Tag: rape victim

Published 6 december 2023

Revictimization: How Can This Keep Happening?

Moving from judgment to compassion.

Posted May 4, 2020 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

Source: Jurien Huggins/Unsplash

I feel like I have “Abuse Me” written across my forehead! Why does this keep happening to me?

Over the years I’ve lost track of how many people have asked me that question.

The first time an individual is victimized, they often take on the responsibility for the abuse. This can be a way for a victim to reclaim control. It is reassuring to believe that changing habits, behaviors, or interactions will ensure that the abuse will not reoccur.

When someone is victimized a second or third time (or more), research shows they are even more likely to feel guilt and shame and to judge themselves harshly. Unfortunately, they are not alone. Family, friends, professionals, and the media often respond to revictimized people with far more judgment than compassion.

Saints, sinners, heroes, villains, the beautiful, the scarred, disciplined, undisciplined, strong, weak, and people of every other type have been victimized. Abuse, whether it is a single or a repeated event, is not elicited by victims; it is perpetrated against them by an offender.

A traumatizing abuse experience will often leave a victim in severe emotional and psychological distress, and sometimes in physical pain. The resulting symptoms, including those of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), are attempts by the body, mind, and emotions to regain stability and to reduce this extreme distress. Ironically, defensive responses can place the victim at greater “risk for later interpersonal trauma.” (Jaffe et al. 2019) These trauma symptoms include: dissociation, alcohol and substance abuse, distorted perceptions, low self-esteem, risky behaviors, cognitive accommodation to on-going violence, learned helplessness or passivity in the face of danger, willingness to tolerate maltreatment in order to avoid abandonment, adaptation to socioeconomic stressors and discrimination, (Briere, 2019) increased irritability and anger. (Jaffe, et al. 2019)

Facts, provided by research, can serve as instruments of kindness.

Jaffe, et al. (2019) stated it succinctly: “The most consistent predictor of future trauma exposure is a history of prior trauma exposure.” A child who is abused is at a significantly higher risk of being revictimized in adolescence and/or adulthood. (Aakvaag, et al., 2019; Zamir, et al., 2018)

These facts, established by scientific research and supported nearly unanimously by experts across the fields of mental health and the social sciences, provide a strong rebuttal to knee-jerk reactions that place blame for revictimization on the innate characteristics of individual victims.

The field of psychology has gone through its own evolution in understanding revictimization. In 1920 Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he identified repetition compulsion as a repeating and reliving of painful experiences in lieu of holding them in memory. (Zamir, et al. 2018) This theory, part of Freud’s developing understanding of human instinct, when applied more recently to revictimization, places the bulk of responsibility squarely on the psyche of the victim.

As the understanding of trauma and PTSD developed in the field, via both research and practice, new theories of revictimization developed based on the impact of an original trauma on a repeatedly abused person.

The facts establish that when a person is sexually assaulted multiple times or in several domestic violence relationships, the cause of that pattern is not some underlying masochism, a characterological failing, or any other personal flaw. All abuse, original and subsequent, is due to the actions of offenders. A victim’s vulnerability to revictimization is often directly related to the impact of inflicted trauma.

A central component to the theoretical models of revictimization, developed in the 1980s and 1990s, was the role of dissociation as a risk factor. (Zamir, et al., 2018)

Dissociation is a defense mechanism that protects the individual by breaking up consciousness to avoid being overwhelmed by an experience, memory, or sensation. This fragmenting can be as commonplace as distraction or daydreaming, or it can manifest more problematically as emotional detachment, numbing, or out-of-body experiences.

Disassociation may provide relief from distress, but when it develops into a behavioral pattern, outlasting the threat of the immediate abuse, it leaves the person increasingly vulnerable. They miss cues of danger and have a disrupted, discontinuous experience of themselves and their life.

Guilt and shame are two distinct, common remnants of having been victimized. While guilt involves the belief that one “should have thought, felt, or acted differently,” shame is a “painful emotion related to beliefs about threats to one’s social position, including devaluation and rejection.” (Aakvaag et al., 2018)

Guilt can increase the risk of revictimization by focusing our attention, in an exaggerated manner, on our own thoughts and feelings, leaving us vulnerable to missing external cues of danger.

Shame often leads to social withdrawal and isolation. (Aakvaag et al., 2018) Decreasing our connections to others increases our vulnerability because while we may be avoiding people likely to cause us harm, we are also losing access to those who would provide protection, support, an increased sense of personal worth, and the expectation of being well-treated.

