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Faculty Focus No more victims: Psychologist Karen Calhoun works to understand and prevent sexual abuse
By Phil
Williams The young woman looks back on the event with sadness and perhaps a little disbelief. "It was eight at night," she says, "and it was just getting dark, and I was walking down the street. There were three guys, completely wasted and so loud, so obnoxious that I should have crossed the street and walked on the other side. But I walked right through them. "Then one guy kind of grabbed me and felt me up and down for about five minutes. And you know, I always thought if something like that happened, I would yell `Get off me!' or scream. I always thought I'd do that. And I didn't say one word. I just stood there." * Dr. Karen Calhoun, a psychologist who deals in her research and as a clinician with victims of sexual abuse, finds such stories hard to take. That women are victims of violence and abuse isn't news to her or anyone else, but Calhoun is among a new breed of researcher the ones who are digging deep to find out why men abuse women and why some women are victimized repeatedly. The facts are stark and raw. Numerous studies have shown that victims of sexual assault have many subsequent psychological problems, especially fear and anxiety. Possibly worse, as Calhoun pointed out in an article published several years ago in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, "research indicates that the majority of sexual assault survivors do not seek services for rape-related distress from mental health professionals, rape crisis centers, or victim assistance programs."
Along the way, she has published path-breaking work that focused a strong light on both the victims of sexual abuse and those who commit it. "I think Dr. Calhoun has certainly been a pioneer in doing research on rape and rape victims," says Dr. Dean Kilpatrick, director of the National Violence Against Women Prevention Research Center, a three-university consortium funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is also a professor at the Medical College of South Carolina and director of the National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center. "One of the impressive things about her and her research is the fact that she started doing it long before it became popular to do so. You have to give her a great deal of credit she had not only the scientific talent but perspective and conscientiousness to do something at a time when few people were doing it." Her early start and passion for the work put her at the forefront of national researchers into violence against women. The difference in her work, however, may lie in more than numbers, for when she speaks, her real passion for the victims as living human beings who do not deserve such treatment comes though with a firm strength of purpose. "I face the same challenge every time I do a talk that when you do work in the sexual assault area, you see the underside of human behavior," says Calhoun. "It can be very grim, but unfortunately, it's something you see every day." * The abuse story above is from a college student who spoke (anonymously) for a project sponsored by the Clinical Psychology Program at UGA, ranked as one of the best in the country, thanks to professors like Calhoun and many others. Each week, Calhoun and the others must balance setting up rigidly designed research projects against the real life troubles of women who have given their trust to men and then had to pay dearly for it. Over the past decade, Calhoun and her colleagues have tackled extremely difficult problems: Why are some women re-victimized while others aren't? Why are some men sexually aggressive while others find such behavior abhorrent? What symptoms do victims of rape and assault show, both in the short-term and the long-run? The answers have been as intriguing as they are productive. Already, the information uncovered by Calhoun in numerous studies has shown the way toward new methods of counseling for victims of sexual assault, and it has given therapists new ways to discuss with men such abhorrent behavior and methods of stopping it. How prevalent is the problem of sexual abuse? Calhoun has studied both college women and economically disadvantaged women seeking help at urban hospitals, and the problem is pervasive and shows no sign of going away. A landmark study published in 1987 showed that 54 percent of college women experience some form of sexual victimization, and 15 percent reported experiences that met the legal definition of rape. Though shocking, those numbers have not yet been reversed by subsequent studies. The numbers in the general population may even be worse. In one important study that Calhoun co-authored in 2001 along with fellow researchers from Temple University and Oklahoma State University, it was confirmed that "Women with histories of multiple sexual victimizations [take] significantly longer" to know when the threat of abuse has gone from potential to imminent. Such women, for cultural or other reasons, appeared to be late recognizing "cues" of imminent sexual abuse that non victimized women see much earlier. The proof of the research's importance research that Calhoun has been doing for years is in a successful program designed to prevent the incidence of rape re-victimization by teaching women to recognize risks and develop skills to deal with them. * Another young woman looks back on her experiences with deep unhappiness: "I was actually dating this