<< Front page News April 30, 2004

SAST reforms hotline training program

After years of debate, work has begun to implement a new Sexual Assault Support Team hotline counselor training program, specifically aimed at addressing issues that led to the shutdown of the hotline in March. The new program will train counselors in cultural sensitivity.

The Sexual Assault hotline, the service component of SAST, was disconnected after members charged that it was inaccessible to survivors who were not heterosexual white women.

“My personal hope is that the hotline will be restarted the fall after next,” sophomore SAST member Caleb Baker said. The hotline stopped operating after Winter Term due to a lack of trained counselors and was officially ended in March because of allegations of inaccessibility.

Baker, who plans to spend his summer developing the new ExCo training course, may have to work alone. SAST has no official timeline on restarting the hotline, and most members believe the organization has to restructure entirely first.

“SAST is not currently a cohesive body nor is it united on any of the issues,” sophomore Farah Joyner said. “It needs to rebuild itself before it can make long-term plans. Ideally I would love if there was a hotline that was accessible to everyone.” Joyner does not consider herself a member of SAST, but still attends meetings.

Senior SAST member and former hotline counselor Christina Pienta said SAST must work to become anti-racist.

“Either an organization is racist, or anti-racist,” Pienta said. “Racism exists along a continuum, but no organization run by white people is non-racist.”

Former SAST member and senior Julie Dulani said, “SAST’s resources are structured to cater exclusively to white heterosexual women, but SAST fails to do even that.”

“If you can’t see a reflection of yourself within the organization, it’s safe to assume that the service providers don’t have your interests in mind,” Dulani added. “It becomes very hard to trust the service.”

But senior SAST member Rachel Klauber said that recruiting people of color as counselors or offering bilingual services wasn’t enough to make the hotline accessible.

“You can’t just add people of color to a hostile environment,” Klauber said. “You must rebuild the entire environment with people of color as a driving force.”

Former SAST member and hotline coordinator senior Rebecca Tinkelman said that SAST’s quest for anti-racism was what alienated hotline staff in the first place, taking the phone off the hook in early February.

“It was hard to recruit anyone for the hotline because no one wanted to go to meetings and talk about their white privilege,” Tinkelman said. “But people like Julie [Dulani] and Farah [Joyner] believe this work is supposed to be hard, and if you can’t take it you should get out. People who wanted to help survivors of sexual violence were discouraged, and not recruited.”

In spite of the internal conflicts and the seemingly inevitable shakeup of SAST, Baker maintains that the hotline should have continued operation.

“I am in the minority opinion on the hotline issue,” Baker said. “I wanted to keep it running and retrain people while they continued their jobs.”

Some counselors support Baker’s efforts to improve the training process but do not feel that racism was SAST’s biggest problem. They assert that SAST’s approach to restructuring will hurt more people than it helps.

“In some ways it must have not served all people equally because most resources can’t,” former counselor and senior Lee McKeever said.

“In what way, though, was never made clear to me. The closest I got from people on the other side of the debate was that ‘some of my friends kind of feel that way.’ People who chose to terminate the hotline felt it was unethical and unfair to offer a resource they didn’t feel provided equitable access, but I feel that a resource which helps even one person is still valuable.”

Complaints and barriers

Callers to the hotline remained anonymous and counselors collected no information about the race, gender or sexuality of its users, SAST members said. But proponents of the shutdown contend that user demographics are irrelevant because they do not show the number of people who avoided using the service due to its white-oriented image.

“Our knowledge about who accesses the hotline is based on our engagement within our communities about this issue,” Joyner said.

“Insisting on demographics misses the point. Demographics don’t tell the whole story because they don’t count the number of women of color who aren’t using the hotline who don’t feel comfortable calling. Statistics won’t and can’t reflect the racism inherent in SAST’s structure.”

Dulani agreed.

“Requiring proof perpetuates the power dynamic where we, people of color, have to start on the defensive because we are starting from a point of invalidation,” Dulani said. “This is the same as [requiring proof] from victims of sexual violence, who are already working through so much already.”

