A Conversation with RAINN | BONUS | Saskia’s Story

Host Andrea Gunning sits down with Jennifer Simmons Kaleba, the VP of Communications at the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network. They discuss Betrayal’s approach to working with survivors and telling stories about trauma. Content warning for discussions of rape, child sexual abuse, and child sexual abuse material. If you would like to share your story, you can reach out to the Betrayal Team by emailing them at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod https://www.instagram.com/betrayalpod/ and @glasspodcasts https://www.instagram.com/glasspodcasts/. Follow our newsletter and join the Betrayal community at betrayal.substack.com. https://betrayal.substack.com/welcome For resources on sexual violence, visit rainn.org/betrayal. You can also get free, confidential, 24/7 support through RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline. Just text HOPE to 64673 or call 1-800-656-HOPE. Every state has a domestic violence coalition, and many counties also have resources available. If you’re looking for help, go onto your county’s website to see what resources are available locally, or search the web for your state’s domestic violence coalition. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 2:42Speaker 03

  I'm Andrea Gunning, and this is Betrayal. Today, we have another bonus episode. On our show, we tackle sensitive topics, from rape and child sexual abuse to financial fraud and identity theft. We handle this work with a lot of care, using trauma-informed interviewing techniques, consulting mental health experts, and communicating with our subjects in every step of production. But we're always trying to do better and to evolve as our culture evolves. That's why last year, we reached out to RAIN, the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network. Throughout season five, they've been advising us on ways to approach our work with survivors. Recently, I sat down with Jennifer Simmons-Kaleba. She's RAIN's Vice President of Communications.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  I wanted to share a bit of our conversation with you and to give you a look into the kinds of conversations we're often having at Betrayal. I hope you enjoy. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your position at RAIN and what RAIN is?

• 3:42Speaker 04

  RAIN is the nation's largest anti-sexual violence organization. I'm the Vice President of Communications. So my role is to ensure that people are more aware and educated about what sexual violence is. And the work that I get to do is make sure that more people understand that the resources are there, that they are not alone, and that if you or somebody in your life has experienced sexual violence, that you have people to turn to.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  How would you define Rain's role in working with Betrayal?

• 4:17Speaker 04

  So, one of the things that Rain does is we work with entertainment companies and studios and producers to insert and establish responsible and relevant storytelling in the journey of making people more aware through storytelling about sexual violence. So, we worked with you guys, we did a responsible storytelling training session with you, we've worked with you when it comes to interviewing survivors during season five of Betrayal, and it's just been such a pleasure to be able to be a part of both the education and also the advancement of this responsible storytelling that you guys are doing at Betrayal.

• 4:56Speaker 03

  You know, when I look back on the canon of Betrayal, there are certain things that our team would probably write differently today. I'm curious, from your point of view, when you look back on a body of work that still survives and exists in the world and is there for people to meet it at any given time, what type of obligation do creators and writers have to address that work if it's outdated culturally with language? Like, what do you feel is the obligation of those producers and creators?

• 5:29Speaker 04

  It's a really interesting question, particularly for something that you put out into the world and then still have some measure of control over. You produce a movie or a film, you produce a book, and it goes out there, and the level of effort that it would take to recut, redo, republish, all of that is a challenge. But for serialized shows like yours, the question of going back and looking at the things that you wish you had done differently is a really valid one. And I think what I hope people who are creating this kind of content do... Is that they give themselves a degree of grace for what they knew at the time and for the best that they were doing at a time.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  And that if they get it really wrong, that they have some sort of clear discussion or apology, or hey, I that really was not what I wanted to do. And then they move forward and change the behavior and then they change how they approach. Because that's really the measure. And that's really where the learning happens.

• 6:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think one of the places that we often struggle with is the language around victim and survivor. And I'm curious if there is like a hard and fast rule for you in terms of that language.

• 6:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. The hard and fast rule is it's what the person wants to be called. And respecting that and respecting what it means to them. And then the idea that if you get it wrong, you say that somebody is something that they don't feel they want to be, you change it. You say you're sorry, you change it.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  It's interesting because we tell stories over 10 episodes. And in those 10 episodes where we're talking about one person's story, it's one person's journey. So episode to episode, they can be in a different place in relation to what happened to them. And that language can be tricky to know. And I think you're validating something for me, which is having constant conversations with our storytellers to be like, at this point in the story, how would you identify, you know?

