 Hi everybody. I think I will turn it over to Becky Rogers, the president of the Family Law Society, to welcome us. Thank you, Professor Sack. Hello everyone and welcome to tonight's event. My name is Becky Rogers and I am president of the Family Law Society, and also vice president of the Women's Law Society. I would like to welcome you all on behalf of Family Law Society, Women's Law Society, and Criminal Law Society, who all helped cosponsor this event tonight. At the end of tonight's event, we will leave time to answer questions. So if you have questions, please put them in the Q&A rather than the chat, just so we don't miss your question and we'll be able to answer that at the end. I would like to now introduce our guests. We have our very own Professor Sack and Professor Turkheimer. Professor Emily Sack joined the Roger Williams University Law Faculty in 2001, where she teaches in the areas of criminal law, domestic violence law, women in the law, and feminist legal theory. She is the co-author of one of the leading domestic violence case books and has published several articles in the field. Prior to joining Roger Williams Law faculty, Professor Sack served as deputy director of the Center for Court Innovation where she helped develop and implement the first domestic violence courts in New York. She has also worked intensively with several jurisdictions in asserting and improving the response to domestic violence, including Louisville, Kentucky, Alaska, Portland, Maine, and Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Professor Sack previously practiced in areas of criminal defense and family law in New York City. She's a graduate of Swarthmore College in New York University School of Law. I would also like to introduce Professor Debra Turkheimer. Professor Debra Turkheimer is a class of 1940 research professor of law at Northwestern's Pritzker School of Law. She joined the Northwestern Law Faculty in 2014 after serving as professor at DePaul University College of Law since 2009 and the University of Maine School of Law since 2002. She teaches and writes in areas of criminal law, evidence, and feminist legal theory. Her book, Credible, Why We Doubt Accusers and Protective Users, was published in October of 2021. In 2014 Oxford University Press published her book, Flawed Convictions, Shaken Baby Syndrome, and the Intra of Injustice. She is the co-author of Casebook Feminist Jurisprudence, Cases and Materials, and the author of numerous articles of sexual violence and domestic violence. Professor Turkheimer received her undergrad degree from Harvard College and her JD from Yale. After clerking for Alaska Supreme Court Justice, J. Ribanowitz, she served for five years as an assistant district attorney in New York City and New York County District Attorney's Office, specialized in domestic violence prosecution. In 2015, Professor Turkheimer was elected to the American Law Institute, an esteemed group of judges, lawyers, and legal scholars dedicated to the development of the law. I would like to now turn it over to Professor Sack. Thank you. Thank you so much, Becky, and thank you everyone for coming. And of course, thank you Deb for being here. I'm really so excited to have you here. So I'm so excited to be here. I really appreciate the invitation and I'm honored to be in conversation with Professor Sack, who is truly a leading authority on domestic violence. So thank you. Well, thank you. So let's just get right into it. Your book focuses on something you call the credibility complex in the context of sexual abuse. And can you just explain for the audience what you mean by credibility complex? Yes, the credibility complex is a cluster of forces that shapes our assessment of credibility. And this is true unbeknownst to us. We often don't see these forces. They're hidden. They're often invisible. And the book is aimed at surfacing this cluster of forces. The credibility complex, I should say, is driven mostly by culture and by law. And so it really is a book about culture and law and the ways that culture and law lead us to often discount credibility unfairly to inflate credibility unfairly. And I can honestly say a lot more about each of those dynamics, but that's the basic idea. Yeah, and I think another important point is obviously this is gendered, but it's also intersectional in that it involves race, class and immigration status as well that can add to that discounting that you were just talking about. I think that another really insightful part of your book is what you call the three pronged explanation of credibility, because I think most of us think of credibility is just, you know, do we believe the person. So can you kind of talk about the three different prongs because I really found that really interesting. Yeah, and before I get there, I do want to say that a main point of the book is to see credibility as power, and to argue that credibility gets meted out along familiar axes of power. Wherever in our society, we see folks who are marginalized or vulnerable, we're more likely to see credibility discounting, and the opposite is true. So where we see status and authority, we're more likely to see credibility inflated or boosted. The greater the differential between, let's say, an accuser and an accused, the more likely that there's going to be a very steep disparity in how we assess credibility. So yes, gender is one really important dimension to be thinking about here, especially in the context of sexual abuse allegations, which is the subject of my book. And as you say, Emily, it is also really important to consider race and disability and sexual orientation and gender identity, immigration status, and so forth, right. All of these places where we see power in our