On August 22, the Association of Title IX Administrators – ATIXA – issued a Position Statement on Trauma-Informed Training and the Neurobiology of Trauma that exposes the many fallacies of “trauma-informed” concepts and methods: https://cdn.atixa.org/website-media/atixa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/20123741/2019-ATIXA-Trauma-Position-Statement-Final-Version.pdf
The Statement begins by quoting a claim that is often cited in trauma-informed training materials:
“Trauma leaves tracks on its victims. It is very difficult to fake or ‘act’ the sorts of symptoms [of trauma]. When someone displays these symptoms, this alone is evidence that they have been victimized.”
ATIXA delivers a strong rebuke to this claim: “Proffered as truth that a mere claim of trauma is proof of assault, this quote should be troubling to any rational mind. To assert that trauma cannot be faked is as flagrantly false a claim as asserting that trauma is proof of assault.”
The eight-page Statement goes on to address many of the flaws of the claims of trauma-informed proponents:
- “Using a study of lab rats to reach any conclusion about the story of a victim of sexual assault is troubling..Do rats tell stories? Do they experience sexual assault?..there is science behind these ideas, but they are not empirical conclusions.”
- “The ‘Neurobiology of Trauma’ should not significantly influence the way that colleges and schools evaluate evidence… improper use of trauma-informed methods turns trauma into evidence, which IS junk science and goes way too far.”
- “application [of trauma-informed theories].. has gotten way ahead of the actual science… is being misapplied, and…some purveyors of this knowledge are politically motivated to extrapolate well beyond any reasonable empirical conclusions…”
- There’s an “important distinction between practices that help an impacted party retrieve memory and avoid gratuitous re-triggering…and those [relying] on neurobiological theories to influence the interpretation of evidence.” Only the former is correct.
The ATIXA Statement concludes with this unequivocal message:
“The truth is that we understand perhaps 1/100th of 1% of what we need to know and may someday understand about how the brain responds to trauma. With such a nascent body of knowledge, most conclusions are premature. It is irresponsible to attribute much about how we interpret evidence to existing neuroscientific understandings of trauma, except to correlate scrambled memory encoding and retrieval with life-threatening incidents, and to see that flight/fright/freeze may be common reactions to such incidents. That is about it. Anything more than that is really theory, thus far unsupported by conclusive evidence.”
The ATIXA report may turn out to be a game-changer.
Quotes compiled by Cynthia Garrett, Esq.