As part of our strategic commitment to reducing stigma around sexual violence, this is the first in a series of blog posts giving perspectives from across our partnership. The following article was written by Rob Balfour, Chief Executive of Survivors West Yorkshire (SWY) and Ben’s Place who offer an online trauma-informed counseling service for male victims of sexual violence. This thought-provoking piece uses the metaphor of a black hole to explore why society continues to struggle with responding to sexual violence, despite years of research, policy development and awareness-raising.
There is something about sexual violence that seems to pull society into a kind of black hole.
The metaphor may sound dramatic, but it helps explain why, despite decades of research, campaigning, policy and investment, we still struggle to deal honestly with sexual violence.
The problem is not simply that we do not know enough. It is that sexual violence carries such a powerful social gravity that individuals, institutions and even survivors can become trapped within it.
A black hole has an event horizon, the point beyond which escape becomes extraordinarily difficult. Sexual violence has its own social event horizon. It is the point where we become frightened to look any further because what lies beyond requires us to question things we would rather leave untouched: relationships, families, masculinity, femininity, power, institutions, professional identities and our assumptions about who can be believed.
Once we approach that horizon, avoidance becomes easier than understanding.
We see this culturally in the myths that surround sexual violence, people ask what the survivor was wearing, why they stayed, why they did not report, whether they were drinking, whether they fought back. We search for explanations that allow us to place the violence somewhere outside ourselves.
Institutions can do something similar.
Systems may create policies, strategies, training programmes and reporting mechanisms, while avoiding the deeper questions about power, accountability and institutional culture. When survivors challenge those systems, their testimony can become uncomfortable, whistleblowers can become inconvenient and the institution may unconsciously defend itself rather than confront what the evidence is telling it.
Inside such a social event horizon, facts can become absorbed by organisational narratives, evidence can be reframed and experience can be minimised.
Those who challenge the dominant story can themselves become treated as the problem, and this does not only affect institutions. Survivors can also become caught in the gravity of the event horizon; their trauma can produce avoidance, anger, mistrust and withdrawal for example. They are responses to living for years within a society that repeatedly tells them, explicitly or implicitly, that the truth of what happened is too difficult, too complicated, too threatening to hear. Judith Herman captured something fundamental about this when she wrote that
“The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness.”
The difficulty with that is – what is banished does not disappear. It continues to shape behaviour, relationships and institutions. This is where the black-hole metaphor becomes particularly useful.
The danger is not simply that society fails to respond to sexual violence. the danger is that the failure itself acquires gravity.
Each failure to listen makes the next failure easier, each institutional defence reinforces another, each survivor who feels silenced becomes evidence of a system that has not learned how to listen. Over time, we see the issues compressed into familiar arguments, defensive behaviours and competing identities. We reach what might be called a ‘cultural singularity’: a place where our normal (common sense) ways of thinking stop working.
Yet a black hole metaphor also contains a possibility, that the way forward is not to keep circling the event horizon but to find the courage to pass through it.
That means accepting that genuine change may require us to enter uncomfortable territory rather than continually trying to manage sexual violence from a safe distance. It means allowing survivors to challenge institutions, allowing uncomfortable evidence to remain uncomfortable, and accepting that organisations may need to change rather than simply defend themselves.
Perhaps what lies on the other side is not destruction but another way of thinking about sexual violence altogether a new ‘social universe’ in which listening is more important than institutional self-protection, accountability matters more than reputation, and survivors are recognised not simply as recipients of services but as producers of knowledge that can empower us all to do better in protecting children from sexual harms.
The choice, ultimately, is whether we continue orbiting the problem, trapped by its gravity, or whether we have the courage to cross the event horizon and discover what may possible on the other side.
See you out there.
Rob Balfour GMBPsS
CEO Bens Place (Survivors West Yorkshire) Community Psychologist | BSc | MSc | Sexual Violence Activist 30 yrs | Veteran RAF Regt Rock Ape | Psychotherapist | CEP | CSA Survivor