Thank you so much for joining this conversation. Nancy Hicks shares from her heart, as well as from her lived experience with grief and loss, her theological education and training, and her personal and prophetic voice for change in the church and the wider world.

We thank Nancy for demonstrating courage and modeling healthy vulnerability as she shares stories of loss related to the death of her beloved son and the clergy sexual violation of one of her children. She also guides us through the ‘way back’ from the depths of despair towards a growing peace and confidence in her relationship with God and others and her roles as a speaker, communication coach and media spokesperson.

Discover more about Nancy and her work at https://www.nancyhickscommunication.com/

Check out her book Meant to Live: Living in Light of the Good News. https://www.nancyhickscommunication.com/resources

Thank you for joining us and tracking with this conversation describing ten ways to engage with someone who has been sexually violated in a religious setting:

6. Be intentional in your language: there are linguistic religious and spiritual constructs that actually harm the person who had been violated. Including but not limited to telling them you are praying for them, encouraging them to read Scripture, giving them notes with Scripture; sharing visions you had of them or for them etc., telling them to forgive their abuser, encouraging them to have more faith, questioning their ‘level’ of spirituality, and generally weaponizing spiritual dogma and practices. For more information on this topic, listen to the HV Podcast Season 2, Episode 6 with Danielle Tumminio-Hansen here:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1979877?client_source=large_player&iframe=true&referrer=https:
//www.buzzsprout.com/1979877.js?container_id=buzzsprout-large-player&player=large#
7. Empower them: keep consent at the forefront and meet the person who has been victimized where they are don’t pull them to where you think they should be or where you want them to be. Match their pacing and do your work on your own if you struggle to slow down to meet them. NOTE: this includes not pressuring them to disclose on your timeline or the church’s timeline and possibly supporting their decision to not disclose at all
Key themes – autonomy and dignity
8. Engage through a trauma informed lens: Your behaviours and words should be vetted
through the lens of safety, collaboration, empowerment, trustworthiness & transparency, peer support, and cultural safety. Elaborate on these and help listeners get a sense of what the would look like in behaviour.
9. Refer and defer to professionals: do not stretch beyond your scope as it can and likely will do more harm than good. Know what resources are available while also not pressuring the survivor to engage until they are ready. Simply say, “I don’t know but I can find out.” when you don’t know the answer. Stay engaged as long as they need to or as long as it is healthy for you to do so and rally a team of people to support you as you support them.
10.Do not position those who have been victimized as the educator or expert: Don’t put the burden on them to educate you or anyone else and don’t wait around or expect them to let you know how to be helpful. Do not say “Let me know what I can do…”

Thank you for joining us and tracking with this conversation describing ten ways to engage with someone who has been sexually violated in a religious setting:

The first three relate to PRE ENGAGEMENT: we can be doing these things before we engage with someone who has been abused in order to be ready to be a safe ally when called upon.

1. Do your own work: spiritual transformation and mental, emotional, and embodied healing practices and routines…not as “duty” but as holy medicine in response to Creator’s invitation.
2. Inform and educate yourself: trauma-informed training and practice is the BARE minimum; proactively educate yourself, your community, everyone you know – advocate all the time. For example, DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender = Jennifer J. Freyd, PhD is a psychology researcher, educator, and author. Her theories of betrayal trauma, DARVO, institutional betrayal, and institutional courage™ have revolutionized the field of trauma psychology and the practice of institutional community-building.
LINK to more information about DARVO: https://dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/defineDARVO.html
3. Act and advocate for change in your church or spiritual community: doing nothing is
equal to complicity – strong words but in the current climate of disclosures of clergy sexual abuse they may not be strong enough! NOTE it is up to those who have been sexually violated whether they allow you to advocate and stand in ally ship with them – this is not the ally’s decision.

ENGAGEMENT:
4. Believe the person who has been sexually violated and posture yourself accordingly –
we encourage a decolonized approach here – don’t take charge as we are trained to do in church cultures. Respond to their expressed needs and take action in your relationships with the person they are accusing and their supporters. This is not a time for “waiting and seeing.”
5. Resist the compulsion to ‘theodicize’ the person, their story, or the context: resist
moralizing, offering tropes or empty reassurances, or references to the “strong” survivor narrative (i.e..”I don’t know how you can be so strong.” Etc.)

