How a University Is Training Its Police to Take a Trauma-Informed Approach to Sexual Violence

UT-Austin

Noël Busch-Armendariz knows that the immediate aftermath of sexual trauma can take many forms. Victims can appear fidgety or calm, talkative or quiet, engaged or totally blank, she says. And they often cannot remember details of what happened to them until much later.

Ms. Busch-Armendariz, a professor in the School of Social Work and director of the Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault at the University of Texas at Austin, also knows that this wide range of behaviors conflicts with common perceptions about how victims of rape should behave. People don’t understand what trauma looks like, says Ms. Busch-Armendariz, and they make assumptions, like “Well, she doesn’t seem like a victim because she’s not crying.”

In the mind of the average person, those assumptions are harmful. But in the minds of campus police officers, those assumptions can damage both the victim and an investigation by leading officers to believe that survivors are being dishonest about what happened to them, says Michael J. Heidingsfield, director of police for the University of Texas system.

Two years ago, both Ms. Busch-Armendariz and Mr. Heidingsfield wanted to break down those misconceptions between law enforcement and victims of assault. Since then, they and their departments have collaborated on a report, “The Blueprint for Campus Police: Responding to Sexual Assault.”

The 174-page manual, which was published in February, aims to “replace tradition with science” by chronicling what happens in victims’ brains during and after a traumatic event and explaining how that activity manifests in their behavior. Then it outlines the policing strategies that law enforcement should use to interact with those victims and combat their own implicit biases.

Now the blueprint is integrated into officer training on all of the university system’s 14 campuses, says Mr. Heidingsfield. Officials hope that the training will foster an environment that can establish more trust between victims and law-enforcement officers.

Trauma-Informed Policing

The blueprint discusses the science of trauma in easy-to-understand chunks and then pairs that material with policing tactics officers can rely on, says Ms. Busch-Armendariz. That information was a refresher for some officers in the Texas system and novel for others.

Investigating officers in the university system were already trained in identifying signs of sexual trauma, says Charles C. Bonnet, the leader of a counterassault strike team at the University of Texas at Austin.

But when taking in that information, he says, “you feel like you’re drinking from a fire hose.”

For Mr. Bonnet, the report serves as a reminder that victims of assault should feel as comfortable as possible when talking to law-enforcement officials, which could mean changing the location of an interview to better suit their needs. The campus police department on the Austin campus has a “soft interview room” for such occasions outfitted with a plush leather chair and a small couch, throw pillows, and a basket of blankets.

For Samantha R. Carter, a detective at Austin, the blueprint reinforced the concept that the best police work comes from asking questions that put the victim at ease.

With a crime like robbery, the campus police might use more-direct questioning to establish a chronology of events. But that technique leads nowhere with sexual-assault survivors, the blueprint says, because the nature of the crime causes them to black out large swatches of the attack from their memories.

They often don’t remember what happened when asked pointed questions, or they change their story frequently. Those are common responses, but to an untrained officer, the behavior can seem intentionally deceptive.

But when investigators understand what’s actually going on in a victim’s brain, Ms. Carter says, they can avoid those tactics and ask open-ended and sensory questions that stimulate a victim’s memory.

For example, an investigator might ask, “What do you remember the room smelling like?,” and allow the victim to go from there. And through their training, officers learn they should document gaps in memory as signs that a trauma has occurred, not as signs of deceit. Investigators also learn how to avoid judgmental phrasing in their questions that could dissuade victims from sharing information, Ms. Carter says.

“It’s a lot about making a survivor feel like they have control over their life,” she says.

Those techniques can lead to a more-comprehensive police report, which could mean higher rates of conviction for the perpetrator, says S. Daniel Carter, a longtime campus-safety expert who serves on the governing board of SurvJustice, a nonprofit group that provides legal assistance to survivors.

Though investigating officers have the most extensive contact with assault victims, trauma-informed training is crucial for patrol officers, too, because they are likely to have initial contact with victims, says Michael J. Parks, chief of police at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Mr. Parks says the blueprint reminds patrolling officers that when they arrive at a crime scene, their duty is to support the victim and not to nail down all the specifics right away. That’s the investigator’s job. By trying to do so, he says, they could retraumatize victims by forcing them to relive the details of their assault before they need to.

“That’s the piece that still happens today,” Mr. Parks says. “How many times are we trying to get the same information?”

Bridging the Gap

For Ms. Busch-Armendariz, the low frequency with which survivors report their assaults to the police indicate how much work is needed to improve those relationships. (She published studies in 2003 and in 2015 that found the rate at which victims in the state of Texas reported their assaults to the police dropped from 18 percent to 9 percent.)

And while there are many reasons victims don’t report to law enforcement, the fear that they will be misunderstood or not believed is one of them, Ms. Busch-Armendariz says. She hopes the new information will give officers the tools to support victims while still practicing thorough police work.

Like Ms. Busch-Armendariz, Mr. Parks says that the information in the blueprint highlights the huge disparity between what is reported on college campuses and what is actually happening in their communities. He hopes that trauma-informed policing tactics will bridge that gap.

“People go to their friends, their partners. They will talk to somebody,” Mr. Parks says. “I want them to talk to us.”