Many victims of emotional, psychological, and sexual abuse say they experienced even more trauma when they tried to get help. Where can someone who is being abused get help? Here’s what you need to know.

Author Nicole Bedera talks about what typically happens when abuse victims try to get help. If you need live support, attend a Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group Session.

If you’re wondering if you’re experiencing one of the 19 types of emotional abuse, take our free emotional abuse quiz.

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Transcript: Where Can Someone Who Is Being Abused Get Help?

Anne: I have Dr. Nicole Badera on today’s episode. She’s a sociologist and author of the book, On the Wrong Side, how universities protect perpetrators and betray survivors of sexual violence. Her research focuses broadly on how our social structures contribute to survivors trauma and make this kind violence more likely to occur in the future. Nicole puts her work into practice as an affiliated educator at the Center for Institutional Courage. Welcome, Nicole.

Nicole: Thank you. I’m so excited to be here.

Anne: I am so grateful to have you on. You do fascinating work. Especially because you focus on what happens after. And that is something that listeners to this podcast are all dealing with. Where can someone who is being abused get help? They’ve found they have been a victim of coercion. Husbands don’t tell my listeners all the information they need most of the time. Their husband actually purposefully kept it from them.

For example, they didn’t know that their husband solicited prostitutes, or was having an affair. Or something outside their boundaries, which is extremely traumatic. And people don’t view this as an actual act of emotional and psychological abuse. They don’t see it as coercion.  

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Nicole: I did my research a little differently than other people in the past. Many people focus on going to the police or workplace. I focus on what happens for students still in school. Victims report most of the time to a Title IX office. You might have heard about it in the news. It’s been everywhere over the past 10 years. New has quieted down quite a bit recently. And a Title IX office is a little different from those other places. We can get into that if you’re curious.

Inside The Title IX Office

Nicole: In terms of what I did, I spent a year inside one of those Title IX offices interviewing the victims, the perpetrators, and school administrators who had the most control over their cases. I found participants trying to come forward after abuse for help in that setting that way.

All knew something was wrong. They might not know how to label it, or how to label it in a way that the system would recognize. That’s something survivors deal with a lot.

Women have been especially made to feel a lot of this stuff is just normal. There’s this idea that this is exactly what you should expect when you go to college, or in a marriage. And so there were some who weren’t sure what was going on. But they knew that something had affected usually their education, or they felt unsafe and unsettled. They were looking for help after abuse? And they ended up in my study.

They went to their school for help for abuse either through the victim advocacy office, which on a college campus can help survivors with whatever they need. But many things that have nothing to do with the perpetrator. Including things like they need an extension on an assignment, or there’s a specific class they want to take, but their perpetrator wants to take it. They’re trying to figure out when they can take it in the semester that they won’t be in the same classroom, things like that.

Or they went through the Title IX office to try to report what happened to them, to seek some kind of safety or justice. So that’s who we’re talking about in the particular book.

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Challenges In Reporting

Nicole: But many themes are not that different from all the other places that maybe you’ve tried to report or consider going to for help.

Anne: When a woman has a situation where she needs help from abuse, but she doesn’t quite know where to go. It’s so heartbreaking for me, as I see this with wives trying to figure it out. We usually do couple therapy, or maybe like addiction recovery or something along those lines. Trying to figure out how to start to feel safe again in my marriage?

When you’re talking about on a college campus, they’re thinking how to feel safe again on campus. Why do you think this idea of safety and how to feel safe again is so hard for pretty much everybody to understand? For institutions or organizations, they’re having a hard time figuring this out. What do you mean she feels unsafe? What should we do about it?

Nicole: There are a few issues that we encounter when victims are trying to decide where to report. One of them is that many systems that we think will help won’t help. Administrators tell students to go to the Title IX office for help. If they experience violence, harassment, or any kind of gender discrimination. But that’s not what the Title IX office is concerned with.

Their primary concern is what do we do with this perpetrator? Sometimes doing something about the perpetrator would help, if the school would. Which they often hesitate to do. But a lot of the time, that’s not meeting a survivor’s need in a real way.

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Classroom Trauma: Where Can Someone Who Is Being Abused Get Help?

Nicole: And that’s the same issue that comes up if you go to the police, or to a couples therapist. I think many people who’ve tried for help at any of these institutions have experienced coming in for something tangible for yourself, right? So an example I gave earlier is you are, let’s say you’re a victim in a university setting, and you show up on the first day of class. And you see your perpetrator is in class with you. And that the class will discuss violence as a topic.

So this just feels completely impossible for you to be able to be safe in this environment because it’s going to be reminding you of your trauma. You might have to watch your perpetrator interact. It’s going to be just a place where your body and mind are responding to the traumatic experiences you’ve already had.

Anne: <a href="https://www.btr.org/emotional-abuse-affects-your-body/" title="And the trauma you continue to experience, because the likelihood of him gaslighting you, continuing to emotionally and psychologically abuse you through this wh