Neither McKeever nor Tinkelman said they had heard complaints of racism in SAST from anyone outside the organization. But both said they had heard complaints about SAST being too politicized and feminist to approach.

Junior Heather Griffin questioned the intent of these descriptions.

“What do these words mean?” Griffin asked. “That we want to hold perpetrators of sexual assault accountable? That we don’t want to lose power to sexual violence and rape culture or be complicit in it? These words are an easy way of dismissing the discussion.”

Dulani said these words reflected the concerns of white people.

“If white people express feeling alienated from SAST, it is a big deal and they are not questioned,” Dulani said. “But when people of color express being alienated from SAST because of racism, it’s not taken seriously and we are asked to quantify and prove the racism.”

Dulani said that the organization and the hotline both were inherently political.

“People think counseling is neutral, but it’s not,” Dulani said. “How one thinks about sexual violence and counsels about it is informed by issues of race, etc. Sexual violence does not occur within a vacuum. There are histories, cultures, aspects of identity that inform how we experience violence and this doesn’t go away just because you’re on the phone — either as a caller or a counselor.”

Tinkelman said that organizational politicking has hurt SAST’s sensitivity toward the basic needs of the community.

“Groups that work on sexual violence are comprised of people close to or personally affected by it,” Tinkelman said. “These organizations can’t survive if they aren’t supportive of what their members are going through. SAST has been the opposite of supportive.”

McKeever said that politicizing the hotline hurts callers.

“Our hotline used a supportive approach, which was based on letting people know their options,” McKeever said. “Other services use a directive approach, which can be more problematic in terms of power. You are dealing with someone in a vulnerable situation seeking information and you do choose what information to provide, but you have to be aware of your biases and be sure that you provide all the options.”

SAST members said they do not want the hotline to adopt a directive approach, but merely to be supportive of everyone.

In 2002, SAST made a list of “problems with performance” in SAST’s existing structure, which highlighted the need for staff to address their own privilege in society.

Two problems listed were, first, the “idea that one marginalized identity (sex, gender, sexuality) or violent experience (survivorship) makes you irreproachable, that being marginalized in one area of life means you don’t have to worry about how you oppress others/are privileged” and, second, “that survivors can’t be held accountable for being racist, etc.”

Disappointment at closure

Not all students of color feel the hotline should have been shut down even if it was racist.

“As a minority I’m concerned, and I feel [racism] should be dealt with, but not by shutting the hotline down,” sophomore student senator Andrea Leung said. “I agree that putting out a message is important, but what about the people who are being sexually assaulted and need help? The people who are allegedly being discriminated against are potential callers. Even if I felt strongly as certain people do that SAST is discriminatory towards minorities I still would not feel ashamed to call them if I needed help because that is what they are there for.”

Sophomore Muslim Students Association member Ali Najmi said that, while his group has discussed racism the group has never addressed SAST.

“I think I’ve seen a general feeling of people viewing this as a repercussion of hyper-political actions at Oberlin,” Najmi said. “Even if it was racist, even if the hotline did only serve white women, what are they going to do now?”

Some former hotline counselors also feel that the closure was unjust.
Tinkelman pointed out that race was only one factor among age, sexuality, community, the kind of relationship survivors have with their assailants and others that influence how people are affected by sexual violence.

“While these factors are important to know, the most important part of being a counselor is knowing how to listen,” Tinkelman said. “Counselors need to not be afraid of what people might say, and know the right resources to point people toward. As far I know, SAST training has done this.”

Administration was unaware of charges

Student Health Director Lori Flood suggested that the decision to end the hotline might have been hasty.

“When I asked members of SAST how they knew the hotline was inaccessible, they just said they’d heard so from students of color,” Flood said. “The attitude seemed to be ‘we just know it.’ I’m not saying decisions must be data-driven, but in the non-profit sector you don’t shut down a whole program without knowing what the data is telling you.”

