0:00:00.4 Louis Marvin: Welcome to Resource on the Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center on understanding, responding to and preventing sexual abuse and assault. My name is Louis Marvin, and I'm the Training Specialist at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. This podcast is part of our male survivors series. Today, Sharon Imperato and Jim Struve join me for a conversation on working with male survivors of sexual assault. Sharon is the project director of clinical training and technical assistance at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. Jim is the executive director of Men Healing, and both Sharon and Jim are on the facilitator team at Men Healing too. [music] 0:00:54.0 LM: Sharon, let's start by hearing from you about your work at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center and thinking especially of its history of working with male survivors and your history of working with male survivors. 0:01:07.2 Sharon Imperato: Louis, thank you for having me and thank you for having this topic. And I appreciate you bringing in a Rape Crisis Center. I know that there is misconceptions that Rape Crisis Centers are not open to male survivors. And I hope that we can change that misconception here and also help other crisis centers provide services for male survivors. So BARCC has actually explicitly offered services to male survivors since 1998. Though we know we've worked with men before that, but that's definitely what in our history goes back. And current staff can even talk about that experience. So BARCC launched an outreach program and awareness campaign in the early 2000s after the clergy abuse scandal broke in Boston. And it really highlighted the issue of childhood sexual abuse, particularly of boys and men. So it really brought awareness and consciousness to male survivors, particularly in the Boston area. And I know for us personally, there was a spike in calls for services for male survivors. And so we were able to meet those needs. And for me personally, I actually started doing this in the early 2000s, myself. BARCC was actually partnering with a Community Health Center. 0:02:15.7 SI: And we were running male groups together. And I've learned so much from that experience. And from there, I actually met people who were involved in Men Healing. And so now I'm a facilitator as well with Men Healing. So I get to have a lot of experience in working with individually, in groups, but really focusing on breaking the silence around male sexual abuse and male sexual assault, and bringing men together to build community. That's been a great part of my work. 0:02:41.9 LM: Nice. And you're getting us kicked off starting thinking about Men Healing as well. So thanks for that. And Jim, could you tell us about Men Healing, and especially how you work with Sharon and the center? 0:02:56.4 Jim Struve: Sure. Thanks. And thanks again for including Men Healing in this discussion. Well, it might be helpful just to context for myself and our organization, I first started working with male survivors back in the mid-1970s. And at that point, there was really hard to find any services or anything going on. And I was fortunate to meet a couple of other colleagues, Peter Dimock and Ken Singer. And we successfully convinced a conference in St. Paul in 1988, to do an add-on day on male survivors. So as far as I know, that was one of the first conferences, and that kind of led to the formation of MaleSurvivor, the organization. It started in the late '80s, early '90s. And by 2001, a couple of members of our organization Mackall Raul and Howard Fradkin, helped to launch the weekend recovery program. So that program has actually been going since 2001, to provide healing retreats for male survivors. In 2017 we incorporated independently as Men Healing, so Men Healing has been around since 2017 but the weekend's recovery since 2001, and we just this spring did our 86th-weekend recovery. So we've got a long history. And what we've done along the way as we've expanded from just doing three-day weekend retreats to doing single day, Days of healing. 0:04:27.7 JS: That's where we have been working with organizations like BARCC, and others around the country to try to find an alternative for people who can't get away for three days, or for other reasons, can't access a three-day retreat. And the other thing that's exciting about Men Healing is that we have expanded our program to now we're doing lots of video production for planning forums for men to tell their story. We just recently did a collaboration of a national story project to have men tell their stories and we've transitioned lots of our services to Zoom over the last year. So we're now doing virtual programming as well and look forward to talking about some of the exciting work we've done together with BARCC and other agencies like that around the country. 0:05:12.2 LM: Yeah, thanks, Jim. There's so much history talking about things going on in Boston and things going on in the pre-Men Healing organizing. So I love having that here. I love that you're both evoking that. So Sharon, you and your center, to that point, really have a clear and deep history of working with male survivors and in thinking about the barriers that male survivors face to services. And I know that in past conversations that we've had, you've emphasized that part of your approach is to recognize that survivors don't have barriers and just making that really, really explicit and clear, and starting from that place, and identifying that it's systems and responders that have barriers and have put up barriers. So could you tell us about your approach to working with male survivors, including recognizing and working to overcome those systemic barriers that you've identified that are imposed on male survivors? 0:06:10.7 SI: Yes, thank you. And I do want to credit Zoe flowers from the Women of Color network. I actually got that quote from her when I attended a seminar on working with communities that are marginalized and around sexual violence. And that really stuck with me 'cause I think we sometimes get so focused on the victims themselves, and what barriers keeps them from coming and it's not about them. It's about us as providers. So really recognizing the barriers that we have is that many men don't see themselves as even being victims or being able to be victimized and that comes from an educational perspective. That we're not telling boys and men that they can experience victimization. We focus a lot on women and their experiences of that. And I wanna be very careful to say that we're not here to compare and contrast experiences of populations of survivors, we're just here to talk specifically about the experiences of men. So I wanted to make that very clear. If men are not taught that they can be victims, then they aren't gonna seek services that can help address the issues, and Jim will probably talk about this too, that men don't see themselves as being raped or sexually assaulted. And if you look at the definitions, they often don't include men. I think the FBI didn't change their definition until 2012 to take out gender. 