Self-Organized Research Championed by Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse

Thomas Schlingmann and CSA survivors introduce a "self-organized research" approach, emphasizing the active role of childhood sexual abuse survivors in mental health research, challenging traditional objectifying methods.

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In mental health research, traditionally, the production of knowledge has been the domain of detached scientists, seeking objectivity by analyzing experiences from an external standpoint. While aiming for broad generalizability, this methodology often turns survivors, including childhood sexual abuse (CSA) survivors, into mere data points. But what happens when these survivors become the scientists, reshaping the narrative and methodology?

Thomas Schlingmann of Tauwetter, Germany, and a group of CSA survivors and researchers are challenging this conventional paradigm. Their recent article, ā€œSelf-Organised Research by Child Sexual Abuse Survivors: Developing a New Research Approach,ā€ introduces a groundbreaking method that centers the lived experiences of CSA survivors.

Schlingmannā€™s article proposes an alternative philosophy and praxis for research on CSA, named the ā€œself-organizedā€ or ā€œsurvivor-controlled approach.ā€ This approach was implemented with the help of two survivor self-help groups in Berlin: the Wildwasser group for women and the Tauwetter group for men. The primary focus of this approach is to place the idea of ā€œregaining agencyā€ at the core of CSA recovery. Although this research approach is relatively new, its philosophy has a strong foundation, supported by Critical and Liberation Psychology researchers.

ā€œMany affected people deal with lower self-esteem and are very sensitive to being ignored, overlooked, or treated as a mere observation object. Self-help groups of adult survivors play an important role in coping with these consequences and are an effective means of self-empowerment,ā€ Schlingmann writes, adding:
ā€œSelf-organised research is democratic research.ā€

Part of the pain of being a survivor of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) is the internalization of feeling like an object that is used and controlled to meet someone elseā€™s needs. Unfortunately, most traditional research paradigms used by those studying the effects of CSA and how people can recover from the trauma of CSA often mimic this objectification. The person who suffered CSA becomes a thing to be studied, measured, surveyed, and rarely ever spoken to, yet often spoken about.

Recognizing the vast experiential knowledge within CSA self-help groups, Schlingmann and his team have pioneered an approach that places survivors at the heart of knowledge production. This ā€œself-organized researchā€ ensures survivors maintain agency throughout every phase of the research process.

Instead of merely being subjects, the survivors become instrumental in collecting, interpreting, and disseminating information. By formalizing this unique process, the team aims to develop and apply quality criteria aligning with the survivorsā€™ experiences, ensuring the research remains relevant and impactful.

This paradigm shift presents a new methodology for CSA survivor self-help groups and offers hope for empowerment. By embracing this approach, survivors, whether adults, children, or youth, can actively generate knowledge that resonates with their personal experiences, leading to more nuanced, compassionate, and effective interventions in the realm of mental health.

Survivor-Controlled Research vs Participatory Research
ā€œThe problem of experimental-statistical approaches in the social sciences and psychology is that, in the full sense, the concept of experience only applies to those working scientifically, while the experience of those being studied is methodologically regulated to the point of being ā€“ in Adornoā€™s words ā€“ ā€˜annulledā€™ā€¦ or, in Marxā€™s words: the ā€˜testimony of the senses . . . is reduced to the sensuousness of geometry.ā€™ā€

The issue of survivor participation in research arose when the ā€œBonn Ethics Declarationā€ (BED), a call to research CSA in educational spaces, was implemented. Participation was minimal in the existing statistical paradigm, leading to a dearth of data to fill the call of the BED. The Bundesministerium fĆ¼r Bildung und Forschung (BMBF, or the Federal Ministry for Education and Research) led the charge to create the research program and followed up the BED with a ā€œMemorandum on Participatory Research.ā€ This research includes ā€œthe direct participation of those people in the research process, whose working or living conditions are the subject of the research,ā€ where ā€œAll research partners jointly determine the core elements of the project, from the selection of the research focus to the selection of methods, data collection and interpretation of the results.ā€

The problem was that the novel approach had very few researchers with experience in fully implementing participatory research programs. In response, the CSA survivors themselves, in conjunction with academics grounded in participatory research (which included Thomas Schlingmann, author of this research paper), created a program that included participant-led research, the participation of academics in the survivor-controlled research, and a possibility of joint research projects. This project was named SELFORG as part of a larger project entitled REGROW.