• 7:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  But also holding in consideration, where the audience is meeting this person in this journey too. So for season two of Betrayal, I remember a big discussion was, does our audience know what C-SAM is? And does our audience know why we can't say what people would colloquially say that material is? Curious what your thoughts are, even just saying it as a manner of explaining and showing why we're not going that route. Like, how do you feel about that?

• 8:19Speaker 04

  We talk about this with media training a lot. So I'm gonna say the words that people will say, "So you're gonna say kiddie porn." That's what Cisay, "It's kiddie porn." No, no, no, no. But when you say child sexual abuse material, for the person who has no connection, they have no idea what that actually means. But you know that that person, if they knew what it meant, they'd be like, "Oh, my God, that's horrible." So like, explaining and breaking down why the sentence doesn't work, but acknowledging that people may need to see that to make that next connection is important. And that's

• 9:00Speaker 04

  something that in the media, people are now getting really comfortable with. But if we go back to the beginnings of rain in the 90s, when we were trying to get people to recognize that this issue was important, networks weren't saying rape on TV.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 9:18Speaker 04

  And it's so important. So, you know, euphemisms around rape as a storytelling device because you couldn't say the words. Like, so how important is it to be able to say, you know, all these, all these kind of workaround phrases, which you're actually talking about is rape. And that's actually something I saw with Saskia this season, and it struck me. One of her friends saw the videos, and instantly, the words that came out of her mouth were, "She's being raped." There was no hesitation, no working around it. No, her husband is doing something terrible. Nothing. She was raped. That is progress. You go from not talking about rape, not saying the word rape 30 some odd years

• 10:02Speaker 04

  ago, to a everyday individual who is looking at something happening through the lens, too, of intimate partner violence, and naming it, naming it immediately. That's the kind of progress we're talking about.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  Then my producer Caitlin chimed in.

• 10:19Speaker 05

  In season three, we were telling the story from the perspective of both Stacy and Tyler. Tyler being a child victim of sexual abuse, and Stacy being a mother who had her life absolutely torn apart by what her husband did to her son. I think as a show, we've changed our approach a little bit in how we've learned to balance the perspectives of multiple victims without getting into that comparative trauma piece. And I also think as creators, we struggle with, well, are there ways we could have done even better as storytellers

• 11:02Speaker 05

  in doing right by the victim of child abuse? So at Rain, when you think about that issue of how do you tell stories from the perspectives of multiple victims? What are some of the strategies that come to mind?

• 11:16Speaker 04

  To the point of comparative trauma in any kind of storytelling, I think about it as a handful of different sized rocks that you throw into water. No matter the size of the rock, there is a ripple. But every single person is the center of their own ripple. Every single person is feeling an impact, feeling a ramification, an emotion. They're all coming to it from their own center of the story. And as long as we acknowledge that everybody's ripples matter to that person at the center of them, then we can stop comparing the trauma of other people and then just start thinking

• 11:58Speaker 04

  about the individual humans involved.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  To me, it's not a zero sum. There's space for every version of this conversation. And that's something that we're often discussing. You know, I knew that the way that Stacy in season three, the way that she talked about her ex-husband would be really difficult for people to hear. But I also knew that there were people who were alone in bed in the middle of the night, staring at their ceiling, thinking, I just wish my life could go back to before times, before the knowing, before everything came apart.

• 12:41Speaker 04

  It was the version of my life where I didn't have to be wrestling with all of these terrible thoughts and feelings. And Yeah, the purpose of all of these different viewpoints is really, what do you want people in the end to be able to connect to?

• 12:56Speaker 03

  The clarity for me is purpose is just doing it intentionally. What is the purpose? If one person feels less alone by listening to this, we've done our job because that was the intention going into the project.

• 13:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  Well, thank you for everything that you do and thank you for everything that Rain does and contributes and thank you for contributing to betrayal.

• 13:35Speaker 06

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