Daphne, Do you think you scared people when you said you might have
perpetrators in the class?  I know that would have freaked me right out if I
were a student.  It's not something many of us like to think about.

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 5:04 PM, Daphne Greenberg <alcdgg at langate.gsu.edu>wrote:


> The recent request for textbooks on family violence has reminded me that I

> have been meaning to share and seek feedback from this list regarding a

> realization that I have had recently.

>

> A few weeks ago, my graduate class on adult learning read an article which

> talked about students and instructors sharing trauma in the classroom. This

> sparked many reactions for students in my classroom and I shared the

> following:

>

> I have two minds about this topic. On the one hand, most instructors are

> not counselors/therapists, and sharing about trauma in a class that is not

> focused on that can be very triggering to survivors of abuse. In every

> class, depending on how large the class is, there is guaranteed to be one or

> more survivors of abuse, and therefore it may not be such a great idea. On

> the other hand, until we start to talk openly about this, society can go on

> pretending that it is not as common as it really is, and in a sense continue

> to facilitate the occurrence of abuse because it is seen as something that

> happens to "the other" and not a common day occurrence of so many people

> that we come into contact with.

>

> While I was saying the above, I said something like, due to the numbers in

> this class I am sure that we have survivors of abuse. Based on the numbers,

> I don't know if we have perpetrators of abuse, because I don't know the

> statistics of the numbers of abusers in our society. But there is a

> possibility that there is at least one "perpetrator" of abuse in this

> class-because we like to have a myth around who is and can be a

> perpetrator-but it is only a myth. Perpetrators can be well educated, they

> can be friendly, they can be likable, etc., etc. They can be one of us. Just

> like survivors are one of us.

>

> The realization that I had after this class, was the deep understanding

> that chances are abusers are amongst our very midst, not just in our

> neighborhoods, but in our professional lives. At my most recent faculty

> meeting of easily 200 or more people, I suddenly deeply realized that in

> this audience there is a good chance that there is someone who could be a

> child molester, a partner abuser, a rapist, etc., etc. I realized that out

> of all the students that I have taught and will continue to come into

> contact with, there will be someone who has or is perpetuating abuse. It

> made me realize that just as there are survivors on this list, there may

> also be perpetrators. These realizations hit me hard.

>

> We often talk about the importance of realizing that some of our adult

> literacy students may have endured or may be enduring violence. It seems

> that we rarely talk about the fact that some of our adult literacy students

> may have perpetuated or be currently perpetuating abuse. I wonder why this

> is so. Is it easier to identify with survivors of abuse than it is to

> identify with perpetrators of abuse? Would acknowledging the fact that we

> come into contact with both survivors and perpetrators in our classrooms

> start to place abuse out in the open and therefore make it more of an issue

> that society can't ignore? What implications does it potentially have for

> instruction in the adult literacy classroom?

>

> Any thoughts?

>

> Daphne

>

> ----------------------------------------------------

> National Institute for Literacy

> Diversity and Literacy mailing list

> Diversity at nifl.gov

> To unsubscribe or change your subscription settings, please go to

> http://www.nifl.gov/mailman/listinfo/diversity

>




-- 
Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt
www.LuxuriousChoices.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/diversity/attachments/20081220/a777fb00/attachment.html