A few months ago, an adult survivor of childhood sexual assault called me from under a table, where she had been huddled for the last hour and a half. Her story, which she will tell herself, and in her own words, is one of almost unimaginable trauma: she was abused by her own father and then trafficked internationally to pedophiles.
Investigators – lawyers and former officers from all branches of law enforcement and the military – have been interviewing the survivor for the past year. They are, they assured the survivor, highly trained and most definitely “trauma-informed.”
So why was she calling me from under the table? Well, on a practical level, because although the investigators had retained a therapist to offer support, therapists — unlike trauma— keep business hours, and it was now 11 p.m. On a more troubling level, the survivor needed solace because, like many who consider themselves trauma-informed, the investigators were no more than that — informed. Informed about the impact of trauma on the brain and body, informed about survival responses… they could probably even recite the principles of trauma-informed care, which are safety, choice, collaboration, empowerment and trustworthiness.
What the investigators could not do was to consistently put these principles into practice. And the reason they could not do that is because they have the same blind spot that afflicts so many survivor-serving professionals: they were not “survivor-informed.”
By “survivor-informed,” I mean the fundamental practice of asking the survivor what they want, and then respecting and prioritizing their wishes. This might sound really simple, but sometimes in our desire as professionals to implement our training in “trauma-informed” practice, we give ourselves permission to make assumptions about what is best for the survivor. (After all, aren’t we the ones who have been educated about trauma?)
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