Talking About Sexual Assault Society's Response to Survivors

This second edition provides a comprehensive, social ecological review of women's rape and sexual assault disclosures and how support providers can better respond to them and challenge rape culture.
 
Women who have been raped and sexually assaulted are often retraumatized by negative social reactions from family and friends, healthcare professionals, institutions, and society at large.
 
Sarah Ullman educates supporters on more appropriate responses that empower survivors and help them heal. Drawing on interviews with survivors and support providers, she offers powerful, provocative insights to therapists, other frontline workers assisting survivors, researchers, and students.
 
She reviews transtheoretical research on why, how often, and to whom women disclose; the impact of social contexts on disclosures; and social reactions from informal support networks and professionals in a variety of institutional settings.
 
New to this edition is updated research addressing social media, social phenomena like the MeToo movement, and informal supporters’ experiences with survivors. While most research still focuses on White, heterosexual, and cisgender women, emerging findings on LGBTQ+ individuals, cis males, people of color, and people with disabilities are reviewed where available.

Sarah E. Ullman, PhD, is professor of criminology, law and justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her doctorate in social/developmental psychology from Brandeis University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in health psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Ullman’s research interests focus on violence against women, in particular the sexual victimization of women in adulthood, including the impact of rape on women’s mental and physical health, which can include posttraumatic stress disorder, suicidal behavior, problem drinking, and mental health services-seeking. She has studied women’s resistance strategies and self-defense training in rape situations and the role of alcohol in sexual assault incidents. Dr. Ullman has completed multiple longitudinal studies funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of survivors of sexual assault that examined how social reactions from formal and informal support sources affect women’s coping and recovery from sexual assault, including their posttraumatic stress disorder and substance abuse outcomes. She has also interviewed both survivors and service providers (advocates and clinicians) about their disclosure and help-seeking experiences. More recently, she has collaborated in the development of an informal support network intervention for survivors and their social network members. She is currently conducting a large multi-method dyadic study to better understand disclosure and social reactions and their impacts on survivors and their informal supports and their relationship functioning.

Introduction
Chapter 1. The Social Context of Talking About Sexual Assault
Chapter 2. Theories of Rape and Women's Disclosure
Chapter 3. Why, How Often, and to Whom Do Women Disclose, and What Factors Influence Whether Disclosure is Healing?
Chapter 4. What Social Reactions Do Victims Receive When Disclosing Sexual Assault?
Chapter 5. Impacts of Social Reactions on Survivors
Chapter 6. Informal Supporters' Experiences Helping Survivors
Chapter 7. Formal Supporters' Helping Survivors: Advocates and Clinicians
Chapter 8. Conducting Interviews With Survivors of Sexual Assault
Chapter 9. Challenging the Rape Culture: Recommendations for Change