0:07:23.4 JS: 2013. 0:07:24.7 SI: 2013, thank you, Jim. And if men were to Google rape, they wouldn't see themselves in those definitions. So I think we need to expand when we talk about sexual violence, talking about sexual victimization and what that actually is, and being explicit about it. I think we need to be explicit about who we do work with. Men Healing, it's obvious, right? Work with men. But again, thinking about a Rape Crisis Center, I think you need to make it explicit that you talk about who you work with, that you name men specifically. Again, men could be on a spectrum, it could be cisgendered men, transgender men, non-binary, anyone who sees themselves on the masculinity spectrum, and their experience of sexual violence. I think also, we talk about Rape Crisis Centers that, again, it's this misconception that a women's only issue, it's also women's only organizations, and those are not true. 0:08:18.6 SI: So one of the things that contribute to men's misunderstanding about them being victims and stop. What contributes to men not seeing themselves as victims of sexual victimization is how it's represented in the media. Often on television shows and movies, when a man experiences what we consider to be sexual victimization, it's often thought of as a joke and done to be funny. And when we look at news reports where people might talk about, for example, an older female teacher and a younger male student, it's often referred to as a relationship or an affair. So if men are seeing that, they're not seeing themselves as victims or as survivors, so I think it's important that we provide education around that. And then we think about men, as you often do talk about male sexual abuse is most often people think of them as young and childhood sexual abuse, yes. But there's also adult male sexual assault and people's responses, I think of Terry Crews. When it came out about his experiences and many responses he got, and we have to be better and do better about recognizing men and responding appropriately to them. 0:09:26.4 SI: I think they are fighting a lot of barriers, and Jim could probably elaborate more on them, too, but I think the biggest one is not being taught that they can be victimized. And if they do have experiences, being taught that they're supposed to minimize the impacts and not talk about those things. Men don't get mental health services and often when men do, it's about something else, like depression or a medical issue, versus talking about sexual abuse. And there's more specific barriers, but I'm gonna pass it to Jim and maybe we'll come back to that. 0:09:58.4 JS: What I would add to what Sharon was so articulate about presenting in terms of the frame, is I think the other dynamic that we need to incorporate, we live in a culture that tries to pit issues or people against each other. And so I think we really have to see, doing this work as, how are we additive and how are we integrated. From my experience in the earlier years of doing this work, it was, "If you're gonna have services for another population, it's gonna take away from the population that's currently being served." And it was really a stretch to begin to try to approach agencies and saying, "Can we do both? Can we address both that nobody has to lose?" But I think our cultural norm so much reinforces... 0:10:49.4 JS: The gay rights, gay marriage movement is another thing, same-sex marriage, how if we get the right for same-sex marriage, heterosexual marriages are gonna lose. That's just a construct in our cultures that we pit things against each other, so I think part of our role as advocates for sexual assault, sexual victimization, is we have to think out of the box and challenge that systemic thing that pits us against each other for resources, pits each other for services and be really creative, that expansiveness can be more productive. And that there's so much more depth of doing it. 0:11:28.0 JS: Then I think the issues begin to tease out, and what happens is any gender can be an offender, any gender can be a victim. It's an abuse of power, and it's an abuse of boundary crossing. And almost the gender and the other separating issues become more, so then we can see through the fog, so to speak. Then secondly, I think the other thing that we're really trying to make an effort to do is, I believe deeply and luckily we have a board and all the team who are in agreement with this, we can't do this work without being a social justice organization. And we have to realize there's trauma-informed protocols, best practice procedures, they are part of the systemic violence, they are part of systemic entrenchment, and that if we don't challenge those paradigms, we just participate in keeping things stalled, and we don't make any progress. 0:12:20.7 JS: So we have to really be willing to be bold and take on the systemic issues in which victimization occurs. We can talk more about that, there's a bunch of ways. We're participating in a mental health system, we're participating in a criminal justice system, we're participating in a financial funding system, and they all perpetuate the status quo. And we either join in that and then we [0:12:44.0] ____ or we're bold enough to try to come into the market and tip over the carts and propose different ways to do stuff and shake things up. 0:12:56.3 LM: Yeah, thanks, Jim. And I know that... I think that leads really well into talking maybe more specifically about Days of recovery program in Massachusetts that you and Sharon and BARCC and Men Healing have offered, and these are the one-day healing events that the Men Healing does that you mentioned earlier. So could you just explore with us a little bit more about what makes these events helpful and relevant for male survivors? 