ATIXA Issues a Stunning Rebuke To The Religion of Trauma Informed Title IX Investigations
On Thursday, the Association of Title IX Administrators (ATIXA) -not usually a friend of due process- released a position statement on so-called trauma-informed investigations and the neurobiological claims of trauma. The group has trained thousands of Title IX administrators across the country to investigate alleged sexual assault on college campuses, and cautioned colleges and universities in its press release“to avoid the use of information on the neurobiology of trauma to substitute for evidence.”
In 2017, The Atlantic’s Emily Yoffe wrote a seminal article on the alleged science behind trauma-informed investigations. In it, she interviewed Elizabeth Loftus, perhaps the most trusted expert on trauma and memory in the United States. She likened the current dogma surrounding “trauma-informed” to the Satanic Daycare panic from decades ago, suggesting it sounded a lot like the “recovered memory” theory of the era. At that time, people were convinced that their problems were caused by repressed memories. Today, students who don’t fully remember a sexual encounter due to alcohol, or who come to regret the encounter for a variety of factors, are led to fill in the gaps in their memory with the belief that they were sexually assaulted… As Loftus told Yoffe, those trying to
reconstruct an encounter after drinking alcohol were “very vulnerable to post-event suggestion.”… A common example for college campuses: A woman has a drunken hookup with a male acquaintance and the next day doesn’t fully remember what happened. She talks to her friends or a Resident Assistant (trained to report incidents of sexual assault under a broad definition that includes having sex after drinking) and they suggest she couldn’t consent due to her alcohol intake. She now starts filling in the gaps and viewing the encounter as sexual assault, and suddenly she is “traumatized” by a consensual encounter.
ATIXA credited Yoffe’s article with bringing to light some of the issues regarding the going theories on trauma. ATIXA stated, “Yoffe leads with the thesis that ‘Neurobiology of Trauma’ is junk science. ATIXA does not fully agree, but we do worry that application of the knowledge obtained by practitioners in our field has gotten way ahead of the actual science, that the body of knowledge is being misapplied, and that some purveyors of this knowledge are politically motivated to extrapolate well beyond any reasonable empirical conclusions currently supported by the science.” ATIXA continued, “everyone in the field is on the trauma learning curve and needs to be cautious about making premature conclusions. “Perhaps the effective tools of truly understanding what causes trauma and what its effects are have not been invented yet. ATIXA goes on to state that trauma-informed is not necessarily bad, but running an investigation starting with the assumption someone is traumatized and then fitting the evidence to support their claim – as Title IX trauma-informed investigations do – is not right.
dailywire– Ashe Schow The Bad Science Behind Campus Response to Sex Assault Emily Yoffe