Shame is strongly correlated with mental health problems in general and with many PTSD symptoms specifically. The Aakvaag et al. findings suggest that shame may be central to the causal link that earlier studies found between mental illness and revictimization.

Kindness and compassion demand that we consistently hold a conscious place for the role of the abuser in any dialogue with or about victims. Experience has taught me that when an abuser is forgotten, the victim is implicitly left to absorb responsibility for the abusive acts and the resulting conditions, thereby increasing the victim’s feelings of both guilt and shame. This pattern is all the more common when the offender is a loved one, providing further motivation for a victim (child or adult), to absorb responsibility for the actions and patterns of the other in an attempt to rescue a crucial, valued relationship.

Source: Dave Lowe/Unsplash

A person who has been victimized needs to heal from the injuries of abuse. Family, friends, support networks, medical, and mental health professionals should be united in promoting that healing for the purpose of restoring health and wellness. A secondary benefit of compassion is the reduction of trauma symptoms, hence a decrease in vulnerability to revictimization.

References

Jaffe, A. E., DiLillo, D., Gratz, K.L., Messman-Moore, T.L. (2019). Risk for revictimization following interpersonal and noninterpersonal trauma: Clarifying the role of posttraumatic stress symptoms and trauma-related cognitions. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 32, 42-55.

Briere, J. (2019). Treating Risky and Compulsive Behavior in Trauma Survivors. New York: The Guilford Press.

Aakvaag, H. F., Thoreson, S., Strom, I. F., Myhre, M., Hjemdal, O. K. (2019). Shame predicts revictimization in victims of childhood violence: A prospective study of a general Norwegian population sample. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice and Policy, Vol 11, No. 1, 43-50.

Zamir, O., Szepsenwol, O., Englund, M. M., Simpson, J. A. (2018). The role of dissociation in revictimization across the lifespan: A 32-year prospective study. Child Abuse & Neglect, 79, 144-153.

Gay, P. (1988). Freud: A Life for Our Time. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.Morereferences

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Published 6 december 2023

Duke University Porn Star Who Said “Porn Is Empowering” Reveals Sad Truth

By Elizabeth Allen

Belle Knox, the infamous Duke University porn star, is in a documentary where she discusses the realities of her life in porn and her true self, Miriam Weeks, who chose this as her profession to pay her way through college.

It’s a story from last August yet it’s still relevant because the underlying truth of the industry is still the same.

As her alter-ego, Belle Knox, Miriam has spent her first year in the porn industry touting her beliefs that porn is “empowering,” “freeing” and “the way the world should be.” She also portrays her choice in finding a way to fund her tuition and graduate free of debt as something akin to noble in the documentary.

However, the realities of Miriam’s life choice clearly weigh heavy on her.

Via Life Site News:

Weeks did a series of interviews for an upcoming documentary. In them, she paints a much different picture than the freeing, empowering, sex-fueled fantasy world her fans and porn supporters claim she inhabits.
“The sex industry has a way of making you very cynical and very bitter,” a tired-looking Weeks tells an off-camera interviewer, “In a way I’ve started to become kind of a bit bitter and a bit cynical.”
“It teaches you to be street smart and not to trust people…I’m so used to being on the lookout for scammers, people who are going to try pimp me out or traffic me. I think my experiences have aged me. I don’t have the mind of an eighteen-year-old. I have the emotional baggage of someone much, much older than me.”

There is a deeper, darker reason that Miriam entered into the world of porn. She was raped and victims of rape have serious issues with control.

In many interviews, Weeks talks obsessively about how porn gives her control over her own sexual destiny: “In porn, everything is on my terms. I can say no whenever I want to. I am in control.” Later on, we discover why this is so important to her: Weeks reveals that she had been raped. “What porn has done for me,” she says firmly, “is it has given me back my agency.”

Miriam’s thinking is erroneous. She has sold herself into a perverted industry wrought with danger and humiliation for the sake of “control.”

Miriam herself admits that her first scene, shot for a company she refers to as “Facial Abuse,” was “a really, really rough scene. I wasn’t prepared for how rough it was. It was weird having some random photographer watch me have my a** kicked on camera.” She talks about getting literally torn up during porn shoots. She admits that porn shoots in which she was physically beaten up until she sobbed were probably shoots she should have refused. Yet she didn’t.

The truth is the industry controls her. In many cases, if she wants to work, she often must agree to a shoot without knowing the scene and who is in it. Once she agrees she is fined for walking out and the penalty is steep, the risk of not working again.

For one shoot, Miriam recalls almost tearfully, her agent wouldn’t tell her who she had to “work with.” When she arrived at the set, she realized he was fifty years old. She wanted to leave, but then she’d have to pay a 300 dollar “kill fee,” the director would have been furious, and, she says, she could never have worked for that company again. So she did it.