0:13:31.6 JS: Well, there's a couple of parts of that question. First is that our history was doing three-day weekend recoveries, and then we realized that why do we have to make people come for three days? Why do we have to make people come to us? And kind of when we were beginning to have that debate, we were fortunate enough that an agency in Canada actually approached us. They had gotten funding from the Canadian government, and they were saying no one's ever done work with the First Nations men in Canada, so they were... Excuse me. They were tasked with trying to do a program for First Nations male survivors, and they approached us and said, "Would you come and train us to do that work so that we can do it together?" So we basically crafted a program to go in and train, training day with their staff, then have several of their staff and several of our staff together do a weekend event, and that became the model that we don't have to do all the work. We should come in and teach people how they can do the work at the ground and leave that behind. 0:14:37.5 JS: And so we did a couple of weekends actually for First Nations men, and then that prompted another agency who heard about us in a rural area in upstate New York, and we did the same thing. We went in, did a training day, and then there we said, "Let's just do a single instead of a three-day program." And we did that, one or two of their staff worked with us, and then along the way, we've had several and with Sharon being on the team it became a natural possibility with an agency like BARCC, we commenced with the same model. We came into training day, several of their staff came in and worked with us. And then what we realized what we're doing is we're not building an empire, we're going out and trying to leave competent, qualified people to do it. So there are several things we took away is that we could do single day or three-day, we could help staff do it with us, and then staff doing it without us. We could also go into more urban settings where people had less problems with travel getting away from family, job, etcetera. 0:15:42.5 JS: And so that's really gotten us where our approach now is to just think out of the box and think what's the way that... How do people plug into our program, how do we adapt to services that are available so that we can adjust and apply our knowledge and skills to the resources, and BARCC's been a perfect example of adaptation, and now we're applying that to how do we become more culturally available for agencies? How do we become more available to the financial limitations around people seeking help? And last year, it was a perfect example with all of a sudden all of our in-person events got shut down, and we were two weeks from doing the event in Boston that was coming up, and we very quickly said, "Well, let's just go for it and see what happens if we do it on Zoom?" And we had been flying by the seat of our pants, and it worked. And then we said, "Let's do our whole year just on Zoom, and all of a sudden, now we're keeping it in our program because we realized some people can reach us by Zoom and they couldn't reach us otherwise. So lots of different kind of challenges, but it requires an organization and the staff to be agile and to not get caught up in the status quo. 0:17:00.2 LM: Yeah. And thanks for that history, and I think what you're saying about, "We were just kind of forced to do it on Zoom and figure it out, and we fought our way through it." I think that really resonates a lot for me, and I imagine for lots of our listeners. Sometimes you don't know what kind of access you can provide until some of that creativity gets almost forced out of us. 0:17:21.2 JS: And we responded, once we took the lead, we realised it was an opportunity that we had never thought of. It wasn't the pandemic forcing us to say, "Why didn't we ever think about that before?" 0:17:31.6 LM: Nice. Yeah, and Jim, a lot of what you're saying is talking about partnering with communities, so Sharon, I think that's a great time for you to come in and say, just talk about the perspective of a sexual assault center. I imagine there are lots of advocates at sexual assault centers listening who may be wondering, how could they partner on something like this. So could you talk with us about what that's looked like for you and what that's looked like for BARCC? 0:17:57.1 SI: Well, Jim talked a lot about the systems and we have to really dismantle those systems, and one way of doing that is to collaborate with agencies and really collaborate, not coming in as experts. Right. So I think we need to recognize, particularly as rape crisis centers, that we are experts on sexual victimization, and maybe we need to expand who experiences sexual victimization and our expertise on that and the best way to do that is to work with community agencies and with other agencies to really build services. Like Jim said, it's not about competing, it's about working together to build services to meet the needs of survivors. And so I think it's always important for all of us to recognize maybe what lacks we have, what things need to be filled in and to finding agencies to partner with that can do that. Like I said BARCC works with men and has worked with men for a long time, but we didn't have this comprehensive experience that Men Healing had. 0:18:50.0 SI: So really, again, thinking outside the box, how many men are really gonna come in for 12 sessions around sexual victimization, or are they gonna wanna come in for one day and whatever they need, we really just want to bring awareness and to let them know that services are there and to open them up a little bit, maybe a day of recovery is the best way to do that. And also two, is breaking down systems requires working within communities, and rape crisis centers are within the communities. And as Jim said, Men Healing is not an empire, it's coming with a specific skill set to add on the skill sets of rape crisis centers. And so I think that that's really awesome, and just through our experience, when we did the Days of recovery in Mass we had funding from the Mass office of Victim Assistance through VOCA, and we were working with men in Massachusetts. 0:19:40.0 SI: We had a lot of requests for men from out of state, and they would just say to us, "There's nothing where I live. There's nothing where I live." And I would often ask them, "Have you ever reached out to your local rape crisis center?" And they'd often say, "No, I never thought about that." So this partnership also brings awareness through Men Healing and BARCC that rape crisis centers actually do provide services for males. And so this was also a really great way to advertise that to men if they go to Men Healing. 