UVA rape survivor Elisabeth Corey has something to say to Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone about reporting on trauma.
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Dear Sabrina Rubin Erdely,
I was devastated by the Rolling Stone note yesterday regarding the UVA story. As a survivor of a rape at UVA, as well as a trauma survivor of family-controlled child sex trafficking, I struggled to understand how you could be so careless. I wondered how someone could set back the anti-rape movement so much by approaching a traumatic rape story in this way. I wanted to vilify you as the sole reason that rape stories will never be trusted again. But then I realized I could not do that. I could not do that because you approached her horrific story the same way that everyone does.
You approached her story as a factual, evidence-based narrative as if she was explaining what she had for dinner the past three nights. You approached her as if this was an easy story for her to tell. You approached her as if she didn’t need to be supported and understood throughout the telling of her story.
Every time a rape story is told in the media, the commentary immediately goes to the evidence. What was the date? What was the perpetrator’s full name? How many witnesses were there? And when evidence is unavailable, the story is dismissed as a lie. Our legal system works this way. And many times, when a truth is hard to take, we dismiss that truth with this technique. We assume that if the story were true, it would be perfectly logical and consistent the first time it is told. We assume that anything else, especially difficult stories, must be false.
For those who have not experienced trauma, this approach makes sense. They have memories that work like a movie reel. The memories are remembered in time order with details and faces and the associated emotions. They are easy to relay to others. We tell them like a story. We may embellish a little to make them more fun and interesting at parties, but otherwise, it is a straight-forward process.
A traumatic memory is stored in the brain and body like a glass bottle is shattered on the floor. Everything goes in different directions.
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But traumatic memories don’t work like that. A traumatic memory is stored in the brain and body like a glass bottle is shattered on the floor. Everything goes in different directions. A part of the memory is stored in one part of the brain. Another part of the memory is stored in another part of the brain. The memories don’t store like a movie reel. They store like the memories we have when we were toddlers. This happens because the same part of our brain is in charge. We are in flight, fight or freeze when we are experiencing trauma.
The associated emotions are stored in the body causing some kind of inexplicable chronic pain. This is why many victims of crimes tell their stories without any emotion. The emotion is separate from the memory. This can make it even harder to believe the victim. We see this in the news all the time. The victim must be lying because they didn’t cry when they told their horrible story.
I have a flash of a scene. I have an understanding of the event. But the details you desire are not available to me.
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I get questions all the time when I tell my story. Who did that to you? What is their full name? Where are they today? What date did that happen? How old were you? Do you have any witnesses that can corroborate that story? These questions can be difficult for multiple reasons. 1) I can’t always tell you those details. I may remember what happened. I may remember who did it. I may have a face with no name or a name with no face. I may know the season because I remember what I was wearing, but have no idea my age or the year. I have a flash of a scene. I have an understanding of the event. But the details you desire are not available to me. 2) If you are asking me these questions, I immediately assume you don’t believe me either. And my response is to move away from my relationship with you because it is no longer safe.
So the next time you choose to write an article involving an individual with a traumatic story, please take the time to become trauma-informed. If the victim tells you they are no longer comfortable with telling their story, honor that. If the victim tells you the facts have shifted from the original story, honor that. This cannot be a story with a deadline. You cannot bully this victim in to telling you what they do not know or can’t speak. You cannot discredit them to save your own reputation. If you treat a victim in this way, you are just another predator and you have re-traumatized the victim. You become part of the problem, part of the traumatic story.
So, do your due diligence. You should not only be an expert writer with an accurate story, but you should understand the victim and how they recall their story. If you cannot take the time to do that, don’t write their story.
Sincerely,
Elisabeth Corey, MSW
Note: The editors also recommend this video for more information on the neurobiology of sexual assault.
Photo—NapInterrupted/Flickr
Thanx Elizabeth for your contribution. Blaming the victim is another way to control and silence the weak and protect the perpetrator, often more powerful. A victim would have to have a very strong sense of self to be willing to be subjected to interrogations, and it may be that they became victims because they lacked that strong sense in the first place. I was very moved recently by hearing Monica Lewinsky’s brave first public speech in many years, decrying the bullying that she and many others have been subjected to by the press and the powerful.
Elisabeth, Thank you so much fr your letter. You are spot on explaining traumatic memories which so fee understand. I heard a heart wrenching report on NPR this morning who interveiwed a fellow survivor from UVA and a friend of “Jackie’s”. The level of betrayal of Jackie is astounding and the comment of Will Dana stating that Rolling Stone’s trust in Jackie was misguided. To me this is the most detrimental statement. Immediately when inconsistencies arise, the survivor/victim is blamed. Do specific dates matter? Could Phi Psi not be lying, wold the perpetrators have confimred her story if interviewed?Really? Could… Read more »
This lack of responsibility for the consequence of poorly thought out accusations is why I refuse to acknowledge being a survivor. It’s certainly possible that she’s just mistaken. However, mistaken or lying she’s hurt a lot of other people. The dates and times aren’t relevant to whether or not she’s entitled to compassion and her feelings, but they’re of vital importance to establishing whether or not anything happened. Rolling Stone should never have agreed to take the story from a single source without being able to at least attempt to interview the people that are alleged to have committed a… Read more »
I realize that “movie reel” may have been a poor choice of words. I do understand that memories do not stream in that way. I was not attempting to give a scientific explanation of memory retrieval. I was attempting to give a comparative understanding to the layman between traumatic and non-traumatic memories. Thanks for your comment.
Elisabeth, as a trauma survivor who is very grateful for the work of 1in6.org, I agree with you. I have some bad news, however. Sabrina Erdeley is far from the only grossly irresponsible person in this case. In my view worse — much, much worse — is Emily Renda, who is supposed to be an advocate for victims of sexual assault and who is on the UVA payroll. Why? Because Emily Renda told Jackie’s story (giving Jackie the name “Jenna”) in sworn testimony to Senator Claire McCaskill’s committee back in June, 2014. That was how Jackie’s story came to the… Read more »
I agree with Jen just above. Human memory is definitely not like a movie reel and anyone who professes this idea is sadly misinformed. From Bjork, a memory researcher, on the key aspects of human memory: – A remarkable capacity for storing information is coupled with a highly fallible retrieval process. – What is accessible in memory is highly dependent on the current environmental, interpersonal, emotional and body-state cues. – Retrieving information from memory is a dynamic process that alters the subsequent state of the system. – Access to competing memory representations regresses towards the earlier representation over time Memory,… Read more »
Actually, none of our memories are stored like a movie real – cognitive scientists believe we recreate our memories every time we think about them. What we remember are associations and patterns that allow us to reconstruct a memory when we need to recall it. This process is inherently unreliable, and even more so when memories involve stress and fear. Our brain evolved mechanisms of memory to help us survive not to have perfectly accurate recall. We only need good enough recall to avoid danger, find food, find mates, and so on. Many years ago I was almost killed in… Read more »
Thanks for this Elisabeth. It is so important to be challenging this kind of stuff, and yet it is so ubiquitous it’s hard to know where to even begin. Keep up the great work.
Kind regards,
Kristin
I mostly agree here, traumatic memories are often times fragmented, contradictory and easily contaminated. But, ultimately, what goes in a newspaper is truth or the best approximation of truth that’s possible. What sets the movement back more than anything else is when we lower our standards of what we accept as truth merely because somebody is in pain. We let people use tales of abuse to ruin other people’s lives and there’s not always consequences attached to them. Yes, it can be very hard to determine what truly happened, but by the same token, we live in a nation where… Read more »