society, meet it out unequally, we're also very likely to see credibility discounting and credibility inflation. So that's by way of background. To the question about what is credibility in the context of an allegation of abuse, we're really likely to focus on the first part of an allegation, which is this happened. And so when someone comes forward and accuses a person of sexual assault or sexual harassment, we realize that what they're saying is something happened. But there's more to credibility than just believing that something happened. We also have to believe that it was wrong. And that it matters. And those are what I think of as the three dimensions of credibility in this context. It happened. It was wrong, meaning the perpetrators to blame, not the victim. And it matters. We ought to care about this. If any one of those claims is dismissed, the entire allegation goes nowhere. And so, you know, these are different mechanisms of dismissal, but they're, they're functionally the same. They lead to nothing happening on the allegation. And we talked about it. We have talked before about it in the context of, say, Governor Cuomo, you know, first there were sort of like he would jump from these different prongs. So, you know, the first was it didn't happen. Then if there was a video or there was some, you know, credible, credible testimony about it, he would say it happened, but it was misunderstood. It wasn't blameworthy, as you said. I, you know, I kiss everybody, you know, that was sort of one of the things he said. And then the third thing was if it happened, and even if it was a little bit blameworthy, it was trivial. And by the way, you know, I'm too powerful a person for this to derail me. And, you know, of course, this issue comes up not just with famous powerful men, but it often also comes up with them. So, I mean, one of the things that we also just talked about recently was the fact that how durable this this battle about credibility is, and we saw this in the recent confirmation hearings for Judge Jackson, when senators brought up the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and I wonder because I thought your, your comments on that were really interesting. So if you want to talk about that, that would I think be great. Absolutely. Dr. Blasey Ford, and her testimony is is is one of the stories I tell in the book. And it's one of these credibility contests that sort of captured the popular imagination. Everyone had an opinion and, you know, for, for many folks, Dr. Ford seemed, you know, extremely credible others thought the opposite. So this is just one of many examples of how polarizing and divisive the issue of credibility can be particularly when a case is in the public spotlight. You know, but what one of the things that struck me at the time was how invested, you know, so many people seem to be in discrediting Dr. Ford on any one of any, any number of grounds. So maybe she was lying, but maybe she was just confused. And maybe she wasn't lying and she wasn't confused. But what she said didn't really amount to much. And you saw kind of variations on those themes in the public discourse around the hearings. And then, as you mentioned, it comes up even still today when, you know, senators who are, you know, kind of looking back on those older hearings bring up the allegations in a really dismissive light and, you know, cast them as being about something, you know, as, as trivial as minor as whether a justice likes beer. And so, you know, it's just interesting to see the staying power of something like Dr. Ford's allegation and the ways in which these very powerful forces converged, you know, to ensure that the allegation, you know, did not amount to anything it didn't go anywhere and of course you know Justice Kavanaugh was was indeed confirmed. And I think also, not just the endurance of those things but also the anger and the emotion and the investment behind them and, you know, whether it's people who are proxies for the accused person like some of these senators, but also the accused often try to make themselves into the victims. And, you know, we saw this in some even earlier set of hearings like with Clarence Thomas, we saw it of course with Brett Kavanaugh and can you explain what you think is sort of behind that feeling that they are the victims. I think some of it comes down to sort of entitlement and a sense of being owed something whether it's a seat on the Supreme Court or a continuing governorship. You know, and you can sort of look at the public figures as you mentioned, you know, most of the stories in my book are not about famous people but, you know, for for the sake of sort of, you know, being on the same page here I'm going to refer to some of the cases that are widely known. Many of these men who have been accused do occupy positions of great power and privilege. And, you know, for many who don't yet, there's a sense of promise there's a sense that that they are on a path that will lead to these, you know, various forms of success be they wealth or, or other kinds of power in our society. And so, you know, many of these cases I think come down to this, this entitlement, not only to act as one wishes in let's say a workplace, but then to escape consequences for it and to be able to move forward as if nothing happened or as if nothing important happened. We orient ourselves to the pain of the powerful in our society and so we're often loath to impose consequences on someone, if it means disrupting that trajectory, or that entitlement. Right. Your book also discuss discusses certain myths we have that affects our decisions about who is credible. And I just want to go through a couple of them with you. One is this stranger rape myth, and if you could