0:20:08.8 SI: So the partnership I just think was really great for us, again, to have us expand our services and what we do, to help, like Jim said, to push us to think outside the box a bit more, 'cause we do offer services for men, and it's usually individual counseling or group counseling, we offer that as well, but sort of like a 12-session model, like rape crisis intervention model, which is wonderful and great and serves our purpose, but what if it needs to go beyond that? What if men need to have more community among themselves? And that's really what we're finding is really helpful. I know a lot of the men from Weekends of Recovery as well as the men's groups that we've run at BARCC are friends now, and they've built that community, and I think that's what we're looking for. 0:20:44.3 SI: And I think what's great about the partnership is building past the services, it's helping men to know they're not alone, to break that silence, to build that sense of community, and there's actually a large male survivor community actually in Massachusetts coming from the BARCC groups and actually the Men Healing programs, and they've come together. And I speak to them often, and they're just really appreciative of the space to be able to come together, to recognize what was done to them, to reduce that shame and to build friendships. 0:21:15.6 LM: That's so exciting. Thank you for talking through that. And I love especially knowing that not only are you connecting men to rape crisis centers in your own local community, but through this partnership and working with Men Healing, that people from other communities are also finding out maybe about their rape crisis centers. So I think that's such a great example of what you're saying, thinking beyond the literal systems or the formal programs. I know I'm paraphrasing what you were saying, but thinking beyond some of the ways that we do things to just get the word out and to get past that barrier of the perception that rape crisis centers aren't for men. So thanks for that. 0:22:01.1 JS: If I could add to what Sharon was saying, the other thing I would say is we have to be careful not to make the assumption that if a services center that works with sexual victimization, not to assume that if they don't offer services, it's because they're not wanting to offer services. It might be that they've never thought about asking for... Providing the service or they've never known how they could. So in the first part, it's people who are male survivors or people who are allies of male survivors, approach your local agencies, approach our community center and say, "Have you thought about providing services for males?" And they may have said, "Oh, okay," 'cause I've seen so many places where centers were willing to start services when someone requested it, they just hadn't thought about it before. Or they might say, "Well, we don't have staff who are qualified. I didn't know there was a place they could train. I didn't know that there was survivors in the community who might do volunteer work." 0:23:00.0 JS: And then the second part of it is the agencies might think, "Well, that's a great service, we just don't have male survivors in our community." And it's one of those things if people in your community don't see that it's available, people may not know to step forward. So on both ends of it, it's being willing to propose things that haven't started happening yet, and even little things like so many centers do 40-hour trainings, do staff training, have an in-service that addresses male victimization included routinely in your emergency responder's training. And it's amazing that when people's eyes are open and their awareness is there, they begin to then find it right there, available. But I don't think we should assume that agencies don't want to or that there are no male survivors. That's a dangerous assumption to assume it's, again, they against us. 0:23:55.3 LM: Absolutely, and I know that agencies who are doing... In the sexual assault center world really are tasked with providing services to any victim in the community, and so knowing that there are these resources like this podcast series and like the training that you're talking about to build that capacity so you can do that well and effectively reach men, I think it's really incumbent upon our listenership to take advantage of those things. Take advantage isn't maybe a great phrase, but to use those opportunities for learning and building that capacity that are out there. So Sharon, I want to, I guess, build on thinking about this conversation that we're having right now about sexual assault centers, and knowing that something that comes up in the anti-sexual assault movement is the discussion of working with men when it's been a woman who has perpetrated sexual violence against him, for example, and I know you've done a lot of thinking around this. So I wonder if you could talk with us a little bit about what does it mean as a woman working with men who've had this experience? And what should advocates who are women consider in approaching working with men? 0:25:14.3 SI: Well, I think it's important to recognize that anyone can experience sexual victimization and anyone can perpetrate sexual victimization. And I think we as rape crisis centers need to make sure, and it gets back to Jim's point before, is that we are welcoming to all survivors and that all survivors feel as if they belong at your center. So really recognizing that we have to thoroughly be open and be explicit about those we service and even name it out in any sort of marketing or advertising that you do, is that if there are visuals, that you are representing as many types of survivors as possible, 'cause again, it's about belonging and it's about welcoming. So I wanted to start there, and then thinking about myself and my own work, when working with victims of sexual victimizations, I could always represent the perpetrator, whether it's a woman, a man, a trans survivor, that I could represent the perpetrator, and I have to remember that. And I've often mentioned that in a lot of trainings that I do, and I'm often sort of receive a lot of shock. 