Secular Skeptics Disbelieve Abuse Allegations Too
I spent my commute home today as I always do — browsing Medium for something to avoid eye-contact with the person invariably staring straight ahead in front of me. Usually I find some new advice from Tom Kuegler about how to grow your audience, or an insightful post on The Mission about the catastrophic state of the world. Today, though, I was kept busy by a new post on The Establishment from Trav Mamone on the denial of sexual abuse allegations in the secular skeptic community. I’ve linked to the article below for you to take a look for yourself.
I wanted to unpack some of Trav’s (well-written and largely correct) arguments in light of my position as a researcher in the area of attitudes towards sexual offenders (and by extension, attitudes towards sexual crime). I’ll touch on two key issues:
- Belief in institutional (or within-community) sexual abuse allegations is largely driven by motivational processes.
- We can use these processes to increase reporting rates.
The Motivated Nature of Allegation Belief
We are beginning to know more and more about the psychological underpinnings of belief in sexual abuse allegations. We know that belief is driven by processes related to cognitive distortions and stereotypes about sexual assault, while within-groups, social identity appears to play an important role.
In 2016 there was an interesting study published in the journal Plos ONE by Kiara Minto and colleagues. In the research, the researchers looked at whether having an increased investment in one’s Catholic faith led to different evaluations of alleged abuse within the Church.
In two studies with a combined total sample size of more than 1000, Minto and her collaborators found the effects that they expected. In general, Catholics were more protective of an alleged sexual assault perpetrator and more skeptical of the reliability of an alleged victim of sexual crime than other participants (including individuals from other religious faiths, or no faith at all). What’s more, as investment in the Catholic identity rose, these motivated judgements became more pronounced.
This is not surprising, and suggests that concerns about the perceived legitimacy of one’s social identity is important when understanding why some people do (or do not) believe allegations of sexual abuse. You can see the graphical plots of the data below.
These findings map on nicely to one point raised by Mamone at the end of their piece, when it is stated that a lack of allegation belief within communities is at least in part due to “people’s unwillingness to believe their heroes have done terrible things”.
Using Psychological Processes to Improve Reporting Rates
The positive aspect of this research programme is that, by understanding the psychological processes that contribute to reporting rates, we can use those same processes to improve reporting practices.
I recently wrote an article with a senior safeguarding figure within the Church of England — Colin Perkins of the Diocese of Chichester — to explore these ideas.
In the article, we set out how investment in religious identity, and the reliance on particular moral foundations (particularly ingroup loyalty) might play a role in the skepticism that some people have about allegations of sexual abuse in their own communities. These doubts about allegations seem to be motivated by a concern about institutional or community reputations.
Knowing this, we can frame safeguarding messages in line with this. We must make it a greater reputational risk to not report than it would be to reveal an abuser within the group.
It is not enough to withhold information and then claim the “one bad apple” line after-the-fact. It is only by openly and voluntarily reporting abuse allegations as they come up that this can be claimed, with community reputations being safeguarded in the process.
These ideas are not limited religious settings. We should be embedding such messages into communications at the social level to encourage everybody to report abuse allegations, whoever they are against and whichever community they are alleged to have come from.
I want to close by thanking Trav for writing the article that inspired this piece. Too often we frame motivated disbelief in sexual abuse allegations as being a religious issue. It isn’t, and the sooner we understand this fact (and the reasons why allegations are not believed), the sooner we can achieve justice for countless unnecessary victims of sexual abuse.
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