Tuesday 4 June 2024, we’ll tackle a tough topic, we will code statements of rape victims who never told anyone about their rape, until researchers dug deep. We will use discourse techniques from the Adult Attachment Interview, using methods from the Dynamic Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation.
Research article
The statements are in a research article by Sandra Caron and Deborah Mitchell:
Caron, Sandra and Mitchell, Deborah (2022), “I’ve Never Told Anyone”: A Qualitative Analysis of Interviews With College Women Who Experienced Sexual Assault and Remained Silent, Violence against women, 28(9), pp.1987-2009.
Coding the reasons
The study identifies the 10 most common reasons the research cohort gave for keeping the trauma secret. We will look at the statement form of those reasons to see if we can code them as being organized around A, B, or C attachment strategies. If we succeed, we can look at whether each woman was using pure, predominately, or equal types of attachment strategies.
The top 10 reasons these victims didn’t tell anyone are:
- Internal blame, shame and/or guilt
- External blame and/or fear of humiliation
- Wanting to pretend it never happened
- Fear of losing control of the situation
- Fear of not being believed
- Fear of getting in trouble
- Fear of stigma, of being labeled
- Fear of not wanting to get others in trouble
- Fear of losing someone
- Fear of being hurt, self-safety, perceived self-protection
Coding the individual statements
The study also provides a number of actual statements from interviews of study participants. We will look to see if we can make sense of most of them in terms of A, B and C attachment strategies.
If we succeed with these inquiries, we’ll then see if we can make any meaning out of it.
Four example statements in the article.
On page 1999: The sentence is “I feared on some level there would be retaliation—that I would suffer the consequences if I spoke out and reported this or told anyone.” Can that be described as an if/then cognitive statement using dry and denotative language, minimizing the danger, and thus a possible marker for A-speech?
On page 2001: “I did not even tell my boyfriend. I feared he would seriously hurt me.” Is that C-like, using connotative language and freely acknowledging danger from both men, rather than minimizing or dismissing the danger?
Two similar statements on page 2000 might offer a nice contrast of the use of how two attachment patterns can process the same type of information.
On page 2000: “I needed to know I was not going to be labeled negatively.” Is that A-like, denotative, dry, short, distances the harm by not fulling stating it happened and hurt, and puts the harm it into a tidy and distal container of a “negative label”?
On page 2000: “I didn’t want people to pity me–see me as “there’s the rape victim.” Is that C-like, evocative, freely referencing two negative feelings, using an auditory image (the quote), acknowledging vulnerability (rather than dismiss/avoid it), and maintaining herself as invulnerable?
If we can make sense of the statements as representing self-protective attachment strategies and attachment discourse, then we’ll see if we make sense of what that might mean for providing granular help for people who have suffered horrific trauma, and for addressing secondary trauma for professionals.
The DMM model of attachment
In the DMM, attachment patterns are broadly referenced with the letters A, B, and C, as Mary Ainsworth originally used. A-patterns are described as cognitive, and organized around past experience of temporally sequenced information. C-patterns are described as affective, organized around the intensity and expression of emotions and feelings. B-patterns are a blend. In other attachment models, A-patterns are generally described as dismissing or avoidant, whereas C-patterns are described as resistant/ambivalent.
Attachment patterns describe a human survival system, and the patterns of how humans respond to danger. The DMM describes the sources of information people rely on to assess danger, and how the attachment survival system impacts awareness, memory processing and recall, and information processing.
When professionals work to help clients, it’s important to know which type of self-protective strategies are being used. It helps the professional adjust their approach to the individual needs of the client, in order to maximize safety and communication, and address the dangers uniquely important to them.
Gratitude to the survivors
The participants in the study were anonymized, so we don’t who they were. CSI extends gratitude to these women who took a risk of doing something that was no doubt scary for them to try. Your contributions have helped us understand better.
Session details
Date and starting time: Tuesday, 4 June 2024, for 2 hours. Starts at 9:00 a.m. in Seattle, noon in New York, and 5:00 p.m. in London.
Host: Mark Baumann, trained in DMM-AAI discourse analysis
Cost: Free, as always
Invitees: DMM Group Talk members and by invitation.
Recording: This session will not be recorded, it involves sensitive information
Zoom link to register: For interested professionals and students, please contact us for an invitation.