Geoffrey W. Sutton PhD, Psychology and Culture

The Psychological Mechanisms that Lead Institutions to Side with Abusers Organizations often respond to allegations of abuse with surprising defensiveness, offering protection to powerful insiders while showing little compassion for the people who report harm. This pattern appears across sectors—politics, religion, business—and raises a difficult question: why do groups so often rally around the accused rather than support the victim? Consider three familiar scenarios: A political aide reports sexual abuse by a well liked male politician. Party leaders quickly close ranks, defending him publicly while circulating stories that cast doubt on her credibility. A charismatic megachurch pastor engages in a six month sexual relationship with a woman who sought him out for pastoral care. When she later names the experience as abuse, the church board emphasizes his community impact and stands firmly behind him. An employee tells a board member that the CEO misrepresented salary and benefits dur...

  How Experienced Clergy Consider Offense and Age In Decisions About Restoring Clergy to Ministry Following Clergy-Congregant Sex In my previous post ( March 30 ), I looked at the background to the study of clergy sexual abuse along with some of the data available at the time. In this post, I summarise the results of an experiment that looked at factors clergy might consider in restoring a pastor following a sexual offense. My colleague and I chose to study a sexual offense because of the widespread damage it causes to the victims, their families, the congregation, the faith, and the pastor. How bad is the problem?      We found some relevant studies not included in the previous article. Pastors who were victims of childhood sexual abuse were more likely to violate a sexual boundary with a congregant (Hadman-Cromwell, 1991). We couldn’t find a lot about clergy-congregant sex and boundaries at the time. So, we turned to the helping professions. The ethical...

Tweeden's report of her long felt anger in the face of a revealing photo of sexual harassment by Al Franken makes big news for several reasons. We know sexual harassment knows no political boundaries. It's not just a problem for conservatives who have been under fire. But now there is evidence of a Democrat's sexual assault-- plus a photo and an apology. Leeann Tweeden says she accepted Franken's apology, which adds to the complexity of how to handle sexual harassment in society. Sexual harassment is wrong. No one of a sound mind denies the obvious. Different groups concerned about people who are accused of sexual harassment handle reports differently. This difference raises the issue of what consequences should apply to Franken and others when there is evidence of harassment. Voters will judge when they have an opportunity regardless of what any official administrative group (ethics panels etc.) decides. So, politicians have consequences of a different sort t...

I changed the channel from the struggling Mizzou to CNN whilst waiting for my wife to join me in plans to watch something entertaining on Netflix. The talking heads were reviewing the latest Weinstein sex scandal allegations. Just seeing the pictures of famous women across the screen has an effect. One man with power can influence so many lives. We saw this before when Cosby was in the news. We've seen stories on college campuses and reports of clergy abuse. One attorney is tuned in to the psychological trauma. "I heard (attorney) Gloria Allred say the other day on CNN: 'Sexual harassment harms people,'" said Kendall. "And it's true. It does. Your body remembers the trauma. Your heart remembers the trauma. It changes you and makes you make decisions about life, like, I'm going to go in another direction. You don't know the harm it can do." ( US News ) Beyond the Film Industry The talk about what to do in the film industry is...