sort of speak to what that is and why it's not accurate. So the paradigm that I think many people are familiar with of sexual assault is that it involves a stranger, maybe in a in an alley or some kind of dark place outside. There's often a weapon involved. There's often really serious physical injury. And that individual who's victimized reports immediately to the police on their physical findings and you know that's the kind of case that is most likely to to proceed through the criminal process. But you know as as we know that is not the typical sexual assault, it may seem that way, and it certainly maintains its its hold on our thinking. But in fact, most sexual assault is is committed by people known to one another by by acquaintances and it doesn't involve weapons and it doesn't involve serious physical injury. What matters about this stranger rape paradigm is that it shapes our thinking about victims and perpetrators. And so it gives rise to what I call the perfect victim archetype and the monster abuser archetype. And I can see more about what each of those archetypes look like, but that's how that's how we sort of rely on these misconceptions and myths I think we can trace a lot of this back to this this original paradigm of stranger rape. Yeah, I was going to ask you next about that other myth about the perfect victim. So maybe you could go into that further. Yeah, the perfect victim. You know we can think about the perfect victim in terms of of her I'll use gender pronouns I do want to of course recognize that men and non binary people can of course be be victims of sexual abuse, but the vast majority of victims do go by the gender pronouns she or her and so I'm going to use that here. The perfect victims behavior before the incident during the incident and after the incident are important for us to think about. So before the incident, she wouldn't have been drinking. She wouldn't have been dressed in any kind of a way that was seen as provocative. She wouldn't have willingly engaged in any kind of behavior with the person who turned out to be her attacker so there wouldn't have been any willingness to go back to his apartment and do anything whatsoever. And you know during the assault, she would fight back really really hard, and she would resist and she would scream and and and she maybe would flee, and then afterwards she would report immediately and she would cut off all contact. So those are some of the sort of that sort of the mythology around how victims behave. And of course when someone then falls short of those behaviors. She's seen as as less than credible, we have a harder time believing that it happened, or that it wasn't her fault, or that we ought to care about it right because it's seen as less serious if it doesn't resemble this sort of behavior of a perfect victim. And I think I'll just add real quickly is that, you know, many of these sort of requirements, these burdens that we place on victims to be perfect are actually baked into the law itself. I mentioned earlier that the credibility complex is driven by culture and by law. And I think it's, you know, important to sort of see the ways in which these cultural biases, and as I say burdens, find themselves into the law itself. Yeah, and I want to get to that in just a second. But also, you know, one thing that comes to mind when you were talking about that is because particularly like, say sexual harassment is often in these kind of power relationships in a work setting. And as an example, again, but of course this happens not just with famous people but you know with Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas. I remember at the time being a person just out of law school watching the hearings that there was this big thing about well why did you ask him for a reference. Why did you, you know, take his phone calls, etc. You know when if this were really true. So either you're lying, or it was trivial, etc. And I don't know if you have other thoughts about that but it seems. Absolutely and you know as recently as you know with the Harvey Weinstein prosecution. We were seeing some of these same themes come up in the cross examination of those victims and the prosecution I think smartly decided to present expert testimony. But it was designed to counter some of these misunderstandings about how victims actually behave. And as we all know that that case did end in a conviction but it's not, it's not that we've, as a society sort of transcended. You know what we saw with the, the Thomas Hill hearings not by a long shot where we're still working through a lot of these misunderstandings about again abuse and how victims react to it. Yeah, and I think also with the perfect victim myth. Again, as you've said in your book. I think that there's also a sense that we don't want to believe that sexual abuse is as pervasive as it is and so if we can kind of put it in a box of somebody who, you know we would be like that we would never act like that we would never be the victims. Again it sort of primes us to not believe victims who may not have been quote perfect, because you know if we had to believe them we'd have to believe a lot more about sexual abuse and maybe want to believe, you know. Right psychologists talk about the just world hypothesis, which is a way of understanding this protective mechanism by which we come to understand bad things in the world as resulting from bad decisions, or bad character. It's a protective mechanism because if we can, you know sort of convince ourselves that if we aren't bad, or if we don't make these bad decisions, then bad things will not befall us. The world feels like a much safer and more just place. And I think this absolutely can help us to understand some of the blaming