0:26:16.3 SI: I remember doing a training a while ago for mental health counselors, and a woman in the back was like, "I don't understand why the men I work with won't talk to me." And I said, "Do you ever consider the fact that you could be the perpetrator?" And she stepped back, there was a physical stepping back and had never considered that before. So I think, again, there's this misconception that women are nurturing and aren't harming and we can be very harming. So I think really going into any situation with any survivor is you're never gonna know what might trigger somebody or who you might represent for them, and so I think you have to go in exploring and understanding all of those things and being open to anything, and I think as providers, we represent a lot of roles. I always think of myself when working with survivors, I could represent the mom that hurt them, I could represent the lover that rejected them, or the teacher that hurt them or anything, and I think it's important, particularly as women to recognize that we can also cause harm. 0:27:15.2 SI: I also believe that it can be really reparative to work with a provider that maybe represents the gender, any one on gender spectrum that caused you harm, because if you can build that trusting relationship with that provider, that can really repair the fact that another relationship was betrayed. And so I do, I always highly recommend that, but I think you have to go in understanding and recognizing what your roles are in that space and having conversations openly with the clients about that. I remember I had one of the gentlemen I worked with, an older gentleman, and I remember him coming in for the first session and he was so small, he made himself so small. 0:27:57.1 SI: You could see the shame and the fear. And again, I'm 5'3", I'm a small woman, but just the idea that's not what matters. It matters that I was a woman, and he was abused by women over his lifetime, and I remember that he asked me three questions. How old are you, are you straight, and are you gonna hurt me? And it still sits with me today, and at that point, I thought it's always really important to be honest and direct and transparent when you're working with any survivor, but also working with men, because they're not really socialized to use mental health services. 0:28:31.3 SI: And so I think it's important also to talk about what services look like and how they're going to move forward and keeping them part of the process. I think that's with anybody, but particularly with men, and this example, it was just important for me to just be direct. So I gave him my age. At that point I was 36, not anymore. I did tell him that I was hetero and I said, "I have to be honest with you, I don't know if I'm gonna hurt you. I'm not going to try to hurt you, but I don't know what might hurt you." And so I just wanted to be really honest about that, and then I had a conversation about, "If I do hurt you or you have anything you wanna talk about with me that you please be open with me." And I think one of the biggest things I also learned from that was that he got very angry very often. And with men, anger is an emotion that men are taught to experience and are allowed to experience, not sadness, right. 0:29:26.5 SI: So the anger can be anger in itself or cover up sadness and fear, but giving space for that, not that it's abusive, but giving space and helping figuring out ways that you particularly, I'm thinking of myself as a cisgendered woman, can sit with that anger in a way that is helpful and absorb it, because I think for a lot of survivors when they express anger, they expect to be attacked back. Now imagine sitting with the anger, not judging it, allowing space for it, how that can feel for someone. So I think for a lot of reasons, it could be really reparative for survivors. 0:30:00.5 SI: I think it's really important for us to recognize the many roles that we bring in as providers, and I highly, highly recommend always getting supervision. Again, we're not gonna know what people are gonna bring out for us as providers, what we're gonna bring out for our clients. So it's important for us to have supervision, for us also to be really present in all of our sessions and really aware of what's going on for us and what we're feeling, what we're experiencing, what our bodies are doing, and bringing that into supervision to have some reflective work on that because again, if we aren't aware of our own experiences, aware of what harm we can cause or the roles that we're playing out with those men is we actually can hurt them, and that's not what we wanna do. 0:30:41.9 SI: So it's about getting support, it's about being transparent, it's about being present and being able to absorb everything that's coming at you and actively working with men in mental health and having them be a part of that experience, and I think I'll stop there and let me pass it off to Jim. I feel like I just talked a lot. 0:31:02.6 LM: Yeah, I think that's so helpful. Thank you, Sharon. And Jim, I know you probably have lots of stuff you wanna say and could build on, and I hope that you could also specifically talk about how some of these dynamics that Sharon is talking about, have been part of you and Men Healing's thinking around how you do your work and how you approach retreats and other work. 0:31:30.4 JS: Yeah, what I would say that builds on what Sharon was just saying is that this is another one of those places where we have to be bold about challenging the boxes that we choose to live in or participate in. And I'm a big believer that if we challenge those boxes and we demonstrate a different paradigm, the world around us begins to shift. I remember when I first moved to Salt Lake City, which is where I used to live in the early 2000s, I approached the Rape Recovery Center there about doing a men's group, and they hadn't done that before, but we did it, and so they were very receptive to the idea of doing it, but we began to talk about things. When do we schedule the men's group so the women don't see the men coming in? Do we have a separate entrance? How do we do all that? And we very quickly decided, what if we just did it again integrated, and there are men coming now to do it, and if we take the time for the staff to be okay that we see that it's there and inclusive, and all of a sudden we create this environment where the women were so welcoming when the men came into their group once a week, and the men were so welcoming that the women were allowing us to be together, and kind of the takeaway that I learned is in my early years of doing the weekends recovery, we spent a lot of time struggling, should we have women on the