Flood said that SAST members could have looked to outside mediators to help settle their disputes.

“They could have worked with someone from the administration, or even a student from the dialogue center,” Flood said. “This is a student group of people who care about violence against women, yet they’ve treated each other so poorly.”

Flood said that caucuses for people of color had been formed in other sexual assault prevention arenas facing similar debates on providing services to provide representation and talk about the work being done.

Flood said she had never heard students outside of SAST complain that it was racist. Acting Dean of Students Bill Stackman said he had never heard such charges formally, informally, or in Student Senate meetings.

President Nancy Dye declined to comment on the hotline’s shut down or on SAST, as did the Multicultural Resource Center.

Flood said that while SAST’s restructuring may be necessary, she was sad to see the organization in turmoil.

“I felt proud of [SAST’s] educational work on consent and sexual assault,” Flood said. “I’m going to miss that. We’re all going to miss that. When you get stuck in being right, you miss so many opportunities.”

Since SAST stopped paying the phone bill, both it and the administration have been referring students to the Nord Rape Crisis Center in Lorain. While Nord offers LGBTQ and bilingual advocates, as well as ones trained in African American cultural experience, if a caller desires one, it does not share SAST’s philosophy.

“I would like to think that a hotline is not political,” Nord Direct Service Advocate and African American Outreach Team Chairperson Sharon Fielding said. “A hotline for us is to help the survivor, and it doesn’t matter who is on the end of that phone. Our philosophy is to believe the person no matter what, and not to convert them to our belief system.”

Fielding gave an example of how an African American might experience sexual violence different from a white person.

“Because of a history of being oppressed and a cultural worldview that seeks commonality and interdependence, African-American family bonds can be harder to break than in Caucasian families,” Fielding said. “If the assaulter is a family member it can be harder [for an African American] to report them. When sexual assaulters are reported to the white authorities, survivors can feel like they betrayed their community.”

Because Nord offers follow-up service in addition to their hotline they are able to collect age, race, ethnicity, gender and disability information about their clients, should the information be given voluntarily. Nord has served Oberlin students in the past, and students have also volunteered for Nord as advocates.

SAST members look ahead

Either through reform or a change in hotline oversight, SAST staff are looking forward.

Tinkelman has submitted a proposal to the administration regarding the hotline.

“I think it should be removed from control of any student organization,” Tinkelman said. “It should be apolitical and a member of the administration should oversee it to make sure it gets publicized and everyone gets the same training.”

Dulani was not optimistic about an administration-facilitated hotline.

“The administration fails to be supportive even to white survivors,” Dulani said.

“We need to make radical changes, and it takes a lot of guts that this administration doesn’t have,” Joyner added.

Klauber said that a College-run hotline would still need to take the issues of racism confronting SAST into consideration.

Flood said that more research into the proposal was needed.

“The proposal assumes that students may not feel comfortable using Nord,” Flood said. “Just like assuming that people of color don’t feel they can use SAST, this assumption must be checked before we act on it. People need to come to the table and talk about what our real needs are, and not our perceived needs. We need to find out whether we have meet those needs through student groups, the administration and local non-profits.”

In the meantime, Pienta said a retreat is tentatively planned before the end of the semester to address SAST’s current state and future.

Joyner plans to co-facilitate an ExCo next fall titled “People of Color: Violence and Sexual Health.”

“It will be a safe space for female-bodied people of color to discuss issues of sexual and domestic violence within our communities,” Joyner said.

“This ExCo is not the first time women of color have spoken out and created resources for women of color survivors on campus,” Dulani added.

Dulani seems aware of the challenge ahead.

“Before SAST can be anti-racist, it must be welcoming to change. It must be welcoming to people of color,” Dulani said. “To be anti-racist takes power from the powerful, which puts white people on the defensive.”

Nord Rape Crisis Center has a 24-hour rape crisis hotline at 1-800-888-6161.

For non-crisis information regarding Nord, call 775-0011.


 
 
   

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