May 2022

Dear Friends of Courage,

I continue to be grateful for your support of Courage’s work and of our mission to generate and share new knowledge that ultimately will inspire more accountable, effective, and equitable institutions for everyone. I want to tell you about two accomplishments that are part of our research and education mission.

First, Courage–along with the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Lab, the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford, and the Stanford Women’s Center–sponsored a joint screening of both the On the Record documentary and a research panel featuring Courage Board Director and Research Advisory Committee Chair Dr. Jennifer M. Gómez discussing institutional courage and her Cultural Betrayal Trauma Theory. I highly recommend watching both the documentary and the panel discussion.

Second, an amicus brief that I co-authored, along with Dr. Sara E. Boyd and 18 other experts in mental health and trauma, has been recently admitted into the record by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. The case pertains to the response of a high school to a student who was assaulted by a peer on school grounds. The goal of this brief was to educate the court about how individuals respond to traumatic events, the harm of institutional betrayal, and the necessity of treating victims with respect. This and other amicus briefs, informed by scientific research, have the power to influence the ways in which victims are treated by the legal system. While often the initial impact is in a single case, the downstream effects can be tremendous. Equally important is that concepts like institutional betrayal enter the legal domain and become integral parts of future cases that support survivors.

In closing, I hope you read this issue’s Spotlight article by Courage Senior Advisor Dr. Anne P. DePrince. DePrince calls on us all to move from unawareness to awareness–and ultimately to action–in addressing the problem of violence against women. Her piece in this issue, and her new book Every 90 Seconds: Our Common Cause Ending Violence against Women, are an excellent starting place for each of us.

Thank you for being with us on this journey, and with appreciation,

Jennifer Freyd
Founder and President, Center for Institutional Courage
May 2022

Spotlight: Unawareness to Awareness and Awareness to Action

By Anne P. DePrince, PhD, Senior Advisor, Center for Institutional Courage
Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Associate Vice Provost, Public Good Strategy & Research, University of Denver

The path to courage often starts with unawareness.

Sometimes unawareness is at the individual level – a common response to betrayal trauma. Being unaware or minimizing awareness of abuse by a trusted person offers a way for victims to navigate and survive abuse, as theorized by Courage Founder and President Jennifer Freyd in Betrayal Trauma Theory: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse and researched across several decades.

Unawareness also operates at larger, cultural levels, such as in the cycles of amnesia and denial that psychiatrist Judith Herman pointed out in Trauma and Recovery. Herman argued that denial of traumas – including the victimization of girls and women – has been commonplace and predictable across history. In recent years, scholars have shed light on the consequences of unawareness of systemic injustice, such as the racialized trauma and discrimination that intersect with betrayal traumas.

Against the backdrop of unawareness, then, awareness can be profound, offering new perspectives and the promise of change. After all, you can’t fix a problem you don’t know about.

Yet the promise that awareness of the victimization of girls and women would lead to transformational change has remained just that – a promise. Despite much attention to the issue in this #MeToo era, stubbornly high rates of intimate violence, harassment, and institutional betrayal remain common.

Awareness may be necessary for change but it’s certainly not sufficient.

Our path to courage, then, has to press beyond awareness to action. We especially need collaborative action that engages an ever-expanding network of people in the work of ending gender-based violence.

In Every 90 Seconds: Our Common Cause Ending Violence against Women (Oxford University Press), I make the case that violence against women diminishes each of us – regardless of our genders or life histories – because of the toll it takes on individuals, institutions, and our communities. Indeed, decades of research have revealed that violence against women is tangled up in the root causes of numerous pressing problems, from health and education inequities to gun violence and economic insecurity.

Understanding those interconnections is the key to building the sorts of expansive collaborations that have the potential to seed new and creative approaches to action – and ultimately transformative change.

Consider, for example, what interdisciplinary and community-engaged research at the intersections of these problems could reveal about new strategies for taking action through healthcare, education, and workplaces, for supporting community change strategies and advancing trauma-informed policy and practice.

At this nexus of complex problems and potential solutions, the work of Courage is essential to advancing, disseminating, and advocating for research that sets the path forward for courageous action. After all, research is one of the most powerful tools we have for moving from unawareness to awareness, and awareness to action.

Setting the path forward and realizing change will take each of us working together to engage an ever-expanding network of people. Every 90 Seconds is my invitation to you to realize that potential together, on our path towards courage.

Courage in Action: March - May 2022

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