13/03/2023
How to Interview a R**e Survivor
Author’s note: this piece is a partial memoir of the work I do with adult survivors of childhood s*xual abuse. Despite the title, it is NOT intended as a guide to interviewing survivors of s*xual trauma. Please be a professional in the field or consult with one, before enquiring after a person’s trauma experiences. Naturally, the article contains confronting and disturbing material throughout.
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I was talking to a friend the other day, on the subject of passing casual judgement on other people without knowing much, or anything, about them. Unless you’re the kind of person who is truly driven to make snap judgements about complete strangers, me and my friend agreed that - as most reasonable people would - it’s generally best to know something of the backstory before ploughing in with your indignation and opinion of people and the predicaments they find themselves in.
I mention this because the person I was talking to then almost immediately launched into a jeremiad about the prisons being full of thugs, gangsters and drug addicts and what a mess society is etc and so on. Prissily informing him that some of my best friends are thugs, gangsters and drug addicts, I reminded him of the work I do with prisoners and r**e survivors, and said in my experience prisoners tend not to reach for excuses about their crimes but instead have a generally realistic and resigned attitude to what they admit is their responsibility. ‘Play stupid games win stupid prizes’, as one of them said to me laconically. ‘I stole some cunt’s car and after a high-speed pursuit down Parramatta Road, the police arrested me and now I’m in jail for the next three years.’
‘You made some poor choices that night, admittedly,’ I concede.
‘F**ken oath I did. And that’s just the stuff that got put in front of the court. Hahaha.’
Moving swiftly on before the client manages to incriminate themselves with some ripe convict anecdote about what else might have happened that night, I note yet again how none of the people I interviewed say something like this: ‘I steal cars and traffick drugs because of what happened to me as a kid.’ For sure they understand that adult behaviour can be influenced by childhood trauma, but that’s a reason not an excuse and few make excuses for their behaviour.
None of them try and wriggle out of robbing a bank because of past trauma, even though that would be a perfectly legitimate thing to conclude.
Back to my judgemental friend, I said that traumatised people do traumatised things and that shoving them repeatedly back into intolerable prison conditions isn’t going to help. ‘Well they made a choice to commit the crime’, he continued, starting to annoy me now. He’s not wrong but as I’ve learnt from my own experiences as an addict, the conditions under which those choices are made play a huge part in what happens next.
Australian prisons are indeed full to bursting with people, incarcerated for the widest possible variety of reasons. Some of those people are, undoubtedly, dangerous and determined criminals, who do need to be locked up. No one is suggesting we go easy on serial killers for instance. But that very dangerous group is a relatively small minority.
Amongst the ‘dangerous but normal’, type I’ve had lucid and insightful conversations with murderers, bikie chieftains, terrorists, bank robbers, international drug and weapons traffickers, domestic abusers, cyber fraud masterminds, white collar criminals, basic shoplifters and petty thieves and, only in highly specific and exceptional cases, people accused and/or convicted of crimes of a s*xual nature.
Many of them are mentally ill, diagnosed with serious conditions such as schizophrenia, paedophilia, bipolar, multiple personality disorder, psychopathy to name a few, and often denied medication for those conditions by the prison medical authorities. They come from all walks of life, although often a background of poverty, instability and domestic insecurity is a notable pattern. At some point in their early youth, nearly all of them - in fact I’d say all of them - experienced some kind of emotional, financial or lifestyle vulnerability, of manifold types, that human infants are simply not conditioned or able to understand or solve. Nearly all of them suffer from some kind of addiction abuse syndrome.
Despite all this, many of these prisoners are clearly formidable people. Displaying above average intelligence at the very least, emotional insight into their own lives, wisdom and resourcefulness, they would have made successful business executives, military commanders, medical experts, sports stars and community leaders, if their lives had only taken a different turn, and not the dark path chosen for them by a mostly random series of events or encounters over which they had no control whatsoever.
For, whatever their many differences, problems, and abilities, all these people share one thing in common: all of them were s*xually abused as children, most often at the hands of the individuals and institutions charged with providing them with the safety, protection and care that is the birthright of every child on the planet.
Worked as an invisible hand guiding them from where they could have gone, to the prisons, clinics and homeless shelters where they ended up, the injustice at the heart of what happened to these people is of a type that passes all understanding.
I’m not suggesting that everyone in prison, or every criminal, was abused as a child, because a) that’s not true and b) a suggestion like that could easily turn into an excuse, levied by the unscrupulous for their own gain. Nonetheless, huge numbers of the Australian prison community have experienced s*xual abuse as a child. I apologise for using an inaccurate number word to describe the scale of it. ‘Huge’ could mean anything pretty much, but non- academic researchers like myself are reduced to such vagueness by the necessarily hidden nature of the problem. We will probably never get a full and accurate numeric count of the number of s*xual abuse survivors in Australia or anywhere. For years victims have said nothing, shocked, traumatised and terrified into a frozen silence that may last a lifetime, and obviously the perpetrators aren’t exactly putting their hands up. That situation is slowly changing and it’s on all of us to encourage survivors to come forward, believe them when they do and help them when they ask.
