Article: Survivor support services are part of the problem

Bryony Ball

1.

To be a survivor, I had to fit the bill. When I first tried to access support for rape, I was sat in my partner’s bedroom on my laptop. I had clicked the link for the website and was staring at the screen. That isn’t me, I thought, scrolling on the site and stopping on one of the images there: I’m not sitting by a rainy window with my head in my hands. I’d been out the night before, dancing and laughing. Yes, I had felt trauma in my life but as much as I had had breakdowns, I had also been having fun. It crossed my mind that maybe I wasn’t even a ‘real survivor’ as I didn't connect to the images of these broken-looking, faceless figures, all the shadows and endless pictures of hands. Is that what I was meant to look like?

I felt that if I clicked on the contact button, I would be consenting to enter that world, a world where my entire identity was broken rape victim and I would have to walk around with it tattooed to my forehead. It was a world where I would -- or should – want to be hidden. Where I must feel ashamed. Where I needed ‘rescuing’.

I knew I needed support as I didn’t really know what I ‘should’ do next to support myself. And everyone said to get professional support so I got in touch.

At my first meeting at the support service, I was told many things about how I would feel in relation to the rape. I would ‘probably want to stay in bed’ and ‘wouldn’t want to do anything, because of trauma’. I might not feel ‘comfortable’ in especially sexy clothing (after all, I was assaulted when I was wearing fantastic leather hot pants and a grey mini-dress). I would likely ‘find sex triggering’. I didn't realise until later how damaging these assumptions put on me were. I obviously wasn’t in the strongest state, so they got in my head.

This first conversation with a ‘professional’ heavily informed how I felt and behaved. Afterwards I felt I should be wearing baggy clothing and crying by a window. I wore tracksuit bottoms and big t-shirts for a while because I thought if I didn’t, people wouldn’t believe I had been raped and question me (and I couldn’t handle that). I was in a relationship at the time with someone I loved and the first time we had sex (great sex), I actually cried afterwards. Not because I felt triggered, but because I thought this is what I should do. It was what I had been told I would feel.

I didn’t tell anyone about this until months later when me and my friend were talking and she confessed to exactly the same thing. It seems wild now that my reactions were so confused, that they were acting out what I thought was expected of me. Some days I was depressed and had chronic anxiety, and some days I felt fine. It was a mess and didn’t follow the pattern of what I had been told healing would look like.

I was trying to navigate a world I didn’t understand and the guidebook was all wrong.

2.

I went through the support service ‘journey’, as they put it, but I didn’t come out the other end ‘healed’ in the way that photos and case studies on their websites promote. Just as I hadn’t been a ‘broken victim’ at the beginning of the support, by the end I wasn’t a ‘happy, healed survivor’ with my fists punching the air, jumping in front of a sunset like they show in the photos. There is a huge emphasis on ‘Before’ and ‘After‘ in the recovery world. I didn’t see the full extent of it until I began working in the same sector that initially supported me. The structures, the attitudes and the assumptions made in these spaces, all fail to represent and support the nuances of recovery and being a survivor.

It was only when I stepped away from the sector entirely that I was able to see clearly how problematic this was. As I started to process the problems, myself and my friend Meg dreamed up what an alternative space might look like. This is how we founded our project SLEEC (Survivors Leading Essential Education & Change); for survivors of sexual violence to have agency, own our healing and claim our own space. It is a space of solidarity and collective power. We show what things could look like if survivors really had autonomy and a space to redefine ourselves. We offer the support that we are desperately missing. That means spaces to have open conversations of rage and fury where we can discuss being let down by services. It also means slut-positive support around sex, kink and sexuality, and support to learn how to make your own natural remedies for self-care and healing.

We have made a space to connect where we are not just seen under the label ‘survivor’ but known as individuals. This was built as an antidote to the support services I had attended and worked inside that had failed to offer this.

3.

A few years after I first clicked onto that website, I found myself working in survivor support services including a safe house for survivors of trafficking. Knee-deep in reporting and monitoring paperwork, I saw even more clearly from the other side how toxic these narratives of healing and recovery are and how they are forced onto us. Even in the head office the pictures on the wall of survivors of trafficking showed women in chains. In the safe house, the leaflets in the hall were filled with images of survivors with no faces or simply shadows again. This was a charity that was supposed to be a specialist in this area.

Some of the forms we had to fill out with the women were solely for funders. Funders want services to prove survivors’ levels of vulnerability and write up case studies with the fixed format/structure of ‘Before’ and ‘After’. We had to pick what looked good and met the narrative of how ‘vulnerable and low’ this person was when they came to us and how ‘capable and healed’ they became after getting our support. Nobody wanted to hear that actually healing is complete chaos and there is no real way to measure it or meet a specific set of outcomes.

I had to fill out various forms with women I supported that hugely got in the way of much more urgent needs including legal casework and emotional support. I spent time doing things I didn’t agree with like regularly measuring people’s feelings of ‘safety, hope and choice’ out of 10, or asking for feedback on our service with carefully worded leading questions. The women would always roll their eyes and we would laugh together and tick boxes as quickly as possible so we had time to get on with real support. The way services were based so heavily on statistics and numbers, it felt like they forgot that behind it all there are real people with real stories and feelings that can’t be translated into numbers.

