Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
Support for today's episode comes from seed Lip, the original distilled non alcohol expirits crafted from the finest globally sourced botanical ingredients. Seat Lip comes in three varieties, the Aromatic Spice ninety four, Herbal Gordon one O eight, and Citrus Forward Grow forty two, all without alcohol calories. Are sugar curiously complex flavors make crafting elevated non alcoholic cocktails easy at home. As simple as adding a splash of premium mixer of two ounces of your favorite preferred expression are challenging your board tending skills to create a more elevated serve. Sea Lip enables you to have that evening drink any night of the week, conveniently delivered direct to your door from Sea Lip drinks dot com. Support for today's podcast also comes from Helix. It's been about five months now and I'm still very happy with my Helix mattress. I'm not sure if you've been on the hunt for mattress lately, but there are so many choices. The thing I love most about Helix was that I was able to take a two minute quiz that matches your body type and sleep preference to the perfect mattress. Just for you. Ordering was very easy and delivery was super fast. If you're looking for an upgrade to the way you sleep, I definitely encourage you to check out Helix for a mattress ship straight to your door with free no contact delivery, completely free returns, and a one nights sleep trial. And just for y'all, Helix is offering up to two hundred dollars off all mattress orders and two free pillows at helix Sleep dot com slash Therapy for Black Girls. Just go to Helix Sleep dot com slash Therapy for Black Girls, take their two minutes sleep quiz and they'll match you to a customize mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life. Now let's get into the show. Welcome to the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast, a weekly conversation about mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, Dr Joy hard and Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information or to find a therapist in your area, visit our website at Therapy for Black Girls dot com. While I hope you love listening to and learning from the podcast it is not meant to be a substitute for a relationship with a licensed mental health professional. Hey, y'all, thanks so much for joining me for Session one seventy seven of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast. Each October, we take time to share resources and raise awareness of the continuing ways intimate partner violence impacts our community. Today, we're digging into what this looks like, particularly for black women, and why there continues to be such a disparity in the way domestic violence is regarded when it involves a Black woman. Joining me for this conversation is Dr Caroline West. Dr West is an award winning professor of psychology at the University of Washington, where she teaches courses on family violence and the psychology of Black women. She's the author of Violence in the Lives of Black Women, Battered, Black and Blue, and producer of the documentary let Me Tell You All About Black Chicks, Images of Black Women in Pornography. Dr West and I discussed the role race plays and navigating intimate partner violence, the idea of the perfect victim, and suggestions for supporting women in your life who may be suffering abuse. If something resonates with you during our conversation. Please share with us on social media using the ashag tbg in session. Here's our conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr West, Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I'm very pleased that you were able to join us and always appreciate having someone who has a history and so much research that you've done, if related to Black women as it relates to intimate partner violence and domestic violence. And so I'm curious to hear the evolution maybe of some of that work and how it maybe looks different now than it did maybe even teen years ago in doing the work. So what we've learned in the last ten years or so, we have better research, and that's one huge advance in the field that I found. So I would say, think about ten African American women that you know to be a friend, of family, member, a coworker. Four of those women, according to National Statistics, will be a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking after the age of eighteen at the hands of an intimate partner. It really is a very stark statistic when you share it, right, Like if you think about yourself in a group of nine girlfriends. That is quite a lot of people in the group who will have been impacted by this exactly, and that's that's devastating. Yeah, And so it sounds like you're suggesting that it is not as urgent to people as it really should be. Absolutely. I think in some ways, ironically, with black women violence, it's so visible because it's impacting us all the time, which makes it ironically really invisible because nobody's talking about it. Mm hmmm. Yeah. And you know, interestingly enough, of course, we have a very public violence that situation between I think they were in a relationship, Tory Lanes and make the Stallion, right, and so we have a very public example right now, and I think it feels like it has brought together all of the pieces of your research in this one incident. Right. So we see that there has been lots of backlash against Meg for sharing this information, But even on her end, she was initially reluctant two press charges or to say anything even on the scene because of fear for herself and fear for him and the other people who were there with them that evening. So I'm curious just to hear more about your thoughts about how the media and just you know, other black people have really kind of really ganged up on her in a lot of ways and are not necessarily believing her. And there were quite a few memes shared when this initially happened. And even now, you know, Tory Lanes has come out with a new album. I'm not listened to it. I wasn't a fan of his music even before, but definitely not now. But you know, it sounds like there are some suggestions he's