man for a couple of years, and I broke up with him," she says, remembering a pattern of abuse. "Even to this day, still, he's very manipulative and kind of disrespectful, especially of other people around me. My friends would always try to tell me that, but I didn't want to believe that I'd spent two years with this person. "I was able to give him the benefit of the doubt. Looking back, I see how he would manipulate me. Alcohol played a part, too. I mean, I look back and say, `'How'd I do that?' but it's so hard to see when you're in the middle of the situation." * The facts of sexual violence are terrible. According to statistics published by the Florida Council Against Sexual Violence: * Thirteen percent of American women have been victims of at least one forcible rape in their lifetime. * Roughly one-third of all rapes take place in the daylight, and roughly half occur at or near the victim's home. * More than five out of 10 of all rape cases (61 percent) occurred before the victim reached the age of 18. * The FBI estimates that only 37 percent of all rapes are reported to the police. Bureau of Justice Statistics of reported versus actual rapes are even lower 30.7 percent. What is going on here? From where does this aggression come? "One problem is that the context has changed over the past 30 years," says Calhoun. "There is simply more access to women by those men who abuse them. There are also date-rape drugs and other new problems. It's shocking if you look at the whole picture. On the other hand, I take a different view that is it possible to make progress in helping victims and in preventing the men from committing abuse." Calhoun's interest in sexual abuse as a social evil began two decades ago when sexual assault victims would come in to the psychology clinic at UGA with bitter stories and little knowledge of what they should do next. Wondering how much such violence was a part of everyday life, Calhoun and colleagues set up a study with victims of sexual abuse who had been seen at Grady Hospital Rape Crisis Center in Atlanta. There, looking at what she admits was "the dark side of human nature," Calhoun began to test theories in her own mind asking what the sequence of events might be in sexual assaults and how women went on after being raped. What she found was partially encouraging: Women are survivors, and most of them, after the shock and horror of sexual assault and a "total disruption of their lives," find a way to get on with things. Unfortunately, as her studies progressed, Calhoun found a disturbing truth: Some women were victims of sexual assault over and over some as many as six different times. It became clear through several studies that some women simply missed the cues that sexual violence was about to happen. Another fact helped turn Calhoun's research effort on its head, however: She discovered that the strongest predictor of sexual abuse was past victimization. If that was true, then preventing a first incidence of sexual abuse could dramatically affect the number of subsequent incidents. Unraveling just why one event of sexual abuse might lead to another was difficult and obviously controversial. Studies show several things going on. First, the abuse leads to a tremendous increase in overall anxiety that acts on victims very much as Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome acts on soldiers who have seen heavy combat. But while there are similarities, there are important differences as well. Victims of sexual abuse must deal with issues of trust, guilt, shame, and self-blame. Second, there is growing evidence that traumatic experiences interfere with attention and cognitive processing of certain information. This could help explain why victimized women may miss the meaning of threat cues. Studies at other universities have actually shown that there are changes in brain biochemistry in victims of violence. After listening to women repeat stories that became all too familiar, Calhoun began research into ways to prevent re:victimization, and that research is paying off already. "Dr. Calhoun's research has always been very important and very well done, but her work now on looking at factors that predict [abuse] and re-victimization is incredibly important," says Kilpatrick. "Her work in this area is some of the most outstanding research that has been done and is being done. There is very little good research out there addressing this topic, and that makes the work of Calhoun and her colleagues even more important. It's impossible to develop a good prevention program without a research base that gives good clues to see what direction we should go." While some researchers in years past have simply concluded that rapists and abusers have psychological problems, feminist critics such as Calhoun are reluctant to let them off the hook that easily. In fact, there is a complex nexus of antisocial behaviors, anger, and callousness toward women that lead men to abuse women. The issue overall is not so much one of sadistic and psychologically unstable men who get a thrill out of hurting women as it is one of men whose behaviors, in many instances, while appalling, if not criminal, can be changed. Calhoun has thus become one of the few clinical researchers who is studying the problem from multiple perspectives simultaneously. * A third woman looks back on the abuse she suffered and sees it almost as a bad dream: "It wasn't like a case of somebody that I had just met," she says. "It was somebody that I had been dating for probably about