I don’t particularly want to dwell here on the thought of child s*xual abuse, for a number of obvious reasons. Firstly, the images and memories shared by victims to people like me are legally privileged and confidential. Quite simply, telling someone else would be a grotesque professional breach of trust and law. I don’t exaggerate when I say that I would rather go to jail than reveal the things told to me by survivors. Secondly, I don’t want anyone else - you the reader, for instance - to have those kind of thoughts anywhere near your mind. It stops with me, and the victim, whoever else they choose to tell and a court of law. I choose to hear it and face whatever the consequences are, because for me it centres around a principle so important that it can’t be ignored, unheard or left undone: and someone has to physically do it.
So what I do want to do, is to make clear why these victims statements are so important and why someone has to witness them, hear them, record them, write about them and further investigate what happened.
There are many dark and horrendous truths at the heart of child s*xual abuse, but paradoxically some of them are enabling if used properly. Something I was keen to impress upon survivors, formed part of the script and went something like this:
‘Apart from being a terrible crime, what happened to you as a child is essentially a lie, an act of ruthless dishonesty perpetrated against you, and then propagated and protected over the years by the people responsible, in an attempt to avoid accountability, deny reality and get away with the worst thing that one human being can do to another. You've carried the burden and effects of that lie since then and it has ruined your life, shattered your faith in authority and family, caused you to spend your life believing that somehow you are to blame for what your abuser did to you.
‘But what you’ve done today is something no one has ever done before; you’ve told someone else the truth about what happened to you as a child, and I’ve listened, and I believe you. I heard the truth in your voice; because you cannot hide a lie like this behind another; because we’ve heard stories similar to yours thousands and thousands of times, and the similarities and patterns are obvious and clear to us, to a court, to the lawyers on both sides of the argument and to the police, and finally this: because the authenticity of a damaged child’s voice rings out down the years with such force and honesty that it leaves lies and cowardice with nowhere left to hide.’
Amidst the sobs from the other end of the phone line, I’d remind this brave and profoundly damaged person - who may be a convicted murderer or underworld enforcer -that the recollection of traumatic memories will probably mean they’re going to have a rough few days now, reliving what happened. I’d suggest they give us a call, not the prison authorities, if they felt low. I don’t know if it was the professional or the right thing to do but I used to give them my personal phone number and full name, and urge them to call me if they needed to talk. None of them ever did, I suspect they’d done enough talking for now and I’m not a thera**st. I think, in the face of this kind of thing, you just try and keep what is profoundly messy and disturbing, as simple as possible. I’ve promised many people in prison many things, but it always has to come back to this: can I deliver on the promise asked of me by someone who trusts no one else on the planet.‘Please don’t tell my mum‘ is a common one we’re asked. Such a simple and loving requirement, from an adult still, years later, trying to keep his family safe from even hearing an awful truth that has embroiled his entire life. I take those promises and commitments very seriously indeed.
When a person asks to tell you something that they’ve never told anyone else, and could you help them, and you agree to listen then you undertake a fierce and sacred commitment, because even without the answers, the kind of questions that now need to be asked, come laden with the sickening realisation that these kind of things are even possible and that adults do this to children.
So when you ask someone, ‘Did the person r**e you when you were a child?’ And how old were you exactly when this happened?’, then you better be damned sure you’re ready for the answers and aware that the questions you ask and the answers given are just going to get worse and worse as you delve deeper into something unspeakable, aware that you’re re-traumatising the victim, but also in pursuit of the thing that can now help them the most: detail.
‘Do you understand what I mean when I use the word r**e, legally speaking?’ ‘Did you understand what it meant when it happened to you, at the age you’ve just told me?’ ‘How many times did he r**e you?’ ‘Over what kind of time period did these assaults occur? Days, months, years?’ and then questions so intensely personal and intrusive and forensic that they come in words and sentences that no right thinking individual would ever truly want to put to another person. But we must.
But I’m sure I speak for everyone who’s spoken to a r**e survivor, or confronted this situation professionally, when I say that our belief in you is not just a professional standard or courtesy, but because our experience, other evidence and legal precedent means that we know the truth when we hear it, and that the things you’d rather remain confidential - the things you don’t want your mum to hear - are safe with us.
The things they say to you, you say to them and the promises you make to r**e survivors are written in two ways: as hard nosed evidentiary statements aimed at bringing some measure of reparation and justice to the victims, but also they are written across the heart of everyone who hears them, because a truth finally told, however terrible, can restore at least something of the discarded, disbelieved and forgotten child that became the damaged and angry person currently filling the jails, mental institutions and morgues of this country.
People that we so quickly forget and readily judge, in our obsession with ‘choices’, our readiness to ‘blame’ and the all too common haste with which we look the other way when someone who is in terrible trouble tells us an uncomfortable or appalling truth.