making on the album that he didn't do it right. And so it very much feels like the pain that she has experience is not being taken seriously, and in some ways, he's trying to invalidate that it even happened in the ways that she's saying it did. And I think that we need to understand that what happened to Meg, it's actually a reality in the lives of too many African American women. Black women are more likely to be killed by an intimate partner at double the rates of white women. Oftentimes when they're killed, they're killed by an intimate partner in the context would you see a handgun in the context of an argument? And so she was really lucky actually that she didn't become one of those statistics. Yeah, yeah, and it is very unfortunate, you know, both the incident and the aftermath that we are now kind of seeing play out on social media and in magazines and other websites and stuff. And so I do want to hear little bit more because it does feel like it's often a very complicated situation. And I have a background in college student mental health and so have worked with lots of young women who maybe have been sexually assaulted and feel very mixed feelings about whether they want to press charges. Right, so we know again the backdrop in which we exist in terms of police violence, and how our stories are not often taken seriously in the system, and so there is often some trepidation about do I prioritize, you know, trying to get justice for myself versus what might happen to this black man in the system. And I'd love to hear more about, you know, what has come out in terms of your work related to that. You know that happens a lot, and I think it's deeply rooted in history. I think historically, you know, black women have known this from the very beginning, where we just don't talk about these things because we know that there's a safety issue, and it really is. We're really kind of groomed and hart and encouraged to take sides against ourselves. I'm wondering, do you have some ideas about how we can begin to kind of shift that conversation so that we you know, and and again, I think it is a very complicated situation, but it feels like the answer can't always be at I expense exactly. I think part of it is to just really start having critical conversations about domestic violence and sexual assault, in all forms of gender based violence within the community. I think oftentimes it's this expectation or belief that women are lying but it's not happening, that it's not really real. But as I say it, with the statistics, if four out of ten of us experience this, this is very real. So we need to start opening our eyes and seeing that these aren't strangers out there. These are people in your social network that you know and listening to their stories and hearing their stories and Dr West, is there a higher likelihood of black women who come for with these stories not being believed in in other groups. It's complicated, like most things are and black women actually, when we look at services and particularly like reporting to the police and reporting to social services, we may tend to under report. Actually, but then when we come forward and we talk about it, we oftentimes are disbelieved or our victimization is not taken seriously. And I think that has a lot to do with stereotypes. And historically, you have to understand, from most of this country's history, the rape laws were race specific, so they didn't even cover black women. So for most of the country's history, black women were not even rapeable under the law. I mean, we know that the laws don't always protect us, probably very often, but they weren't even on the books for some time exactly. Yeah. Yeah, So what kinds of things can we do in our own circles to try to protect one another. How can we maybe initiate some of these critical conversations that you're saying we need to have. I think part of it is that we also have to hold perpetrators accountable, and that doesn't tend to happen very often. I think we have to carve out spaces where we really challenge ourselves around the stereotypes, the miss the misconceptions around domestic violence and sexual assault, that it only happens to certain women and if you just do everything right, that those are politics of respectability. You just kind of keep your your dressed down and your legs close, if you carry yourself quote unquote like a woman or a lady, that these things won't happen to you. If you aren't aggressive or you speak in a certain way, that you're going to be protected. And so those are really old tropes and misconceptions about who is being victimized, because the reality is anybody or Yeah, so it makes me think about this whole story around like the perfect victim, right, that there is a way you know that if you, like you said, keep your legs closed and where your dress is long and all of these things that you know, bad things won't necessarily happen to you. And we know basically anybody could become a victim exactly exactly, and these are the people that we know. You're more likely to be victimized, not so much by a stranger, but somebody who's in your social network. Yeah, it does feel like very early on, and you probably can speak to this better than I can with your years of research, but it does feel like Historically, the messages around assault were be careful about somebody jumping out of a bush on the sidewalk, right, And clearly the research indicates that we are much more likely to be victimized by somebody who we actually know, not a stranger exactly, people within our social network, within our family, or friendship network in our neighborhood, or or intimate relationships. So I would let to hear you say more about the whole idea of com modifying my sexuality and having it so back to us. What do you mean by that? What I mean by that is I did a documentary called let Me Tell You All about Black Checks Images of violence against Black women in pornography, and the title comes from one of the first interracial porn videos that was on the market in and was taken off the market because it showed Clue Klux Klan members having sex with black women. And so everywhere