Can experience in self-help groups be generalized?

Now that the participants were in the lead of the research project, what next needed to be decided was the actual method of data collection. Schlingmann points out that quantitative approaches consider outlier experiences as exceptions to mean generalizations and, in the process, ā€œnegates the standpoint of the subject and reduces survivors to data suppliers ā€“ even when they accumulate and interpret the data.ā€

While there have been critiques of quantitative methods regarding dehumanizing research participants, Schlingmann and SELFORG also saw many qualitative approaches as equally objectifying, even as those methods attempted to reduce the issues regarding quantitative research.

ā€œQualitative research methods, whether hermeneutic or content analytic, also include interpretation of the collected (interview) data by researchers. Once again, survivors become research objects.ā€

Once again, the survivors of this abuse are reduced to objects to meet someone elseā€™s needs while their needs are ignored.

Critical Psychology and Self-Helf Groups

Critical psychology posits that, in opposition to the behaviorist/cognitivist model of psychology, people behave for reasons that are rational and understandable to that person. People are not simply conditioned by their surroundings, nor are they suffering from cognitive distortions when they behave in ways deemed unacceptable or simply irrational by society. Thus, research from a critical perspective needs to include those reasons that seem the least reasonable and accept them as just as valid as the ā€˜meanā€™ behavior or rational thought. Outliers are not ā€˜thingsā€™ to be statistically manipulated but causal relationships that are just as important as the norm.

To account for this view, research must include the perspectives, input, and validation from participants. Self-help groups themselves work to help a person understand their own personal causal relationships between their current experiences and behaviors and the reasons those issues arose (in this case, CSA).

ā€œBy recognizing internal reasons for action, it becomes possible to see through personal limitations and reduced interpretations and thus expand oneā€™s agency. In this process of ā€˜transcending the immediateā€™ā€¦, one discovers which actions seem to make sense in which situation and why.ā€
The SELFORG Model

IN 2017, the CSA survivorā€™s group Tauwetter applied to the BMBF for a line of funding to integrate participatory research models into the group functioning:

ā€œThey wanted to achieve two things: The first was to find out whether and how it would be possible to transform the more or less unsystematic generalization in self-help groups into a research approach for CSA survivors with the help of the ideas of Critical Psychology. The second was to study the multiple ways of processing sexualized violence beyond the clinical settings. These ways ā€“ described as self-organized recovery processes ā€“ play an important role for quite many CSA survivors.ā€

The group would first identify a small ā€˜initial groupā€™ of CSA survivors within the support group with similar questions. The responsibility for gathering and interpreting the data around that question then falls on the group members. They can then recruit others into the group or leave those uninterested out of the group; thus, ā€œself-organized research is democratic research.ā€

The survivor-researchers would try to ensure that the groups consisted of diverse backgrounds and genders, with Tauwetter reaching out to Wildwasser for different gender experiences. They would also try to ensure that the member had the space for self-reflection, which would include experience in the group already, as well as a certain stability gained from either outside the group or within the group.

The groups would try to meet in a central location and ensure that all members had the chance to reflect on and respond to the research questions. ā€˜Crosstalk,ā€™ with members relating their own experience to the experience of the initial speaker, was included so that members could create relations between experiences, with the ultimate goal of trying to find a ā€œstructural generalizationā€ of membership in self-help groups.

The first meeting includes introducing the members, as not everyone will be from the same group(s). This meeting also provides training on the research models, themes, and underlying philosophies. The process of ā€œsuccessive transformation from pretheoretical discussions to scientific conceptualizationā€ means that members can hold the tension of being both the researcher and the object of research.

The next meetings build on the original responses while ensuring the survivor-researchers validate the interpretations. The groups then presented to other groups for review, ensuring that survivors who did not participate in the research also validated the experiences. Once the feedback is gathered, a final written report is generated, incorporating and detailing the themes and responses of the members to build a ā€œstructural generalization.ā€

Possible Improvements and Additions

Schlingmann points to the possibility that results may not meet the expectations of the participatory researchers and that the researchers need to be open and ready for that possibility, just as any researcher would be. Additionally, outside sources could be incorporated into the research for validation and comparison.

