Trauma 101: A Practitioner's Audio Guide to Trauma Response
“I couldn’t help but wonder if I was doing survivors a greater disservice by helping them navigate systems that would not only re-traumatize them but leave them without justice or the right support to find peace of mind. I had then realized that it was my duty as a practitioner to protect trauma survivors from institutions, rather than further institutionalize and re-traumatize them.”
- Annalissa Crisostomo
Take a listen.
This project is a pilot episode for an audio program that educates practitioners, survivors, and students about sexual violence, trauma, and healing. First and foremost, the creation of this product was motivated by the vested interests of three interconnected institutions to silence survivors of trauma - Psychiatry, Law and Post-secondary. It hopes to support survivors of sexual violence by making trauma-work more accessible and providing basic general skills for listeners dealing with sexual assault trauma in any capacity, as a way of “commoning the services”.
Project Background
As a survivor, I wanted to produce a creative resource that would support sexual assault victims navigating reporting, in order to mediate and prepare them for some of the challenges that I experienced myself. Initially, my intentions was to develop an easy guide for survivors to navigate institutional systems connected to reporting cases of sexual assault, such as the University and the Law. This is because ‘next-steps’ were often unclear or not accessible; and information that forewarned survivors about re-traumatization resulting from campus and legal processes was nearly non-existent in any resource website or handbook.
By creating a guide, I was hoping to contribute to resolving the issue around the lack of support for survivors in navigating decisions related to legal and campus reporting. I thought creating a podcast that allowed incoming students to engage in sensitive topics missing from academic classrooms such as “consent” and “sexual assault” would be helpful. Essentially, at first, I believed that establishing the challenges and obstacles involved in institutional processes would support survivors by helping them make informed decisions amidst their journey towards healing. Even though I knew I wanted to emphatically stress the dangers of Psychiatry, I was thinking it might be responsible to include a guide for navigating “mental health” services as well, since such services are currently suggested by prevention groups and university campuses.
As I continued to do research for this project, over time I found myself mainly questioning the reliability of the services I was providing. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was doing survivors a greater disservice by helping them navigate systems that would not only retraumatize them but leave them without justice or the right support to find peace of mind. I had then realized that it was my duty as a practitioner to protect trauma survivors from institutions, rather than further institutionalize and retraumatize them.
This product is important because information about sexual assault on campuses lack accuracy and transparency, with investigative reports revealing that many post-secondary institutions skew statistical data related to campus assaults by underreporting or informally dismissing cases. For example, Maclean’s published an article in 2018 on Canadian Universities responses to sexual assault on campus. Author, Zane Schwartz (2018) found that of the 41 students interviewed, many claimed that staff members encouraged survivors not to contact the police or media and to resolve the situation informally. Furthermore, with a bureaucratic system in place, survivors complained of ‘callous counselling staff’, delays, and an understaffed emergency hotline.
This audio podcast is ideal for incoming students at universities to listen to, most especially within their first eight weeks, because that is when the majority of total campus assaults occur (CFS Ontario, 2015), and typically students are within the ages of 15-24 years old - reported to be the ages in which most sexual assaults are committed against (CFS Ontario, 2015). Apart from being the typical target for sexual assault, students are also often at the age of ‘emerging adulthood’, a term coined by Jeffrey Arnett. According to Arnett (2000), 18-25 years of age is where adolescents become more independent and explore various life possibilities; included in these possibilities are legal consequences.
Many campus resources recommend some form of institutional involvement when dealing with incidences of sexual assault, whether it be the police or the use of mental health services; However, these suggestions are made without detailing the hegemonic barriers working against them (like for women and women of colour) and addressing the potential harms that can accompany institutional aide.
Challenging Institutions of Power
Within this ‘first’ episode I wanted to challenge the institutions of Psychiatry, Law and Post-secondary (University) by establishing ‘sexual assault’ as a social construction (Wilson, 2000) and by exploring how formal terms related to sexual violence and trauma in the Criminal Code and DSM are controlled by institutional actors such as psychiatrists and legal officials. As a way of establishing a foundation for listening as an important component of witnessing in trauma work, I challenge the “destruction of witnessing” since it can be attributed to [re]traumatization (Burstow, 2003). As a way of encouraging self-reflexivity, I challenge listeners to question what impacts their perceptions and knowledge about survivors by addressing products of hegemonic culture such as rape myths and myths about survivor needs and responses.