we look around this culture, some aspects of hip hop, not all pornography, all forms of sexualized media, black women are kind of depicted. Is these hyper sexual, out of control creatures that you can just do anything to us? I wonder if there is an opportunity to discuss then you know, like most recently Megan Cardy have the example of the WAP song, right, And so I think in some ways you can see that as okay, are they selling back what has kind of been internalized to them? But where does black women kind of embracing their pleasure and being free to be sexual, Like, where is the spectrum there or is there a spectrum? I think that there is a spectrum, and I think it's incumbent upon all of us as individuals to decide what a healthy sexuality is going to be for us as individuals. The problem becomes when you you reduce your entire being to your sexuality. The problem comes when Black women don't have control over how they express their sexuality. And if you are being sexual in spaces where you don't feel comfortable with that because the whole culture and your partner expects that of you and you don't feel like you can say no, I would argue that that's not a healthy sexuality. So be sure that it's internally driven, not driven by the culture. I completely agree with you there that it has to be something that you thought about, right, and that this is how you want to express it as opposed to this is all I feel like I can do exactly exactly. Yeah. So, Dr West, you mentioned something earlier and I want to follow up on this, the whole idea of holding perpetrators accountable. And so again we know that the justice system as it is set up now doesn't typically work for us. So are there other things or other ways that you have seen be successful in terms of holding perpetrators accountable? That is such a good question. You know, there is various justice programs were instead of incarce rating perpetrators, getting them treatment, making sure that they own what they've done and they apologize to the victim and they try to make some restitution and they try to make things right so that they're not just shifting the focus two the victim, that they're owning their part in the trauma and the violence. So that could be restorative justice, right right. Yeah, I've definitely heard something about that and have not at all, you know, done a significant amount of research there, but I have heard that as another framework to use, and I think that that's where a lot of people struggle with, you know, these conversations around abolition, right and defunding the police. People are really concerned with, I think especially things like suxual assault and domestic violence, because it does feel like, Okay, how do we make sure that you know, other sisters don't continue to be victimized by the hands of people who wish us harm? Exactly. The project I'm working on these days is a project out of Seattle called Survivors. First. What we're hoping to do is to work with black victim defendants. And these are are black women who actually victims of domestic violence, but they end up getting arrested at higher rates than other women of other ethnic backgrounds when they use violence and self defense, and then they end up in the legal system, and so they don't get access to other services because you're treated like perpetrators. And so how can we work with the prosecutor's office, How can we work with saying maybe let's take a second look. Oftentimes these women have an extensive background of being victimized by the person that they're accused of assaulting. So what we need to do is in put them in contact with social service agencies so that they can get the help that they need, not arresting them and throwing them in jail. Yeah, they definitely have been some pretty higher file cases recently that we've heard, you know, people defending themselves and then going to jail for a significant amount of time. Well, we're saying Alexander Yes in Florida, Uh, Cintia Brown, who is woman who is being trapped her her abuser and then was looking at a lifetime in jail prison right right, Yeah, And it really feels again, I think that's just another example of how the justice system is not really set up to protect us in a lot of ways. We're not believed and we're not Yeah. Yeah, so it again goes back to your earlier point about just us not being believed. Let's take a quick break here to hear a word from our sponsors. Support for today's podcast comes from the number one new scripted series on cable, Tyler Perry's Systems on BT. The Juicy two Hours Season two premiere happens tonight at nine Central on BT. Grab your popcorn and be sure to use the hashtag exists on BT as you watch live. We also have a quick message paid for by the Leadership Conference Education Fund. Remember that you don't have to wait until November three to cast your ballot. You can be an October voter. In most states, you can vote early, request your mail ballot, return your completed ballot in the mail or in person, or vote early at an early voting location. Let's all do our part to try to make sure all voices are heard, make a plan to vote, visit, and still I vote dot org to join the fight for voting rights today. Now let's get back into our conversation. So I want to hear more Dr West, since you brought up the idea of working with this program called Survivors. First, we know, of course, that we are still in the midst of a pandemic. We know that for some time, lots of businesses were closed and I think are still primarily closed. And I know that there has been a huge impact even though we've seen an increase in like calls for domestic violence. If we know anytime there's a major stress like this, there is a likelihood of increasing instances of domestic violence as well as child abuse. But a lot of those services were closed, right, like the shelters. And so I'm curious to hear if there are ways that you've heard organizations be able to shift to offer their service digitally, Like what kinds of resources are even available given that we're all still in a pandemic. That's the real challenge. I mean, oh, it's exceedingly complex, and social services were understaffed, under resource even before the pandemic, And so I think what's going to need to happen next is that October it is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and as also as individuals have to reach out to these social services and say what is it you need and how can we help as a community, because it's got to be a community based response. So it could just be something simple as donating money so that survivors can stay in a hotel for some time, or donating clothes or food so that they have some economic resources. It is a problem. We'd have to be calling the National Domestic Violence Hotline and seeing what services are available in your community. I mean, it was a struggle even before the pandemic, and like you're mentioning, now that you know so many offices you can't necessarily visit in person, it has become even more of a struggle. