The reason I'm flagging this as NSFW is because of the exact subject matter I'm skipping out on. Once a year we have this huge all-staff meeting to go over the most mundane shit you can imagine. 8-3 going over policies and procedures then throwing in some random other “training” to pad out the time (this year its on homelessness. Not a bad thing to talk about. We live in a city that regularly drops below 0 degrees (f) throughout the winter and it's fantastic that they're going to have a group of people who get paid shit start feeling guilty for not giving to the homeless, but I digress).
One of our bosses/presenters is taking on the responsibility of talking about sexual abuse prevention. We work with vulnerable adults, so this is a very important thing to be aware off and to look for signs of. Thing is, this same presenter did it last year and she has no idea what she's really talking about. She runs our arts program and really focuses on drama so….she's a high school drama kid in a 30-40 year old's body. She thinks she knows everything and really LOVES presenting because she's in the center of attention. She has also never experienced sexual assault or abuse. She has no concept of how hard it is to deal with that and how carefully you have to navigate the conversation around it with a victim and last year things got heated when I tried to call her out. Long story short for that one, she was implying that we should nudge the client to take it to court, even after going over the statistics of how unlikely a perpetrator is to go to prison when their victim is a vulnerable adult. She even full on said “I haven't been un that situation but I think it would give me closure to put them away. It would make sure they can't hurt anyone else.”
What I told her, in front of the group, which I think pissed her off, but it had to be said, is that you can't tell someone how to deal with the aftermath of their assault. I don't care if they're “vulnerable” or not, you don't take that choice away. I speak as a survivor who was taken advantage of when I was 19 and living alone, we've already had a choice taken away from us once, we don't need someone who doesn't know what we're going through try to take away another one. She decided to take that as me saying we shouldn't report it and repeated 4 times over that we're mandated reporters and have to. I repeated 4 times over that that was clearly NOT what I was saying. She got really annoyed because I refused to back down and let her misinterpret me in possibly the most bad faith way possible.
Anyway, we have another all-staff next Friday and she gets an hour and 45 minutes to talk about this shit and I'm not sitting around for it. We're having a taco bar for lunch so I'm going to pretend it gave me an upset stomach so I can leave. I wish there was a way I could confront this while thing more directly without worrying about retaliation. There's nothing wrong with someone who hadn't had to have the horrible experience of being taken advantage of, manipulated, assaulted, or abused doing this kind of training, but it shouldn't be done by someone who runs their mouth and likes to think they have the answer to everything. Especially on a topic that has no clear right or wrong answer.
If you're going to have inclusivity training it should be done by a minority. If you're going to have SA prevention and response training it should be done by a survivor. And yes, this pretty cis het white woman also did the gender and sexuality training last year.