team? 0:32:53.9 JS: How do we mix with the gay and the straight? How do we mix with that? And we realized that we were taking lots of time trying to figure that out for everybody. And what we started doing again, as we switched... And this is something that people can do. We started at the very beginning asking people, what do you need to be safe enough to be here this weekend? And I use that even in individual therapy, when I start, what do you need to be safe enough, 'cause then you begin to tease out people will talk about you remind me of, or you represent. And then we talk about there are no guarantees to safety, but we can make it safe enough together. So then we begin to move towards we have the duality and the spectrum of being both the transference of offender and the transference of healer. And so collectively, individually, we can do that. We used to ask people in the interviews, are you okay with having a female co-facilitator in your small group, and then we realized because some people might have a female offender, but we never asked the man how you feel about having a male's co-facilitator, even though they might have been offended by a male. 0:34:05.3 JS: And so we were participating in all these stereotypes. And what we've moved towards now is like what Sharon was saying, we have to be open to the spectrum of offenders. And we're beginning to realize how many people either have had a female offender or had multiple offenders, one of which or more of which might have been a female. We recently did a national story project, and we got 12 videos on our website now from that presentation, and four of the men who did presentations had female offenders. And so it's very, very interesting just to hear their perspective on that. And lastly, what I might say is, the other thing that this exposes is that adult men get victimized as well as children. This is not just a boy issue. And one of the people in our presenters talks about intimate partner violence from a female who is the offender. I think we have to be open to all those dynamics and not get caught in the box of male, female. 0:35:14.1 SI: I think what you're talking about is again, that welcoming that belonging, and that normalizing. 0:35:18.2 JS: Yes. 0:35:18.3 SI: Everyone's experience is... They're welcome to talk about that experience. And I think when we ask the questions like, what do you think about this? It was like, wait, are we making it a problem? 0:35:32.2 JS: Yeah. 0:35:32.3 SI: Versus just being open to what the experience is, and having them come in, and one thing about working with sexual victimization survivors is that really the relationship between us as providers, and them is really important. And that's actually the most reparative piece, 'cause sexual victimization is a betrayal of relationships. 0:35:51.9 JS: Yes. 0:35:53.7 SI: Relationship to self and to others. And we again, as advocates have to approach that this is a relationship, and there are a lot of people in the world that represent a lot on the gender spectrum, and so we have to be able to live and survive in this world, and so I think it's really important to build those relationships, even if they're uncomfortable. And I think, Jim and I talk a lot about this is that, when it comes to doing these partnerships, is we're modeling relationships. We're modeling two groups of providers coming together, maybe providers of different genders coming together, many different things. And we are able to collaborate and put these things together, and they actually see us communicate with each other, they see us laugh with each other. We're very playful. And all of that modeling is such a great piece about this partnership as well. So I just wanted to make sure to put that out that it's about relationship building, and to self and others, and that's a large part of the work, and I just love to think about how this collaboration really is a model for that and how we model it for the men that have attended the days of recovery. 0:36:53.4 JS: Yeah. And to expand on that Sharon, part of what we're trying to do as Men Healing is organizationally and as individuals, the relationship building that we're trying to do is to model different kinds of masculinity. So that therefore, a male based organization that's willing to be cooperative and not competitive, a male-based organization that wants to be collaborative, and not take the credits, a male organization that wants to be non-hierarchical and grassroots. We're indirectly and very powerfully, directly challenging the norms of masculinity, and trying to create models for healing that don't perpetuate toxic masculinity. And that's around our authority, our image, or perception, and to go into community organizations and say we wanna work and we wanna make you shine. We're going to be in the background. That to us feels like we're helping to break down some of the stereotypes of gender and create different models of men and women being together. Ultimately, maybe there'll be less victimization if people have different ways of being together. And maybe people will see things that, Well shouldn't have been that way. Where I never even noticed that before. That wasn't okay that that happened to me. 0:38:14.0 LM: I love that. I love everything that you both just said. I really appreciate the point about relationships and modeling kind of a new way of being with each other in society, and maybe that there's a prevention thing happening there, too. I think that's really great. I want... 0:38:32.1 JS: All the men that come who are dads, all the men who come, who... This is kinda... Again, all the men who work so hard that they never are home to be with their children, all the men who are going out to get all pumped up and stuff. What if they were soft men? What if they weren't afraid of being gentle? What if they were... I'm just saying how our children would benefit from that. 0:38:54.5 LM: Yes. I wanna pivot from something that you said earlier, Jim, about how we used to do this this way, and then we realized, Hey, that's not... We're feeding into a stereotype that we don't wanna feed into. And I really appreciate that reflection, and that you're sharing it with folks who are listening to this podcast. And Sharon, I kinda wanna get back to you then and say that I know that over the course of time that you and BARCC have evolved your services and made changes to how you can better serve male survivors, and I just imagine that lots of our listeners are thinking about how might I make a shift? How might I make a change? And so could you talk us and them through what some of those changes have been and what that process has been like and hopefully our listeners can see themselves at different places in your own story. 