Thank you so much Danielle, for your time, insight, expertise, and generosity in today’s episode. We join you in your commitment to increase knowledge about rape and sexual violation and provide language so people can name sexual violation for what it is.

Here is the link to Danielle’s website which has a link to her book, “Speaking About Rape: The Limits of Language in Sexual Violations.”

https://www.danielletumminiohansen.com/

Listed below are the quotes from Danielle’s book which were read and discussed in this episode:

"Those who listen to testimonies of those who experience sexual violations may be unaware that the linguistic choices they make may cause the person who shared so vulnerably to feel misrepresented or discredited, and thus cause a listener to inflict unintentional linguistic harm"

"...from recognizing that most human beings - even including those who perpetuate harm - are nuanced and complicated. A person can charm, coach your daughter's basketball team, be married and professionally successful, publicly advocate for women, and still pin down a girl on a bed against her will, cover her mouth, and attempt to have sex with her. This is possible, though many believe it is not."

" ... this was a classic "he-said-she-said" case of sexual harm. It would not go to trial. It would not receive a conviction, rendering any kind of public accusation an emotional and expensive experiment in futility. Moreover, our justice system operates in such a way that it punishes an individual for what is considered to be an individually perpetrated crime against another individual. However, if what I propose in this book is true - that sexual harm is a collective and not just an individual problem - then it follows that our individual system of retributive punishment requires re-examination, because meaningful accountability is needed on the part of both the person who perpetrated the harm and the wider society that enabled it"

: "...the definitional gaps that exist in matters of sexual harm will continue to function as forms of linguistic violence done to the individual by the collective. This linguistic violation becomes just one more component of the rape, one more way in which the person's body agency, and desire get disregarded, resulting in a toxic, symbiotic relationship between individuals and the collective in regard to the sexual harm done."

"One of the differences between a violating and non violating sexual encounter, then, is that the victimized party is denied co-authorship, so that the person who causes the violation alone writes the key plot points, overexerting narrative agency in a way that attempts to write the victimized person's story and have a lasting impact on that person's self. What separates those who inflict sexual harm from those who are on the receiving end of it, then, is that the latter group did not consent - irrespective of what they said or did not say during the encounter - to becoming the selves that the former tried to narrate them into being.”

Thank you so much Danielle, for your time, insight, expertise, and generosity in today’s episode. We join you in your commitment to increase knowledge about rape and sexual violation and provide language so people can name sexual violation for what it is.

This is the link to Danielle’s website which has a link to her book, “Speaking About Rape: The Limits of Language in Sexual Violations.”

https://www.danielletumminiohansen.com/

Listed below are the quotes from Danielle’s book which were read and discussed in this episode:

"What does it take to keep a person from naming her own sexual violation for what it is?"

"I recall a session with my own therapist where I was going to tell her about what had happened to me, but when it came time for me to actually explain, I found that I didn't have words to do it. I verbally froze, unable to speak, unable to say words like "rape" or "sexual assault" or even to offer a description of what had occurred. What I could do, though, was turn to music, the vocabulary of my childhood. I took out a compact disc player and turned on Samuel Barber's Agnus Dei, a devastating choral composition that begins as quietly as it is possible for singers to perform - pianissimo - and then escalates in tone and tension into a kind of collective vocal suffering. And what a singer seems to communicate in the performance of it is the same thing I was feeling: a profound sense of aloneness, of hopelessness, of fear. It said what I needed to say better than any narrative could have. My therapist seemed to understand, and after that, I found that I was able to talk about my experiences a little more freely."

"If you don't see yourself included in the language, then what is there to say? Because those who survived harm live within linguistic discourses, they may also self-gaslight, becoming unable to categorize harm that they might have named had they been exposed to different epistemic constructions of it, by which I mean that they might have thought differently about their own experiences if they had been exposed to different ways of constructing the knowledge related to it."

"Victimized individuals may, therefore, first imagine themselves as co-writers or, at least, ghost writers who had at least some agency or subjectivity in the encounter to maintain a sense of control or a sense of protection, or because they genuinely believe that's the most accurate representation of the event. Put more colloquially, they are prone to blame themselves. And while psychologists often label this as denial, I'm not sure it's always as simple as that - sometimes people are wrestling with the significance of events using competing ways of knowing (or epistemologies), which resolves into cognitive dissonance and the feeling that one is assembling a puzzle, the but the events that make up the pieces do not fit together to create a coherent picture. That's not denial. That's turmoil."

