From military sexual trauma to ‘organization‐trauma’: practising ‘poetics of testimony’

Abstract

In this descriptive essay, the authors attempt to demonstrate the inadequacy of positivist and modern theoretical approaches to understand and respond to sexual trauma and other forms of traumatic organization violations, which occur before and in the aftermath of sexual trauma, in the armed forces. Modern theories which advance colonizing rationalities, positivist epistemes, and male‐identified narratives are contested in their ‘thrones of privilege’ to no longer remain the dominant and ‘only’ legitimate judgers of what is deemed ‘true’ knowledge and reality, specifically in the context of sexual trauma and violations in organizations, who is violated, what constitutes a traumatic violation, and its effect on the victim. Building upon the work of critical management scholars, knowledge/language around the topic of traumatic violations committed by the organization itself as the unit of analysis and how this relates to military sexual trauma in total institutions, specifically the armed forces, is constructed using the concept of ‘organization‐trauma’. This concept is crafted using the discursive practice coined by Rebecca Chopp, a contemporary constructive theologian, as the ‘poetics of testimony’ which is employed by the authors in a particular application. The interdisciplinary practice of poetics of testimony is proposed as an alternative discourse for both scholars and practitioners (psychologists, managers, chaplains) to employ when inquiring into the nature and processes of the sexual trauma experience in totalized institutions, particularly, but not exclusively, the armed forces. This discursive praxis provides space for survivors to narrate their own traumatic experiences including the processes which lead to traumatic experience, the nature of the trauma, and the post trauma experience. This type of engagement is important for not only understanding trauma in organizations, but for preventing and meaningfully responding to its occurrence.

Keywords:

• organization‐trauma
• military sexual trauma
• poetics of testimony
• workplace violence

Notes

1. Angela Hope is a captain in a US Army Reserve Civil Affairs unit, and has been in the service for over eight years. All of the material in this article comes from unclassified sources and the views expressed in this article reflect Angela’s personal scholarship.

2. Matthew Eriksen was a Professor of Management at the US Coast Guard Academy in the 2001–2002 and 2003–2006 academic years. During that time, he taught five directed studies on gender and leadership, wrote a number of articles, and did a number of presentations with female cadets concerning the experience of female cadets and officers in Coast Guard as well as about his and the female cadets’ attempts to change the gendered culture of the Coast Guard.

3. The term organization violations coined by Jeff Hearn and Wendy Parkin will be articulated fully later in the paper.

4. See http://www1.va.gov/wvhp/page.cfm?pg=20

5. Total institution refers to the closed, isolated nature of an organization which involves the total or attempted control of bodies in organizations (i.e., psychiatric hospitals, military, church). They have ideologies and cultures operating within strong physical and social barriers (Hearn and Parkin 2001).

6. Forms of insidious trauma is a topic for another article, but it should be acknowledged simply because trauma is often a discourse defined in reference to men’s experiences and from a position of privilege. For more see, Brown, Laura S., ‘Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1995) 100–12.

In this chapter, Laura S. Brown, a feminist clinical psychologist, clearly critiques and raises the limitations of the prevailing definition of trauma. She calls to attention the ways in which trauma is caused by the ‘constant presence and threat’ of ‘an assault on the integrity and safety of those who are not members of the dominant classes’.

7. The exception is an article entitled: How Organizations Should Respond to Rape in the Workplace by Lee and Kleiner in a practitioner journal entitled the Journal of Employment Counseling. While containing helpful information, it does not address the gendered nature of workplace violence and why violence is more common to occur against women (Lee and Kleiner 2003).

8. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, from 1992 to 1996, approximately 51,000 incidents of rape and sexual assault occurred in the workplace. Women are four times more likely than men to be murdered in an occupational setting. Many studies show that women seem to report more rates of victimization at work than men in many countries.

9. The authors find that sexualized workplaces, barracks, and drugs/alcohol were associated with increased odds of rape

10. We are suggesting the possibility that the organizational establishment can also be the unit of analysis and the perpetrator of organizational violations and violence.

11. What we mean by colonial rationality: reason manifests through rationalities as opposed to rationality. Colonial reason refers to the rationality that is privileged above others and deemed universal or generalizable in nature to all human experiences.

12. Practitionership refers in this essay to those practitioners who may come in contact with those who are survivors of sexual trauma such as psychologist, military supervisors and the military establishment, social workers, coworkers, military chaplains and nonmilitary ministers.

13. ‘The Ruling Relations are those real and abstract social forces that represent the translocal, the overarching institutional control in our lives. They are the interconnected organizations and institutions that govern and/or teach individuals to govern, to control and to reinforce the social rules and structures that influence and shape our lives. These are political structures, and management structures, corporations, and health institutions, but she also always includes those institutions of education and the academy where she and we also spend our time and energies.’ Quote taken from a paper reviewed by Angela. The authorship is unknown at this point because of anonymity in the reviewing process

14. When speaking in terms of sexual assault as a violation, veterans report sexual assault at significantly higher rates than civilian women. Additionally, surveys indicate that rates of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among female veterans and active duty members are higher than those found in national civilian surveys (Suris, Lind, Kashner, Borman, and Petty, 2004).