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, so I am curious out to west to hear You know, we talk a lot about social media here on the podcast and the ways that it can often be helpful but also harmful and I'm wondering if you have seen an evolution in your research and looking at like the impact that social media has in the mystic violence, or in the ways that needs and things like contribute to this gender violence. Can you share anything about that. Absolutely, social media in all forms of technology, has just absolutely made things more challenging. You can put cameras up, cameras are available and smaller, and you can actually put those up in the victim's house and be able to stalk them virtually in that way. You can harass them and stalk them on social media. You can put a tracking device in their car or in their purse, so you know where they are all the time. So with social media and technology, stalking has become much more complex as a form of violence. We're seeing more of that. Yeah, it does also feel like the whole idea of like leaking people's news is an additional thing that the laws, it feels like, have yet to catch up to. That is, of course another way in which people are violate it, right, It's called revenge porn. Yeah, and so that is something that that's happening a lot. So you share nuds maybe within the context of a personal relationship and that can be used to harass the victim afterwards, or they could be taken without her knowledge and consent. M Yeah, so you mentioned earlier, Dr Wes, the whole idea of their still being some huge misconceptions related to intimate partner violence. Can you share some of the things that you feel like are the biggest misconceptions. I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that victims deserve it. They've done something to create the problem of why they're being victimized, and if they just changed their behavior that it wouldn't happen, rather than seeing what's going on with this perpetrator that he's doing this, so the victims enjoy it, that they are, you know, stupid or they're emotionally defective in some way if they can't just leave. One common misconception I here all the time, well, if it's not bad, just leave, just leave. People don't understand that leaving is a process and it's not always easy to disconnect yourself from a relationship. So those are really common ones when we've talked about this in the community before. This whole idea of if it's that bad, then just leave, and not understanding all of the things that need to be in place even for somebody to have an attempt at leaving successfully, and the evidence that we have that talks about that being one of the most dangerous times, you know, in a survivora's life, we need to understand that that's exactly right because leaving and I'm not saying don't leave, but there's safety planning that you may have to put in place. Where are you gonna go? But making sure that you have your children's first certificates in your documentation when you leave, How are you going to you know, provide for yourself when you leave? How can you keep other family members safe when you leave? So there's got to be safety planning in place because leaving oftentimes may trigger an escalation in the partment's You know something drs I have been thinking about and I don't know if there's any research that supports it, but it feels, at least in the stories that I hear in the news that when women are killed by their partners, it often happens at their places of employment. Is there anything behind it? Leaving certainly can trigger that. Getting order protection can trigger that. And if you have a perpetrator who has those kinds of control concerns and the belief that if I can't have you, no one else can. And if they're they're really motivated to commit this homicide, they'll commit it wherever you are, within the home, in your workplace, wherever they can find you. So that may just be anecdoto. There's no real research that you've seen that talks about an increase of life violence happening at the workplace so much in terms of an increase, we just know that it can happen. Yeah, and so I haven't seen any research that indicates that we've seen an upticking and happening within the workplace, but it certainly does, which is another reason we should all care about this because it's not something that's just hidden behind doors that can happen anywhere. So are there things that we should be kind of on the lookout for with, you know, people in our communities that might indicate to us that something might be going on? Are certain questions we should ask. Yeah, I think that there is a danger assessment that we do as researchers, and we look for things. Has there been a history of violence before, does a person have a history of drug and alcohol use? Is there stalking? Is a person abusing the victim when she's pregnant. Perpetrators who are both physically and sexually abusing are more potentially dangerous. Is a perpetrator suicidal? Perpetrators who feel like I don't have anything to lose may not have a problem killing themselves. And and the victim, do you have a child with a perpetrator who's not their biological child? Is a perpetrator unemployed and has lost employment. All of those are things that could