impulses that that we see so pervasive in our society. So let's get into the this concept that you had you just mentioned about being baked into law. So, give us some examples of how you think this this discounting works legally. So both I talk about the criminal law but I also talk about sexual harassment law and because you know tonight our examples are focusing some on workplace harassment let me let me give a few examples from that area of law. Two, one is a requirement that in order to be actionable harassment rises to a very extreme level, such that is severe or pervasive in the language of the law. It falls short of that it cannot even reach a jury so you don't even, you don't even get to the sort of what happened did this happen question in a court of law, we can sort of get stuck on that doesn't matter and the answer is, it doesn't matter, unless it's horribly egregious, and I, you know, go on for pages and pages in the book because the cases are, in my view so appalling about the kind of workplace harassment that that that never even goes forward to to reach a tire effect it's dismissed beforehand. And so that's one example of where the law is making a very clear judgment about what matters and, more importantly, what doesn't matter. The other place that I that I think is interesting to think about is the laws requirement that the victim of harassment established that it was unwelcome. And so the presumption really is that this kind of behavior in the workplace is is welcome. And in order to establish that this this behavior actually was welcome there's so many types of evidence that come into court that I would think of as being very victim blaming types of evidence so what was she wearing, what kind of banter was she engaging and what did she do outside of the workplace that might be, you know, considered behavior that a certain type of person would engage in. And so this, you know, this welcome this unwelcome this inquiry is a place where you see a lot of blame shifting within law. It does seem to have analogies in criminal law and rape law with consent or lack of consent and there have been attempts in rape law to change the burden of proof on you know who has to prove consent or lack of consent. It doesn't seem like things are moving the same way in sexual harassment law in the sense that this unwelcome this standard has been around, you know, for, I don't know, decades and there doesn't seem to be a lot of movement in that area as far as I know. I mean, the contest in criminal law around how to define consent is is ongoing and I and I think that there's still a lot of work to be done, but it is true that the criminal law once formally incorporated a resistance requirement. And in other words, it required a victim to resist to the utmost of her ability or to resist in a way that was that looked like a physical fight. And that's no longer written into our laws. But there's still a force requirement in many states so non consent alone is is is not going to to make something sexual assault in many states about half you still need to have force as well. And then to your point about consent and how we define it, you know, there's still a verbal resistance requirement in most states that that define consent. And so affirmative consent which requires some demonstration of willingness. That's the standard we see on most college campuses now and it's a standard that most of my law students are really really familiar with. And I would have stunned to learn that that is in fact not not the law when it comes to the criminal law of sexual assault. Right. Another concept that you talk about in the book relating to victims is something called an anticipated credibility discount and so can you explain that phenomenon. Another thing that you talk about about sexual assault and sexual harassment is that the vast, vast majority of it is never reported. And I think that the credibility complex is a main reason why. So what happens is that survivors anticipate or expect that if they come forward their credibility will be discounted, and they might anticipate this because it's happened to them before. They anticipate it because they look around them and they see it all around them because it happens so often. And so it is a very rational decision I think to choose not to come forward because credibility discounting can be so devastating. And what I heard over and over again in the course of researching my book is that the experience of the credibility discount is as bad as or even worse than the abuse itself. And it turns out there's lots of psychological research that bears that out and lots of reasons for that. And so I think by by seeing the credibility discount as anticipated, we can better understand why we have this under reporting and to put it a little bit differently, if we can do better with the credibility discount and if we can dismantle the credibility complex that meets it out so frequently, we're likely to see more reporting. It's not to say that it's the reporting is going to be right for everyone, or that that reporting will be anything other than difficult for many people, but at least we eliminate that unfairness and at least we eliminate that added that added harm that is often described as a second assault. Yeah, and I think you also in the book talk about as you said it's sort of the site that sort of inner psychology what happens to victims is the sort of self blame and the self doubt so they feel not only will they not be believed but they start to not believe themselves in a certain sometimes. And I don't know if you want to talk further about that. I mean so I think of this, there's the anticipated discount and then there's the internalized discounting that goes on, and