The numbers, though not surprising at this point, were still distressing. A survey of nearly 1,000 students at the University of Oregon, released this month, found that 10 percent of women had been raped and more than a third had experienced at least one nonconsensual sexual encounter. Troubling, too, was the finding that nine out of 10 victims never reported their assaults. Such statistics reveal a situation on college campuses that President Obama recently called “an affront to our basic humanity.”
The researcher behind that survey is Jennifer J. Freyd, a professor of psychology at Oregon. Ms. Freyd’s work on “betrayal trauma,” a term she coined in the early 1990s, has attracted increased interest from policy makers in recent years. She has twice been invited to the White House to take part in discussions about campus sexual assault, and not long ago she met with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, who has been outspoken about harassment she’s suffered on Capitol Hill.
The amount of attention sexual assault is garnering right now—and the seriousness of that attention—is unprecedented, according to Ms. Freyd (pronounced fried). For a long time it seemed as if her research and that of her colleagues around the country was mostly shrugged off; other people nodded, but nothing much changed.
“We were more or less talking to each other,” she told The Chronicle last week. Now she compares the growing awareness to a tidal wave. “We’re seeing a huge shift in consciousness about sexual assault,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like this in this field.”
Not that there haven’t been setbacks. Ms. Freyd’s own university hasn’t exactly offered unwavering support. When she met with administrators in the spring about her survey, they seemed supportive. The president at the time, Michael R. Gottfredson, agreed to provide the $30,000 in funding she thought she’d need to pay participants and cover other administrative costs, she said.
“I thought we had a deal and I would do this big study,” Ms. Freyd recalled. “I said, ‘The results aren’t going to be pretty.’ He said, ‘I know.’”
But once administrators saw the survey, their tune changed. The offer of funding vanished. Ms. Freyd showed The Chronicle an email she had received from Robin H. Holmes, vice president for student life at Oregon, stating that the university would prefer to use an external survey rather than one that had “a priori assumptions about outcomes.”
Charges of Bias
For any scholar, the suggestion that his or her research is biased from the get-go is a not a trivial accusation. When news that the funding had been rejected became public, an article in an Oregon newspaper, The Register-Guard, included a comment from a university spokeswoman again speculating that Ms. Freyd was guilty of bias. (The spokeswoman, Rita Radostitz, said last week that her comment had been off the record and taken out of context.)
“Do these people have no idea what a scientific reputation is about?” Ms. Freyd said she wondered at the time.
She suspects that administrators may have grown leery in part because she was among those who criticized the university’s handling of a rape accusation in March against three Oregon basketball players, and also because she had become outspoken on the issue of campus sexual assault nationwide.
In the basketball case, the three players remained on the team even after the administration knew of the allegations. Though no criminal charges were filed, the players were eventually thrown off the team and then, in June, were suspended after a university investigation found them guilty of sexual misconduct.
Mr. Gottfredson, the president, resigned in August after two years on the job, citing his desire to spend time with his family and pursue his scholarly interests.
The university’s interim president, Scott Coltrane, has been more supportive of her work, Ms. Freyd said, though she still wouldn’t mind an apology and a retraction. In an interview last week, Mr. Coltrane stopped short of offering either, noting that he wasn’t president at the time, but he did call it “a bit unfortunate” that the university’s concerns about the survey had been “characterized that way.”
“I think the dialogue at the time was on trying to make the survey better,” he said.
Yet Ms. Freyd said the survey didn’t substantively change after the criticism from the university (she found funding elsewhere when the administration turned her down). And officials have never explained how, exactly, the survey might have been biased. The questions Ms. Freyd asked lined up with surveys on sexual assault that had been conducted elsewhere. Even months later, she finds it odd that the university was touting her national reputation as an expert on sexual assault while simultaneously casting doubt on her scholarship.
“They bragged about my White House visits,” she said. “It was like—what?”
Memory Wars
Ms. Freyd is best known for her theory of “betrayal trauma,” the idea that when the perpetrator of abuse is a person trusted by the victim—like a parent or a coach—that affects how the victim copes with and remembers the abuse.
In the 1990s, Ms. Freyd was caught up in the controversy over the validity of recovered memories of abuse, a debate that has since been dubbed the memory wars. On one side were scholars like Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Irvine, who showed how, in some cases, subjects could be tricked into “remembering” events that hadn’t happened. On the other side were those like Ms. Freyd, who, while they didn’t deny that memory could be faulty, argued that victims, in some cases, blocked out memories of their abuse that could resurface later.
Her work in this area had been prompted by her own recovered memories of alleged sexual abuse by her father. Ms. Freyd tells the story in the book Blind to Betrayal, published last year, which she wrote with Pamela Birrell. In 1990, when Ms. Freyd was in her early 30s, she began to remember being abused. Her father and mother denied the charges and in response started the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, enlisting a number of psychologists for its advisory board, including several she knew personally.
“I could not fathom why my colleagues would do this,” she says in the book. “Was I not credible? If not, why not? I had no prior scandal attached to my name, no history of fraud or dishonesty.”
These days Ms. Freyd prefers not to delve into that part of her life and career. Not long ago she turned down an interview request from a documentary crew that was making a film about the memory wars.
“I don’t want to start talking about my personal life,” she said. “I’ve never wanted to do that. I want to talk about my ideas and research.”
A ‘Sense of Duty’
Those have moved beyond recovered memories (though she hasn’t, by any means, abandoned that theory). In Blind to Betrayal, she and Ms. Birrell write that betrayal trauma can extend to institutional betrayal—that is, how “the harm of sexual assault may be made much worse by institutional failure to prevent sexual assault or to respond supportively when it occurs.”
Her research has found that victims who feel betrayed by institutions they trusted have more trouble coping with their assaults, and they’re more likely to feel depressed or to hurt themselves.
Until a few years ago, Ms. Freyd didn’t think institutional betrayal was necessarily a huge problem on college campuses. Then, in 2010, one of her graduate students, Carly Smith, suggested trying to measure it. Ms. Freyd wasn’t convinced that the study would produce any significant data because the college campus seemed like a “warm, fuzzy place,” friendlier and more progressive than, say, the military.
However, their study, which surveyed 514 undergraduates, found that 46 percent of women who had suffered unwanted sexual experiences felt that their college had not responded adequately.
“What blew me away is that we did find a lot of institutional betrayal,” she said. When the study was published, in 2013, Ms. Freyd started getting calls from colleagues at her own university, and from colleges around the country, thanking her for affirming with data what they knew to be true anecdotally.
“It was a kind of radicalizing experience for me,” she said. “It changed my sense of duty as a member of the university.”
Despite the criticism and foot-dragging at Oregon, Ms. Freyd said, she feels that her relationship with the administration is moving in the right direction, and she hopes that more universities will conduct sexual-assault surveys on their campuses.
And she remains amazed that the issues she’s been studying for more than two decades have finally moved into the spotlight. People aren’t shrugging now. “I actually believed it was possible,” Ms. Freyd said. “I just didn’t believe it would happen my lifetime.”