For example, Lori Haskell works to dispel the myth that women who are being raped often fight back, by taking a closer look at the neurobiology of trauma within this episode. I include 2 clips from an interview she did about “The Truth about Trauma”: the first, about the neurological justifications that support the survivor response to freeze during an assault; and the second about fragmentation, where an overload of the ‘fear of circuitry’ in the brain can result in processing random ‘bits’ of the assault (an example included within the episode).
I wanted to include concepts from Bonnie Burstow’s article “Critiques about Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and the DSM” about the arbitrariness of the DSM’s formal categories. Luckily, I found her lecture on “Psychiatry and the Business of Madness” at the Toronto Public library in 2016 and was able to include it. She use ‘Selective Mutism’ as an example of an arbitrary term within the DSM, and this was significant to include because it helped establish some skepticism around the institutional use of terms included in Psychiatry such as “PTSD”, and by extension, the Law such as “sexual assault” and “consent”.
To end, as a way of equipping individuals for trauma response, alternatives to institutionalization are provided and briefly explored such as the use of the arts in trauma like spoken word poetry. Instead of silencing sexual assault survivors through pathology, underreporting, and inadequate response, the aim of this product is to amplify survivor voices by equipping every day people with skills to be practitioners in their own communities. Moreover, this episode was created as a potential illustration of what ‘commoning of the services’ in trauma work can look like, potentially replacing professionalism and institutionalization as the first line of defense for practitioners and survivors to turn to; it can work as a valuable vehicle for social change and education, outlining and critically analyzing systems, policies and institutional histories at every step in an easy-listening way.
A ‘Podagogy’ of Healing
The need for audio programming for survivors of sexual violence
Audio podcasts have become increasingly popular over the last four years. The Canadian Podcast Listener, a Canadian podcast research group, conducted a study published in the summer of 2017 that revealed nearly 10 million Canadian adults had listened to podcasts that year; and more than 70% of Canadian listeners started listening within the last three years. Additionally, three primary reasons were found amongst adults for listening to podcasts: 1) to be entertained 2) to hear interesting stories and 3) to learn something new (Ulster, 2017).
Sexual violence, as a form of insidious trauma, needs to be addressed as it affects nearly 1 in 3 women (Ontario Government of Canada, 2017), and yet audio programming centered around sexual violence is non-existent (though there is a plethora focused on murder). As a way to fill this gap in audio programming ‘edutainment’, this podcast project was created with the intention to increase awareness of sexual violence and make trauma prevention and response more accessible through a practical and auditory medium.
Audio as a tool for learning and healing
In Kim Sterlney’s (2014) “The Evolved Apprentice”, he argues that human uniqueness is attributed to society’s capacity for apprenticeship learning, that in turn can lead to innovation. He posits that after basic survival skills were met, most likely due to an increasing population, specializations in fields emerged. A relevant example in Toronto would be the field of Education and its many programs at OISE. Exploring pedagogies in education, such as spoken word poetry, allows us to uncover benefits that further develop innovative methods conducive to learning that fits an increasingly technological society, such as audio programming.
There is a kind of sensational value inherent in audio programming such as podcasts. Anthony Bates (2017), in his evaluation of broadcasting as education, provided a list of benefits for using audio in teaching. One obvious benefit is that it is ideal for auditory learners, however perhaps not as evident, is its ability to provide variety and a ‘break’ in learning that can be refreshing and maintain learner’s interest. What is meant by this is, that by using a combination of recorded discussion points and audio clips, information can be better retained through constant auditory stimulation- a learning feature that written articles and blogs cannot benefit from. Moreover, Bates provided that audio programming had the capacity to change learners’ attitudes by presenting information in a novel way or from an unfamiliar perspective - a benefit ideal for counter-hegemonic work.
In addition to its sensational value, audio podcasts are also easily accessible in many ways. For example, they can be accessed through an online website, or can be used on your phone through an audio application such as ‘Spotify’. They are also accessible because they can be listened to on the-go, such as on the way to school or work, providing ‘entertainment’ and education on a commute or long trip. Related to trauma work, Bates provided results of a study conducted by Nicol Durbirdge, that revealed audio to be an intimate medium for distance learners because it provided feelings of ‘personal closeness’. This can be beneficial for practitioners because these qualities of audio podcasting can mean that survivors can have the ‘personal closeness’ of a therapist more readily accessible to them in the ways mentioned above.
In order to manage potential risks due to the sensitive nature of sexual violence, the audio podcast allowed me to insert a grounding meditation exercise near the end of the episode so that listeners could feel at ease, if they were feeling in any way anxious.