it goes on along each one of those three dimensions that we talked about earlier. It happened. It was wrong, it matters and how does that get internalized well, maybe it didn't happen, right, maybe, you know, maybe I misunderstood or, you know, maybe it wasn't really as bad as is it, maybe, maybe I'm thinking it was. And so there's a lot of sort of second guessing and self doubt that, you know, I hear when I talk to survivors and certainly, you know, therapists and psychologists will talk about when they're talking about this, you know, this problem. There's also, you know, shame and self blame, and a lot of questioning what did I do to bring this about, you know, was this maybe my fault or partly my fault and so that again is kind of internalizing that blame shifting. And then when it comes to, you know, to care, you know, I, what often happens is that a survivor will feel like it's not worth coming forward because it just wasn't serious enough it wasn't harmful enough it wasn't worth sort of triggering a cascade of consequences that maybe will will ensue and that it's better just to stay quiet. And another part of your book that I found really fascinating was this whole the whole the untested rape kits. And, you know, as many of us know there's just this incredible number of rape cases that were where victims have come forward and have gone through the process and yet law enforcement has not pursued those cases and I think you do a really, you know, excellent job of explaining that but you could tell us a little bit more about that. Yeah, thank you the backlog of rape kits I think is this really tangible evidence of how cases get dismissed before they ever get fully investigated. This is drawing in part on on research that's been done on these rape kits and really extensive interviews with the officers who shelved the kits. And it turns out that they were making really early credibility determinations that led them to believe the case was going to go nowhere. And so that the case went nowhere. So it's this idea that if you short circuit and investigation before you do your job as a law enforcement officer, you're, you're, you're dooming the case to failure. And that's a lot of what we see, sadly, in the law enforcement context. There's a story for about the harm that this causes victims, both internally, externally, etc. And, you know, you give, as you've mentioned, some really powerful narratives from survivors of abuse, and as you said a second and often organization is how they are treated by the system. What do you think that victims most want to address the kind of harm that they felt. What really varies from victim to victim. And one point that I really try to meet in the book is that there is no one size fits all approach to justice when it comes to sexual abuse and sexual violence. Many of the survivors I spoke to wanted there to be some criminal justice intervention, and maybe that looked like a conviction and maybe it looked like jail time. Some didn't want that at all. Some were interested in restorative justice, particularly on campus, that's something that appeals to many survivors. And some I think wanted in their own kind of inner circles and the people to whom they reported informally wanted that kind of vindication and validation that that is often elusive and that you know, to frequently, I think survivors come forward to those they trust most, and they don't get that kind of support and they don't get that kind of vindication and validation. And so, you know, that piece is one that each one of us has real control over because we are, I think, more and more receiving disclosures in our daily lives. And so part of the message of the book is that even if you aren't a law enforcement officer or a Title IX officer, you don't work in HR and your company. There are so many things that you can do when you hear about an allegation of abuse that actually can help set that survivor on the path toward healing. And I think it would be interesting for our audience, if you talked a little bit about what really led you to write the book and really why credibility became your focus you've worked obviously a lot in the criminal law sphere. How did you come to focus on that. I mean, I was thinking about credibility from the time I started practicing law because I was a prosecutor and I did handle these special victims cases where credibility is central. So it's kind of been on my mind from the beginning of my work as a lawyer. As a, you know, as a legal academic my scholarship has focused a lot on law reform and particularly rape law reform. But enforcement issues are always lurking underneath. You can have the best laws on the book, on the books that you could imagine. And yet if you don't have good enforcement of those laws, they're really not doing what they're designed to do. And enforcement in turn, you know, leads me to questions of how we assess credibility and not only how we evaluate the question of what happened, but also how we evaluate the question of whether it matters and whether something ought to happen as a result of this allegation. And so I think my in my writing, I was sort of drawn to turn squarely to this question of credibility. And then the last thing I'll say is that the, you know, the hashtag me to exploded several years ago. And, you know, we seem to be having this new ish conversation about abuse and I, and I was fascinated by the thought that we might be making progress in that there were more stories in circulation and survivors were feeling more empowered to tell these stories. But yet it didn't seem to me that we were necessarily getting better at it, at figuring out what to do with these stories, or at imposing any kind of meaningful accountability, particularly