be potential risk factors for the person who may actually try to take your life. M can you say more about the pregnancy risk, like why that increases the likelihood of violence? You know, I'm so happy you asked. That Black women experience certain types of violence at higher rates than other women of other ethnic backgrounds. So we are more likely, as I mentioned, to be killed by an intimate partner. We are more likely to be strang gold by an intimate partner. Can you imagine somebody trying to choke the life out of you. Black women experience that at higher rates, and we're more likely to experience higher rates of what we call reproductive corsion. And that's a special type of sexual violence that involves pregnancy corsions. So the perpetrator is going to try to pressure you to become pregnant by not allowing you to use birth control or saying I'm gonna end this relationship if you don't have a baby. Birth control sabotage, so they're going to remove that condom. They're not going to allow you to take birth control pills or throw away your birth control, and they're going to try to control pregnancy outcomes, pressure you to have an abortion or pressure you to keep the child, and you don't want to carry the pregnancy the term. So pregnancy just puts you higher risks because obviously if you're pregnant, it's going to be harder to escape the violence, to protect yourself, to get security, and that's just a stressful time in relationships when there's a pregnancy got you and Dr West, I wonder if there are things that you're already thinking about in terms of the increases in domestic violence that we may see on the other side of the pandemic, Like, are there things that you're already thinking about kind of about what's gonna be happening once we're done with the pandemic. Black women are living within multiple pandemics. So even when the pandemic ends, we're experiencing our violence in the context of structural violence, poverty, homelessness. We're living with community violence within our community. So many of us were living with historical trauma. It's not even historical because it's ongoing. When Brianna Taylor shot in her band by the police, this is not even back in historical this is today, and so we're living in multiple pandemics, institutional violence when we seek help for or intimate partner violence from the medical system and the police. So I think we're going to have to work harder to wrap our arms individually also around victims in our community and asking them what is it they need to be safe? Mm hmmm, Yeah, So, like you mentioned earlier, making sure that we're you know, donating to systems who may have to kind of pivot and do in some of the work digitally, but also very directly asking like, what is it that you need to be safe? Were is that you need to be safe? And how can I be a part of creating that? And asking the women and girls in our lives what's going on in your family? Do you feel safe? Is there something that you need to talk about and opening the door so we can have those conversations. Yeah, So what is leaving you hopeful in this word, doctors, what kinds of things are you kind of seeing on the horizon that you feel like we'll make an impact in the work that you've done. What's leaving me hopeful these days is for myself just working towardstitutional change. I've been expert witness for many years and talking to women who are in jail or trying to help women get out of jail after they have killed intimate partners or defended themselves. What's keeping me hopeful is that at this historical time, when we're talking about Black lives matter, that if we can shift the narrative to not just talking about violence against our community, but like Kimberly Crenshaw says, say her name, that if we can start saying the names of victims of gender based violence, that we can really move towards making some change in this area. Yes, yes, I mean her work around intersectionality. Right. So you mentioned earlier the whole idea of like choosing am I gonna be black now? Or am I going to be a woman, when really there's no way for us to choose. We are both black and women. Yeah, yeah, I guess I would say to to black women out there. It reminds me of a song by Nina Samon you just gotta learn to leave the table when love is no longer being served. Mm hmm, you gotta to leave the table when love is no longer being served and doing some real self reflection and saying if this relationship isn't working for me, if I don't feel like I'm being honored, respected and treated well to know when it's time to leave the table. So where can we find you? Dr? West? Can you share your website as well as any social media handles that you want to share with us? Yeah, the best way to find me is through my website Wwwdr Caroline West dot com and I have articles, videos, and other information. They are free for download for people who just want to learn more about this topic. Yes, we will definitely be including that in the show notes. But we so appreciate you sharing your information with us today, Doctor West, Thank you so much for having me. I'm so glad that Dr West was able to share her x ortias with us today. To learn more about her work, be sure to visit the show notes at Therapy for Black Girls dot Com slash Session one seventy seven, and don't forget to share this episode with two sisters in your life who might appreciate the conversation. If there's a topic you'd like to have covered on the podcast, please submit it at Therapy for Black Girls dot com slash mailbox, and if you're looking for a therapist in your area, be sure to check out our therapist directory at Therapy for Black Girls dot com slash directory. If you want to continue digging into this topic and connect with some other systems in your area, come on over and join us in the Yellow Couch Collective, where we take a deeper dive into the topics from the podcast and just about everything else. You can join us at Therapy for Black Girls dot com slash y c C. Thank you all so much for joining me again this week. I look forward to continue in this conversation with you all real soon. Take good care, the best, the best pitch