0:39:50.2 SI: One of the first thing is to collaborate with agencies, right again, so this collaboration has really been a change for us to, again, really help men to feel more welcome at BARCC is to partner with an agency that focuses on working with men. And receiving that training and that understanding has been really helpful and again, to think about mental health for men and how we wanna approach that and what that can look like, and being very upfront and transparent about that as well, but we also all know that when it comes to treating a population of survivors, is that they wanna see themselves in the staff and the volunteers. And so I think it's really important to recognize that BARCC over the years has really increased its gender diversity of the volunteers and the staff, and so men can come into the office and see themselves. I think that's really important. They hear their, sort of, men on the hotline and that's also really important. And again also, was really thinking about any sort of advertisements you do and things like that, that you really do include men, say the word men, include pictures of men and offer, I think services, right, groups. So we're talking about groups, you can offer men specific groups. 0:41:05.1 SI: We've done that, we've also offered expansive or inclusive groups or gender integrated groups, which has also been really great. Jim just talked about that, because again, it's also about having people just feel safer and more welcome, and so everyone is welcome. We're meeting the needs of every survivor, and we're helping to build relationships again amongst many types of survivors, that's always a really beautiful thing. And also one of our... We have a communications department at BARCC, which is amazing, and they're always really thoughtful about any media requests that they get, that they really integrate all types of survivors in the responses. We also do actually provide trainings on working with men. I do those trainings, and so advertising those is really important and yeah, I think that's some pretty basic things that you can do. Is that enough Louis? Do you think there needs to be more? 0:42:00.9 LM: Those are so many things, I... [laughter] 0:42:04.2 LM: Jim, I think you were nodding along. Did you have anything you wanted to add to that? 0:42:09.2 JS: Well, kind of based on what Sharon was saying, I think agencies, thinking in terms of collaboration and coalitions instead of singular. I know we had a really interesting program a couple of years, about a year and a half ago at the University of Utah. October was sexual assault awareness programs on campus, and so we went and we said, "Who are the people on the campus who work with men?" Rather than us coming in to do a program, and we took the time to build a coalition of about 10 organizations, the local community Rape Crisis Center, and several student groups, including people associated with the athletic department, and people associated with fraternities. And we took the time, we had them start doing the imagery, the advertising, the messaging, and we were astounded that when we did our program, we'd showed a movie that had a panel of male survivors, we had about 100 people showed up, and I'd say 80% of them were young males below 30 who you never would have imagined seeing in a room... Personally I got... And they all stayed til the end of the program, nobody got up and left, but we met people in the fraternities, we got people from the athletic department to get their athletes and their members come, and it was a coalition effort that then they took that back to their organizations. 0:43:29.9 JS: And so, it was so much more powerful than if we'd come in and just done a program for the evening, that really left... And it saw us working collaboratively with other organizations and they were supplementing what we have, we were supplementing what they have, and so I hope organizations can think more and more and more about how we do stuff together. 0:43:51.8 SI: I know personally I, again, 'cause I have an expertise in working with men survivors, and I have worked with many other rape crisis centers, and being able to talk about what those things are that they can be doing to, again, have men feel welcome and belonging at their agencies. So rape crisis centers are willing to do these services as Jim said before, and what I love is that we're also able to recognize when we need some support and receiving that support. So I often say, 'cause I have worked with people all over the country, I'm thinking of places like even Alaska where they may not have people that feel as if they're comfortable enough to work with male survivors, but you have that trauma background, get consultation. We offer it, I will offer it, I think in reaching out to other rape crisis centers, and I think it's okay to also get consultation from each other, 'cause I think that that again, helps us recognize that we can't have every single expertise, but also helps build connection between rape crisis centers, and I think what Men Healing is trying to do, and I'm trying do at BARCC, is to spread working with men and the abilities to do that and the skills for that, and I think we can all just teach each other. 0:44:58.7 JS: Interesting that you should mention that Sharon. I just did my second training last weekend with the agency in Alaska, who's trying to reach out to men, so again, any agency anywhere in the country who's listening to this podcast, think about approaching us or someone and say... 'Cause I, by Zoom now, twice I've done presentations for their training as their community volunteers, and they had not gotten that before, so we're a resource for agencies all over the country. 