when it came to the most powerful men accused. And so I think that all of this was in the mix for me as I sat down to write the book. You know, when I teach women in the law, which I know you do as well and one of the things that came up in a class discussion was the backlash after me to that some of the students in my class for example reported that say a male employer would say, Well, I'm not going to, you know, give you this opportunity I mean they wouldn't phrase it that way but basically because I don't want to be accused of something, etc. And I just wondered if you had thoughts about, you know, you started to talk about the progress we're not sure if there's progress you know how you feel about things like that. Yeah, I hear some of the same concerns from my my students and you know the the notion that there would be fewer mentorship opportunities because the, you know, the maybe the men and the workforce were reluctant to sort of do what needed to be done. There's something, you know, I think self serving about about that rationale that you know to the extent it's given as a rationale for for staying away from mentoring. But I think the larger point that I would make is that there are powerful investments in the status quo. And this, you know this me to movement so to speak, if it's to have staying power is it is going to topple a lot of vested interests and so it should not surprise no one that that there is, you know what you might think of as a backlash or resistance to a real effort to take on, you know widespread sexual entitlement. And so you know this is part of this is part of the fight this is part of, I think what we're looking at as we look ahead and think about the, you know, the next iteration of this movement, I think we absolutely have to reckon with the ways in which, even well intentioned people I think maintain an attachment to familiar structures. And when we're talking about systemic change that can be deeply threatening. And that was going to be my next question, which was, you know how you know what is the path forward. I mean I don't want to put this all on you but you know just thought you thoughts that you might have on how we really couldn't make meaningful change in our culture and in the law. Yeah, I think you know I'll make clear that you know when I talk about credibility, discounting and credibility inflation. I'm really talking about about patterns right why sort of behaviors across swaths of society, I don't mean to suggest that, you know, in every case. This is sort of how it goes. I certainly don't want to suggest that every allegation, you know, ought to result in a in a sanction. But I, but I do think that these patterns should be noticed should be identified should be understood, and then we're in a position to do better. As I say, you know maybe one by one, each individually in our own lives. I think that, you know, it's not, it's not radical to suggest that these systems are populated by individuals. And so if we care about just to take one, the criminal process, then we need to care about the police officers and detectives who are working up cases with prosecutors the judges who are deciding evidentiary emotions and doing sentencing jurors, we're all we're all, you know, in this culture, we're all drinking from the same water, we're breathing the same air. And yes, there are subcultures and I don't mean to suggest that culture is a monolith. But I do think that if we want to sort of take on some of these institutions and systems, we have to, you know, look at the culture at large. And that's way too massive to take on in any way other than individual by individual. And so really the book is a call for each person who reads or, you know, each person who's listening to this conversation, you know, to think through how each one of us can be more fair and more just when we come to the task of judging credibility. Well, I would love to talk to you all day all night. But I see that our time is getting short and it's time to turn it over for we want to make sure there's time for questions. So let me turn it over and thank you, Deb. Let me let me turn it over to Alyssa Lynch, who is the president of the women's losses, sorry, criminal law society and Ali Rapetti who's going to be joining her and handling the questions who's the incoming president of the criminal law society. Fabulous. Hi everyone as Professor Sack said my name is Alyssa I'm president of the criminal law society. So we will just go ahead and jump into the q amp a. Again, if you have a question. Just go ahead and type that in the q amp a, and we're we hope to get to all of the questions. Okay, so first one is can you point out how credibility and gender based cases is often gender stereotypical. What should a judge tell a jury about how to judge credibility affirmatively, and how to avoid the inappropriate biases that play into credibility. The model jury instructions do an awful job of explaining credibility. Any. Are there any published good ones. I just want to add that I believe that's from one of our federal judges. Okay, I should, I really appreciate that question I've been thinking a lot about jury instructions and the, you know, the ways in which judges tell jurors to use their common sense. And of course, that when one of the main arguments of the book is that our common sense is faulty, and that when we rely on understandings of the world that are inaccurate, we're not going to do a particularly great job. When it comes to this task and I say we, I guess I mean jurors are not going to do a particularly good job when it comes to this task of judging credibility so I am absolutely in agreement with the with the with the questioner and this notion that, you know, simply