We are all individuals with complex human lives.

4.

When I tried to challenge support services, I was met with defensiveness. I was told that they needed evidence of the fact survivors are dissatisfied with their service before they can change anything. They wanted survivors to make actual reports or criticism before they would believe survivors were unhappy. As survivors accessing services, we often feel vulnerable and aware that any minimal support offered to us is conditional. We feel obliged to show ‘improvements’ in our healing process and to write ‘satisfied with the support given’ on the forms. Women I have supported have told me that they felt patronised, belittled and even bullied by support services but still wrote ‘satisfied’ on the feedback forms. There is no space for us to say how we really feel.

One thing that has always stood out to me within mental health services (and particularly survivor support services) is how people communicate with survivors in these spaces. They treat survivors like we are so fragile, and they’re scared of saying anything to us in case it causes harm. I first noticed this when I was supporting survivors through different mental health services in my city. And recently when I tried to find a counseller again myself to work through some unprocessed trauma, it took me five assessments with different counsellors before I found someone who spoke to me normally. The others spoke slowly, quietly and carefully like anything might be a sudden trigger, like I might kick off or have a manic breakdown if they said the wrong thing.

This assumption that we are fragile and weak leads to us being given less autonomy and control in managing our recovery. We are not viewed as capable or strong enough to know what is best for us and therefore decisions are made about what is the ‘right way’ to heal from our own individual trauma.

I have seen support services question survivors’ coping strategies and judge particular behaviors as entirely unhealthy. Things like sexual behaviour or kink in particular are often seen as a harmful trauma response and discouraged. Alcohol or drugs are viewed as strictly problematic as we are ‘too vulnerable’ to engage in such activities. I can guarantee that many support workers and counsellors go home and have a glass of wine at the end of a long day to relieve stress but if a survivor has a glass, it is judged completely differently, like we are too fragile to make that decision.

I personally found alcohol to be helpful some of the time in my breakdowns; it could give me a huge lift. This is not to say that it can’t also be harmful. Many survivors I know have found weed or hallucinogens helpful in recovery, but usually if we speak about this to a ‘professional’, they immediately draw up a risk management plan. They class it as worrying behaviour rather than create an open space to explore it as a genuine tool for healing. Shutting down conversations around kink or drugs is just another way of treating us as incapable of knowing what works for us. And all this reinforces the idea that there is one set way to heal.

5.

When I worked in the safe house, a colleague came into the office one morning and told me that she was very concerned that one of the women had been playing Crystal Crash on the tablet for too long. She said that it wasn’t good to have that much screen time. She was talking as if this woman was a child. She asked me if we should intervene and try and get her some ‘healthier coping strategies’.

While she meant well, I don’t think my colleague realised quite how important this game had been in giving this woman’s mind a rest from feeling manic and suicidal. She was recovering from years of sexual exploitation, violence and abuse and had told me that this game was helping her find peace from her mind for the first time in months. I could see how much it was not only helping but literally keeping her alive. Too much screen time was the least of her worries.

There is no simple solution or answer to trauma but there are thousands of beautiful individual ways that we can support ourselves and each other through it. Our complex human lives have very varied needs.

The set ideas of what is a good way or bad way to heal mean that so many of us feel alienated or like we’re doing something wrong when we don’t connect to the types of self-care or the recovery structures and well-being supports that are fed to us. Many times in my recovery, I have felt guilty for meeting my needs since they don’t fit what I’ve been told I should need. Trauma makes everything a bit of a mess so having some trust, validation and support for our choices from professionals is so necessary. I nearly cried when my (first good) counsellor told me how incredible I looked when I was wearing my little red mini-dress, when she got excited – rather than concerned –that I was going out to have a cocktail night.

Recovering from rape is complex. You’re not only dealing with your own trauma, but also have to manage the support service’s perception of your experience. You have to cope with their misconceptions around rape and sexual violence, their expectations of you and how you should heal. This all controls how you see healing yourself.

The support services and communities around us are such big influences on our recovery. It would mean so much if they could offer types of support that are varied and nuanced as people and our experiences themselves. Right now the conversations being had about survivors are not being had by survivors. So many multi-agency meetings are held about survivor support. At many of them, where I have sat in a huge room with other professionals who don’t know I’m also a survivor., And I’ve heard where survivors spoken about like we are this inferior vulnerable group that exists outside the community. Instead of talking to us about our actual issues and needs, the focus is on gathering evidence of how different organisations have successfully ‘fixed’ us.

Because of how survivors are left out of conversations and our identities are misrepresented, there are many misunderstandings about our experiences.

This is why me and my friend Meg are building entirely new spaces where we can learn to liberate ourselves from these systems of ‘healing’ and reframe what it means to be a survivor. We want survivors to be able to trust ourselves as the experts oin our own care and to, have the freedom to heal how we want: t, he freedom for it to be a mess, the freedom to make mistakes. Spaces where humour, joy and sexuality areis included in our healing. We created SLEEC as the antidote. It starts from a place without assumptions or , without set narratives and and where we hear each other and celebrate ourselves freely.