We are so grateful to "Esther" for taking the time and energy to raise their voice and help us continue to learn what it means to be everyday advocates. To read a fuller version of "Esther's" story, check out their blog at www.overturningtables.co.uk

You can also find @overturning_tables on Instagram

The email from the Head of Safeguarding referenced in the conversation can be found here: https://overturningtables.co.uk/email#abdbdd56-2cb9-481f-afd3-8b362b38d09d

Esther has also recommends a couple of resources:

https://survivorsgateway.london/

https://safespacesenglandandwales.org.uk/

And if you'd like to support an organization that has helped "Esther" and many others, consider Rape Crisis England and Wales https://www.justgiving.com/page/rape-crisis

We are so grateful to Alexa for her time and wisdom. We sincerely hope this empowers survivors considering court with the info they need to navigate that space with a little less harm. And that we ALL grow in our awareness in order to strategically support survivors in their attempts to find justice.

Here's a link to the 278 project "Survivor Safety Matters":
www.survivorsafetymatters.ca

Here's a link to the document where Alexa and her team have clearly laid out a comparison between the charter rights of victims vs the accused and how well those rights are executed in the court system:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12OKTkfJ9zmLfaQrcZd_wWAcRRXzYgaE4/view?usp=sharing

Here are the stats Alexa rattled off in case you want to take a closer look:
https://sexualassaultsupport.ca/statistics-sexual-violence-in-canada/

https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/benefits-military/conflict-misconduct/sexual-misconduct/training-educational-materials/myths-facts.html

EVERYDAY ACTIVISM:
Canadians, please sign this petition to endorse action be taken to change 278 (which gives the accused access to victim's private records like counseling records, journals and such):

Non-Canadians, here is a link to a petition you can sign to communicate the same thing to decision makers:

Follow the movement on Instagram (liking and sharing the content boosts the volume): https://www.instagram.com/survivor_safety_matters/

Know someone in the media, government or with a connection to sexual assault centres? Make an introduction to the Survivor Safety Matters team: https://www.survivorsafetymatters.ca/contact

This episode shares the story of a survivor who experienced abuse in two different industries and a traumatic trip through the court system. The story (and therefore episode) is long, but there are obvious breaks along the way to pace your own processing as you listen. The survivor, "Cassandra*" has been incredibly generous to provide the following show notes and access to communicate with her if you'd like.

RELATED ARTICLES:

"Cassandra’s" complaint to the Federal Ombudsperson for Victim’s of Crime (June 25, 2023)

Links to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights - review of Bill S-12 Publication Bans:

Oct 5, 2023

: Morrell Andrews refers to the “Cassandra” PB issue at 17:05:48-59 and she has powerful words about what we still face in the system at 17:06:50-17:07:34.
https://parlvu.parl.gc.ca/Harmony/en/PowerBrowser/PowerBrowserV2/20231005/-1/40002?mediaStartTime=20231005170218&mediaEndTime=20231005170905&viewMode=3&globalStreamId=14

Oct 17, 2023:

Dr. Ben Roebuck, the Federal Ombudsperson for Victims of Crime, presented at 17:04:10 to 17:04:41
– the part specifically about protecting therapeutic records and their plans for a systemic review.

https://parlvu.parl.gc.ca/Harmony/en/PowerBrowser/PowerBrowserV2/10101/-1/40048?mediaStartTime=20231017170153&mediaEndTime=20231017170643&viewMode=3&globalStreamId=14

- the reference to Cassandra wishing she had known to speak to a lawyer before reporting to the police, which led to the defence subpoena of her records and her decision to stay the case:
https://parlvu.parl.gc.ca/Harmony/en/PowerBrowser/PowerBrowserV2/10101/-1/40048?mediaStartTime=20231017172607&mediaEndTime=20231017172655&viewMode=3&globalStreamId=14

Victims of SA can get 4 hours of free Independent Legal Advice:
https://www.ontario.ca/page/independent-legal-advice-survivors-sexual-assault