talking about common sense and relying on your experiences is not especially helpful. Unfortunately, I haven't come across good instructions that are corrective I think that the ways in which prosecutors in sexual violence cases are trying to deal with it is by way of expert testimony. And so going about the correction of these misunderstandings in that way, obviously, you know, there's there's some that can be done in closing argument but I, I think it's really difficult when it comes to instructions, because of this insistence that you know common sense is is is all that jurors can bring to this. Okay, thank you. And let's see so the next question we have is how do you feel about defense attorneys whose job it is to essentially discredit victim stories and how that plays into the system. I am less. I think I'm less bothered by the fact that defense attorneys do this because within the confines of, you know, ethical dictates and their professional responsibilities, defense attorneys have an obligation to zealously represent their clients. What I think is worth noticing and worth critiquing is that these arguments still have traction, or that they're likely to be effective they're likely to sway the triers effect. That's what I think is is really the problem here because as soon as jurors stop responding to these kinds of arguments and to these insinuations about victim behavior and the like, you can bet that defense attorneys are going to stop, you know, making those arguments in court and stop doing that kind of cross examination so the problem I think goes beyond kind of what defense attorneys are doing. And to be clear, but there are ethical considerations there are evidentiary rules that constrain what defense attorneys can properly do in court so I don't want to suggest that I'm, you know, in support of some kind of a free for all. But again within those parameters defense attorneys are doing their job. And the, you know, the issue is that to do their job they're they're able to rely on these on these myths and on these blame shifting impulses. That's what I think needs to change. All right, I just want to apologize if you see me looking to the rights because I have another screen that's where I'm getting the questions from so I'm not looking away. Next one is from your research what do you think we can do to undo the implicit bias of the rape slash victim slash credibility culture we know today. Yeah, I mean I think that what what we can do is better educate ourselves and become better aware I think that, you know, a premise of any kind of implicit bias training is that surfacing some of these biases is at least a necessary first step toward eliminating them and I you know and I take that very seriously I think that we have no hope if we can't look in a clear eyed way at how in this context, the credibility complex is shaping our judgments without us even realizing it, that this isn't a problem, mostly of bad apples but this is people who are well intentioned who I'm going to presume want to do better and want to do right and I think that a lot of this is just happening in such hidden ways that at least you know my, my effort is to try to expose some of this. So our next question is conventional wisdom holds that restorative justice is inappropriate and sexual abuse or intimate violence cases. Do you share that view or does restorative justice have potential, particularly as an alternative to incarceration. Yeah, it's such an important question and I will confess that the restorative justice part of my book was, I think the hardest for me to write. I came at it with some fairly deep seated skepticism that this was, you know, the best way to handle, particularly as you say gender violence. And yet I was hearing from enough survivors that this was something that that was appealing and I as I delved into the research and and sort of sort of read about some of the success stories. I really wanted to present restorative justice in its most favorable light and to sort of put it forward as an alternative that for many survivors really is the best option. So, so the way that I kind of accommodated this impulse was to say restorative justice can be a great thing it takes the what happened part of this credibility assessment off the table it starts from the proposition that it happened. And it the offender is coming at the process willing to accept responsibility for what he did, or what she did. And, and then the question becomes how to restore the victim and bringing the community along in that process and. And so this idea that validation and vindication are hugely important to most survivors, you can see why a restorative justice process would, you know, would be would be appealing that it would be a comfort to be able to start from an acceptance of responsibility and an apology and then to move on to what it takes to kind of repair that harm. So I tell a story in the book about a high school student who came away from restorative justice process really empowered. And I explain why I think that that happened and what worked in that case. At the same time, I include the voices of people who don't want restorative justice and who are who are skeptical that it can provide the kind of systemic response the kind of real accountability meaningful accountability that they are seeking. And I think that it's important to include these multiple perspectives. And really, it really doesn't feel to me like I'm the one to weigh in on whether this is good or it's not good. I think it should be available if done well to those who want it. And I think we should also recognize that it's, it's not for everyone, and it really has to be done well because if it's not done well it replicates existing power and