The reality of her choice weighs heavy on her and the consequences are great.

“I felt like crying during the entire scene and afterwards I was really, really upset,” Miriam says tearfully to the camera, looking like nothing more than the hurting 18-year-old girl she is. “I just thought of my mom, who was always there for me and always protected me…I think about my mom a lot when I do porn scenes. Just how sad she would be that her little daughter was doing this.”

Miriam is a lost soul who has been a victim of sexual assault resulting in choices where shame has become her partner leaving scars of self loathing, literally.

One day looking in the mirror, she became so overcome with self-hatred that she smashed the mirror and cut herself, slicing the jagged letters “FAT” into the flesh of her thigh.

While Miriam has her dark moments that hint at unhappiness and regret, she continues down this tragic path.

What is sickening is that there is even a demand in our society that has turned into multi-billion dollar industry that preys on the Miriam’s of the world. As I contemplate Miriam crying wondering what her mom thinks of her doing porn, I wonder what the dad’s of our culture would think of their 18-year-old daughter doing porn.

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Published 6 december 2023

Do Survivors Lie?

False allegations of domestic violence are rampant … or are they?

Google “false allegations of domestic violence” and a litany of defense attorneys and men’s rights groups would have you believe that nearly every person who reports domestic violence is lying.

One site even suggests some 70 percent of restraining orders are trivial or false. The article cites a study that concludes 60 percent (not 70 percent as the article proclaimed) of restraining orders are unnecessary or based on false allegations of abuse. But how the “study” got to that number is by discarding any petition for a restraining order that didn’t include actual or threatened physical violence. As any domestic violence advocate or prosecutor will tell you, domestic violence doesn’t only include physical abuse. Other forms of abuse are often predecessors of physical violence, such as stalking, threats or coercive control.

Meanwhile, other sources report the rate of false allegations of domestic violence is low and in line with the rate of false reports of other crimes, such as theft and burglary.

So, why the discrepancy?

Without Physical Proof, Some Survivors Are Labeled Liars

“A lot of it has to do with studies’ biases and methodologies,” says Melissa Hamilton, J.D., Ph.D., visiting criminal law scholar with the University of Houston Law Center. “From a methodological perspective, if you were to count cases that are marked ‘unfounded’ as lies, that’s not sound logic.”

And yet, that’s exactly what some studies on false allegations of domestic violence rely on, according to Hamilton. Just because a case had insufficient evidence to make an arrest or was turned down for prosecution, that doesn’t mean the reporting party made up the abuse.

“A lot of times police are looking for a physical sign of assault, but not all injuries show up right away,” Hamilton says. “So police might close it out as ‘unfounded,’ but it would not be fair to say it’s a false report.”

Police will sometimes mark cases unfounded if they suspect the highly contentious idea of mutual abuse, where its thought that both parties played equal parts in the violence. In reality, self-defense can be incorrectly labeled as mutual abuse when both parties have injuries or both parties admit to using physical violence.

Survivors More Likely to Lie That Abuse Didn’t Occur

According to a 2008 study by law professor Nicholas Bala and three other researchers, in the context of custody disputes, mothers make deliberate false reports less than 2 percent of the time. Fathers are 16 times more likely to make deliberate false reports which contributes to disbelieving true reports made by mothers.

“It is critical to emphasize that the making of false allegations of spousal abuse is much less common than the problem of genuine victims who fail to report abuse,” reads the study.

Deputy district attorney in Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Family Violence Division, Miji J. Vellakkatel, agrees—it’s far more likely for survivors to lie and say they were not abused when, in fact, they were.

“People do sometimes change their statements from the initial report to preliminary hearing or trial,” Vellakkatel says. “But in most cases, it’s minimization. We tend to get victims saying, ‘It was my fault,’ or they no longer wish to participate. When a person decides not to participate in a case, I think people jump to assume that they were lying.”

But Vellakkatel says he doesn’t think that’s the case.

“In my experience, false reports of domestic violence are very rare,” he says, adding he’s only come across one case in his career that was dismissed because the incident was fabricated.

Vellakkatel encourages survivors to report abuse, even when they’re concerned they might not be believed.

“Do not be concerned about being believed or not. Be concerned about your personal safety or your children’s safety,” he says. “If we do not file a case, it’s not because we didn’t believe you. It’s because there’s insufficient evidence to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Read more about the importance of evidence in criminal and family court and what exactly you should document in “Why You Should Document Abuse.”

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