0:45:27.3 LM: Yes, I love, especially Sharon, that you mentioned that rape crisis centers have a background in trauma, there are advocates who are listening have so many skills that are... Even if you feel like you need more training in a specific area, you really are trained and ready to provide great services to men, and then there are these other folks like Jim and Sharon, and us at NSVRC through this project, and a whole lot of other folks who can support you on that journey toward thinking about what might be just a little bit more specific about working with men sometimes, so... Yeah. 0:46:01.8 SI: Exactly, Louis. I just wanna say, I think you just said it, and I appreciate that so much is that you actually have the skills to work with every type of survivor. As a rape crisis counselor, we've all been trained [0:46:14.4] ____, we have the expertise in trauma. Again, one of the barriers is what stops us from utilizing it when working with men or seeing a man come in, so I think that's really important that that's about us. And so really, again, thinking about when a man walks in the room is to address him and welcome him, and the initial response is anything you would do with any other type of survivor, so you have to challenge your own bias about that. 0:46:36.4 LM: Love that framing. Thank you. 0:46:39.8 JS: This might be an odd statement, but as you were talking, Louis, what came into my mind is that lots of people may have the expertise and the skills, but part of what we're learning is that the experience of working collaboratively is a different dimension, and this may seem really odd to say, but it's so much more fulfilling to do the work when we're working together, and there's more joy and more energizing. I think the stereotype as an agency is you do this work, it's like being... You've signed up for combat duty, and that we should expect how long before we burn ourselves out, and then our attrition is there, and what if we change that paradigm and we didn't promote people burning out, we didn't assume attrition, and we didn't ignore that this can be joyful work and that people can... 'Cause Sharon and I, as an example, we have so much fun and laughter, and joy together. Not at people's expense, but because we love so deeply working together, and I think the people we work with benefit from that, but that's a different paradigm. We're supposed to go to work and be so serious, come home exhausted, get burned out, and I think as providers, we need to challenge that paradigm. 0:47:55.4 SI: The work should energize us. 0:47:57.3 JS: Yes, yes. 0:47:57.4 LM: I really appreciate that. Finally, we're talking a lot about... We're talking a lot about services, we're talking a lot about barriers that we put up, biases that we bring, collaboration, and new ways of being with one another. And I know through the course of doing that, we have talked a little bit about our work in reaching men to let them know that there are services. But Sharon, I hope you could summarize that and maybe give some more specifics about how do men in the Boston area learn that your center has services for them? I know that, again, this is something that we've touched on throughout the conversation, but if you could just put a button on that and talk about what do you do to reach male survivors in the Boston area? 0:48:43.4 SI: We definitely do some targeted social media and outreach, we've definitely been really good. Again, we have to be explicit. So for example, June is Men's Health Month, and so we have a video series that we're gonna be putting out, speaking with one of our Survivor speakers. So BARCC has a survivor Speakers Bureau, and we actually have male survivors on that bureau who will go out and talk and often they talk about when they walk into a room, people don't expect to see them, so we are able to use male survivor voices as a way to bring awareness to male survivors and to BARCC as services, the targeted outreach is definitely important. 0:49:18.4 SI: So I think, again, being explicit and targeted in that is really important. I will say word-of-mouth. Once one male survivor recognizes you provide services, they often will go out into the community. It's always interesting. And they say, "Once I started doing this work, I disclosed to people and they disclosed to me." And then they will then share the resources, so word of mouth from survivor to survivor is really important. That's why we've be so welcoming and belonging and transparent, all of the things we talked about. And then also making sure, as we talk a bunch today is to collaborate so that you let other providers in your communities know that you can provide services for men, because again, these are doctors. 0:49:56.4 SI: You could talk to doctors, urologists, dentists, anyone that is gonna see men in other settings is to let them know that if they disclose a history of sexual violence that they can refer them to BARCC, and so we have a lot of collaboration as well with other providers. And if you feel comfortable, it's like training, like doing collaboration and training other providers in your area, and again, training them helps to build a trust and relationship with them, so that help they also refer to you. And again, consultation is also important for that too, if you're looking for that. 0:50:27.6 SI: And the amount of men that come into BARCC... I don't have the specific statistics of the men that come in, but we have definitely seen a larger grouping of men coming in for services, again, around that targeted outreach, the word of mouth training providers, and then just being open. 0:50:45.3 LM: Thanks, Sharon. I really appreciated our conversation today. I wanna ask Jim and Sharon, is there anything that you were hoping to talk about that we didn't get to yet? I'll just kind of leave it open to hear what you all have to say still. 0:51:00.8 JS: I invite people to visit our website, menhealing.org. Menhealing.org is website, we've got lots of videos there, men telling their stories, we've got Q&A, their information about events, and anybody from agency sign up for our free Listserv. We send out information every few weeks, every couple of weeks, and encourage people to spread the word with that. 0:51:30.5 SI: And I will say, again, is I actually coordinate the survivor speakers bureau at BARCC and often at the end, I ask the men, I was like, "What is one thing you wanna leave the audience with?" And they always say, Believe men. So I'm just gonna leave with that. 0:51:42.5 LM: Thank you so much for joining us today, Sharon and Jim. And we do invite listeners to learn more about working with male survivors by checking out the links in the show notes, including the link Jim mentioned, then we'll leave a link to BARCC as well. [music] 0:52:14.6 LM: Thanks for listening to this episode of Resource on the Go. For more resources and information about understanding, responding to and preventing sexual assault, visit our website at www.nsvrc.org. You can also get in touch with us by emailing resources@nsvrc.org.