balances and hierarchies in in ways that will absolutely work to the detriment of victims. So in your book you interviewed a lot of survivors and quoted from them extensively. Why was it important to you to include these narratives. I really wanted to center survivors and to center their voices to center their experiences. I, I set out to identify patterns and common themes. I wanted to do that without flattening anyone's experience or suggesting that these were all the same. And I think that my way of kind of reconciling these competing demands was to, as you know as the question suggests to include a lot of the words of survivors in the book. In your view, what are the best ways to combat the deep seated myths that affect law enforcement's treatment of survivors. Well, I think that one promising avenue is, is, is to do training around trauma informed interviewing and investigation, which is something that some departments around the country are doing and doing well. And that's a place where I think that there is a real need for education, and there's some research that suggests that law enforcement officers are very open to the teachings about trauma and that it actually can significantly change the way these people are approaching their work. So I think that's one place that I would point to where where you could actually see some, some real progress is to, you know, to sort of teach officers about trauma and its effects and how incorporating an understanding of trauma can can change the work that they're doing. Okay, it looks like this is the last one that's posted so far so if anybody else has any additional questions please feel free to go ahead and post those in the q&a. So how do you think and I guess I'm going to add a little bit. Do you think that prosecutors and defense attorneys can work together better to bring justice to victims or do you think that like it's more one side needs to work harder to bring justice to victims or you know I think prosecutors and police. There's improvement to be made on both fronts and on all fronts I mean I think when I'm looking just at the criminal process you know I think that at every stage along the way. We can do better police can do better prosecutors can do better, which is not to suggest that there aren't you know police officers and prosecutors doing you know wonderful jobs when it comes to their cases of course there are, but in the aggregate I think that you know that these systems need improvement and you know there are plenty of horror stories, you can pick up the papers and read them but certainly in my book there are plenty of horror stories of survivors who were mistreated horribly by by police and by prosecutors. And there are some whose cases got all the way to the jury and then at that stage you know that things things went south so there you know there's a lot of work to be done across these across these systems and within them. A quick question, if that's okay. Because I know this has come up a lot with people who have read your book which is what do you think about the specific situation of child sexual abuse, and believing children, and some of the issues that come with that. In terms of, you know the memories issue and all that stuff and I just wondered if you had thoughts about if you had any different way to focus on or frame children and their role as victims. My in my book, you know very deliberately looks at teenagers and adults and and doesn't look at child sexual abuse, except to the extent that many of the survivors I spoke to several are also abused when they were children, and the research suggests that child sexual abuse is a risk factor for later abuse as in adulthood. But so those are the places where my, my book sort of touches on childhood sexual abuse. I don't, I don't in the book, talk about sort of repress memories and I think that that's a really complicated question on and one that I would need to do more research on before I felt like I could intelligently answer the question. So one more. In your opinion what do you think can be done to bring the backlog of rape kits as current as possible. I mean so there's you know they're funding funding questions and you know some efforts to actually fund the backlog and that's something that seems to be actually fairly successful is actually getting money targeted to this so you know we can applaud those efforts. I think if I'm you know pulling back even more. I'm tracing the backlog of rape kits to this tendency on the part of law enforcement officers to do credibility discounting. In the early stages of an investigation and that's kind of the, you know that's the larger piece that I think I would like to see fall into place we can address the backlog and we should. But if we don't do something to sort of improve the law enforcement response to sexual violence, there will be a backlog in 10 years because these cases will continue to be, you know dismissed at early stages and these rape kits will continue to be closed so you know there's a shorter term solution and then there's a longer term solution. Okay well, I think that concludes the q amp a portion but I just want to thank you so much for being willing to speak with us all and for the hard work that you do and the super important work that you do. I thoroughly enjoyed having you, and I will now turn it back over to Becky. Thank you, Alyssa I appreciate that very much. Alyssa and thank you Professor sack and Professor Tarkheimer for coming. I know the Roger Williams students really appreciate having people to come and talk about this subject. So also thank you everyone who attended family law women's law and criminal law society all appreciate it, and have a good night. Thank you everyone. Thank you. Thank you.