeah, people find it offensive.

Anne: And I’m like, why are you offended? He’s a rapist. Why do you care about him?

Nicole: I think that’s the place we need to get to, especially in this moment in society where most people are empathizing with the perpetrator. So this framework I was thinking about where everybody’s saying, oh, you know, I’m going to empathize with the perpetrator because it’s a hard thing to do. Something administrators would say is everybody’s going to side with the victim, because we all know rape is wrong.

So she’s going to have everybody in her corner. He doesn’t have anybody in his corner. So I’m going to be the person to show up for him. But the problem was everybody was doing that. Where can someone who is being abused get help? And so what we need at the bare minimum is a whole group of people who will show up for the survivor in that same way. To recognize the real reality, which is the perpetrator has so many people in his corner.

Sometimes, her entire social group pushes the victim out. One of the things that’s so traumatic about violence is that a lot of people lose all their loved ones. They’re friends, many of their family, they might have to switch schools or change jobs, because everybody is focusing on being “fair” to the perpetrator.

I put fair in big quotes here because none of this is fair. If what we’re doing for the perpetrator means the victim has to leave, it’s not fair.

Anne: There is no fairness.

Nicole: This makes me think of the next book I want to write.

Where Can Someone Who Is Being Abused Get Help? The Responsibilities Of Rapists

Nicole: And so, you know, I’m putting the feelers out there if you know any publishers. The next book I want to write is something with a sort of working title of something like The Responsibilities of Rapists. Because I think when we have an entire society where none of these systems are good at holding perpetrators accountable. It’s really hard for people to imagine what that looks like for themselves. It’s hard to reinvent the wheel.

Most people are not experts on violence. But I do think at a bare minimum in our personal lives. Where can someone who is being abused get help? When we know that we can’t trust many of these systems, we have to handle this as individuals and communities. I think at the bare minimum, if we know that the main thing victims want is never to share space with their perpetrator again. That’s the number one thing victims say they want. At the bare minimum, I think we can ask that a perpetrator leaves a place where a victim is.

For the rest of their lives. That gives them the rest of the planet they can be in. And that one spot where the victim is should always be that space, because the trauma will leave a lifelong impact for the victim. It’s never going away. And so if we look at the perpetrator and say, well it’s been five years, why isn’t she over it yet?

That’s saying there’s a time limit for how long the victim can be traumatized. That’s not how it works.

Reasonable Consequences For Perpetrators

Nicole: And I think it’s reasonable to say, if you perpetrated a assault, the minimum of consequences is: If you see the victim in the grocery store, at your new job, you turn around, walk out, and go to a different grocery store. You get a different job. This is reasonable to ask for. If anything, it’s lenient. For a victim who is looking, where can someone who is being abused get help? It seems almost impossible to find.

Anne: You are 100 percent well spoken and amazing. I appreciate this conversation. Nicole, I’m so grateful that you’re doing this work. Thank you so much for spending the time to talk to me today.

Nicole: Thank you so much for having me on. This has been great. These are the kinds of conversations that people need. I’m so glad I got to be here today.

Anne: Thank you.