First, general boards of experienced survivor-researchers, critical psychologists, and other researchers in sexualized violence could be created to help build research projects and maintain databases for the use of groups to utilize in their research. Second, the results can be compared to existing databases and literature for contradiction and validation. Research that contradicts existing literature can help replace or update databases. Also, the research can be built into literature reviews, collating the experiences of multiple groups into single accessible documents.

 

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Schlingmann, T. (2023). Self-Organised Research by Child Sexual Abuse Survivors: Developing a New Research Approach. In Participatory Research on Child Maltreatment with Children and Adult Survivors (pp. 247-261). Emerald Publishing Limited. (Link)

5 COMMENTS

  1. As one who knows that what is omitted from the DSM, is likely more important than what is written in the DSM. Since I know from personal experience, and subsequent research, that concerns of child abuse currently is “uncredible” according to the DSM, despite a person having medical evidence of the sexual abuse of a very young child in the child’s medical records, thus is an “unbillable disorder,” according to the currently “invalid” DSM.

    https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-child-does-not-have-bipolar-disorder/201402/dsm-5-and-child-neglect-and-abuse-1

    https://psychrights.org/2013/130429NIMHTransformingDiagnosis.htm

    I completely agree with you, that survivors of CSA must break free from the systemic child abuse covering up psychological and psychiatric industries, and their Western civilization paternalistic “religious partners.”

    https://medicalkidnap.com/2019/10/21/christian-churches-redefine-the-meaning-of-orphan-to-justify-participating-in-child-trafficking/

    https://books.google.com/books?id=xI01AlxH1uAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=
    0#v=onepage&q&f=false

    Because the DSM “bible” billing “mental health” “partners of the paternalistic religions” can NOT even truthfully bill to help any CSA survivors of Western civilization today.

    And this is NOT just a problem with my former Christian religion, but seemingly of all of the Evangelical paternalistic “religions” that own hospitals, and their “mental health partners,” who are currently systemically profiteering off of covering up child abuse.

    https://medicalkidnap.com/2019/10/21/christian-churches-redefine-the-meaning-of-orphan-to-justify-participating-in-child-trafficking/
    https://books.google.com/books?

    https://books.google.com/books?id=xI01AlxH1uAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=
    onepage&q&f=false

    I’m quite certain this systemic child abuse covering up problem of the religions, and their claimed “mental heath professional partners” needs to be ended.

    Some ethical pastors of a different religion did confessed this systemic problem to me, to be “the dirty little secret of the two original educated professions.”

    https://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=59031

    As the innocent mother, of an innocent child abuse survivor, who dealt with staggeringly unjust crimes against my family, to cover up the medical proof of the sexual molestation of my very young child, by the systemic child abuse cover uppers of the “mental health professions,” and their pastoral “partners.”

    I will say, the systemic pedophilia aiding, abetting, and empowering crimes of both the “mental health professionals” and their paternalistic religious “partners,” does need to end.

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  2. After I had seen five psychiatric practitioners I joined a civic sponsored self help group unaligned with any pastoral work and not akin to a twelve step program. We had seven women members and two volunteer leaders. Five members were in their 20’s or 30’s as well as the volunteers. Myself and one other member were over 40. I entered the group of gracious young people and established a relationship with the one woman who was younger than me but closer to my age. Besides having been sexually abused as young children each of us had a life limiting medical condition. Unfortunately learning of the traumas of each young woman triggered my unresolved memories. I left the group because I could not function with the reawakened trauma. Although accounting for differences in age may be possible I believe the premise of this article is untenable.

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  3. In the early 2000s I was involved with a participatory research project out of Boston University. At the time I was working for the statewide peer led organization in Massachusetts and I don’t believe we were paid for our participation (although I was through our organization). Ultimately, the lead researcher removed the project from the peer participants and wrote a highly critical published article about us and our contributions. We were shocked and deeply hurt. Peer-led research is needed, especially around non-medication alternatives.

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