seven months . . . I feel like now I wouldn't be the type of person to put up with that kind of behavior. "It wasn't just one thing, but in so many ways, he showed disrespect that I should have woke up to and never did. And now I can look back and think of a million things, but at the time I think that it would been so much harder for me to sit there and believe that what happened had really happened. Instead, blaming myself was so much easier. And it took a long time before I ever thought that it wasn't my fault." * Calhoun's studies were among the first of their kind to be funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, and she was a pioneer in showing that there are different patterns of recovery and adjustment for victims of abuse. "Creating prevention programs to reduce the incidence of sexual violence requires an in- depth understanding of both victims and perpetrators," says Dr. Garnett Stokes, professor and head of the department of psychology at UGA. "Dr. Calhoun is a rarity among researchers because she focuses on both, uniquely positioning her to play a key role in designing effective sexual violence prevention programs. "The prevention program developed by Dr. Calhoun was so promising that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funded a large four-year multi-site trial of the program . . . Initial results indicate that the program is successfully reducing the rate of sexual assault by nearly 50 percent." While Calhoun's progress has been painstaking and hard won, there is still much to do. There has been considerable research, for instance, on the impact of how sexual assault as a child interferes with normal social development as an adult. Calhoun, trying to include the horror of child abuse into the equation, bases her work on research showing that if victims of childhood abuse are not abused again in adolescence, they are less likely to be re-victimized in college than those victimized as adolescents. While this is encouraging in one way, it brings up yet another deeply disturbing aspect of abuse: why some adults sexually abuse children. For most of the past century, the response of society has been to lock up the offenders for decades a response that most would accept as reasonable. But that doesn't help prevent the problem in the first place. The huge dimensions of that dilemma have daunted Calhoun but not stopped her. Some federal agencies that one might expect to fund research into sexual abuse actually fund very few studies, Calhoun says. Fortunately, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "saved the day," she says, by funding research into ways of solving the problem from many angles at once. While studying women has perhaps become easier as more victims are empowered to step forward, studies on men who perpetrate the crimes has been nearly impossible, and while some studies have been done with prisons, little work has been done with men in the general population. "But that doesn't solve the problem when it comes to potential problems of male aggressiveness," says Calhoun. "The attitude for offenders is generally to lock them up and throw away the key, but these people could be anybody, the boy next door." * The problem of violence continues to be a huge one in all societies. Though there has been a steady drop in the percentages of many violent crimes in the U. S. over the past decade, that is small comfort to the victims, who must deal sometimes for the rest of their lives with emotional scars that few health care providers know how to salve. However, Calhoun is encouraged by what has happened in the past twenty years as psychologists and sociologists begin to dig deeper into the problems of sexual abuse and to uncover its origins. "Things are starting to get better because people are aware of the scope of the problem," she says. "It's not being swept under the rug anymore, even though a lot of research still needs to be done. What we need to remember is that it can happen to anyone anytime. We tend to distance ourselves when we hear about it happening. Women tend to say that's something that happens to somebody else. "But the point is that such violence continues to happen, and women should not have to live in fear of it." Calhoun is at pains to point out that she is only one of many psychologists at the University of Georgia working on violence-related problems. In fact, her colleagues are studying many kinds of interpersonal violence. They have formed a center for research in this area. There are often areas that overlap and can be studied together. That means experimental design is getting better all the time. Calhoun remains one of the few researchers, however, who is studying the issues with anything like a "global" approach. Better, her approach is working. The result may be fewer incidents of sexual abuse and an understanding that gives hope to women and knowledge to men. Little wonder, then, that Karen Calhoun seems optimistic when discussing such a grim topic. That is her gift: To see the darkest part of human nature and, with a genuine passion and scientific rigor, illuminate it with the light of reason. >> Click here to see reports by the Florida Council Against Sexual Violence, Inc.
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From the beginning of her career, Calhoun, a soft-spoken
but dedicated professor of psychology at UGA, has devoted
her professional life to understanding what
has become a plague around the world, a horror that is not confined
to a single country, culture, or color. 
