Expert Status and the Challenge to Maintain our own Voice

Marianne Winters is a leader in the movement to end and address sexualized and domestic violence and is passionate about progressive movements that are visionary, inclusive, current, responsive and proactive. Some would say that she’s “all over the place”. She prefers to say that she thrives on variety and is energized by the multi-faceted, never ending, interconnected and always exciting work of social change. She is the Project Diva for Graphix for Change and consultant and trainer for Praxis for Change.

I just googled the term sexual violence in the city where I live. Here’s the list of sites on page one. First, a link to the local sexual assault service provider, then a link to a training event that happened last year, next 3 defense attorneys giving advice to someone accused of sexual assault or domestic violence, and then some general business links to the local rape crisis center and some other law firms. Then I came across a listing of local newspaper articles on sexual assaults, then some links to law firms 90 miles from here and some national organizations.

Here’s the good thing about this list. If I were a victim of rape looking for help, I would have found the local hotline easily enough. Here’s the problem as I see it, putting on the hat of a sexual assault victim, while I would have found the local hotline, I would not have found any information that speaks to me in this moment. I easily found news and resources, yet I could not as easily find some of the key messages of safety, health, comfort and support. I don’t see any indication of what’s normal, what to expect, what to do. I can’t readily find out what will happen if I decide to call the hotline. Will I forced to report to the police? What are my options?

Then if I scroll through the entries, the problem gets worse. I find a YouTube video of a sex scene that is really a simulated rape. I find an entry in a website on college stories where a survivor of date rape shared her story and then received a long list of comments, some supportive, others victim blaming and abusive.

Here’s the challenge to those of us working in organizations addressing sexual violence. To the general public seeking basic information, our knowledge base is one of the best kept secrets on the internet. Search engines have certain rules. They find information based on their matrices that involve key words, phrases, and links to good information. Search engines don’t discern between survivor-centered and supportive messages and victim-blaming non-supportive messages.

We can meet this challenge by strategically building our expert status. We need to create the website pages, blog posts, articles, and links to the information that we know survivors need. We can do this by getting savvy about how the internet finds and prioritizes information and optimizing our own websites to respond.

We also need to realize that the internet which at first was a convenient place for organizations to post an electronic version of their brochures and reports, is now an interactive, changing, breathing thing. Many organizations are now catching up to this trend and they’re seeing results. By building websites that also become platforms for news and information, for discussion and trends, to help communities engage and connect, that attract donors and supporters, our work is more often coming up on the front page. Yes it changes things, it often requires changing job descriptions, workplans, updating skills, and increasing knowledge, but the payoff can be huge – survivors can more easily find you, donors can more readily support you, communities can more easily engage with you.

Here’s an example of an organization that adopted a more optimized format for their website presence. The Enough Abuse Campaign in Boston, Massachusetts seeks to engage people in the prevention of child sexual abuse. Their website includes interactive ways to get engaged, information about the issue as well as about the organization, a blog, compelling images, and  most important, reasons for people to keep returning.

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