A Conversation with RAINN | BONUS | Saskia’s Story

Host Andrea Gunning sits down with Jennifer Simmons Kaleba, the VP of Communications at the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network. They discuss Betrayal’s approach to working with survivors and telling stories about trauma.  

Content warning for discussions of rape, child sexual abuse, and child sexual abuse material. 

If you would like to share your story, you can reach out to the Betrayal Team by emailing them at [e-mail] and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts.

Follow our newsletter and join the Betrayal community at betrayal.substack.com. For resources on sexual violence, visit rainn.org/betrayal.

You can also get free, confidential, 24/7 support through RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline. Just text HOPE to 64673 or call 1-800-656-HOPE.

Every state has a domestic violence coalition, and many counties also have resources available. If you’re looking for help, go onto your county’s website to see what resources are available locally, or search the web for your state’s domestic violence coalition. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal. Today we have
another bonus episode on our show. We tackle sensitive topics
from rape and child sexual abuse to financial fraud and
identity theft. We handle this work with a lot of care,
using trauma informed interviewing techniques, consulting mental health experts, and

(00:30):
communicating with our subjects in every step of production. But
we're always trying to do better and to evolve as
our culture evolves. That's why last year we reached out
to RAIN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. Throughout
season five, they've been advising us on ways to approach
our work with survivors. Recently, I sat down with Jennifer

(00:50):
Simmons Kaliba. She's rain's vice president of Communications. I wanted
to share a bit of our conversation with you and
to give you a look into the kinds of conversations
we're all having a Betrayal I hope you enjoy. Can
you tell us a little bit about yourself and your
position at RAIN and what RAIN is.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
RAIN is the nation's largest anti sexual violence organization. I'm
the vice president of Communications, so my role is to
ensure that people are more aware and educated about what
sexual violence is. And the work that I get to
do is make sure that more people understand that the
resources are there, that they are not alone, and that

(01:34):
if you or somebody in your life is experience sexual violence,
that you have people to turn to.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
How would you define Rain's role in working with Betrayal.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
So, one of the things that RAIN does is we
work with entertainment companies and studios and producers to insert
and establish responsible and relevant storytelling in the jarny of
making people more aware through storytelling about sexual violence. So
we worked with you guys. We did a responsible storytelling

(02:07):
training session with you. We've worked with you when it
comes to interviewing survivors during season five of Betrayal, and
it's just been such a pleasure to be able to
be a part of both the education and also the
advancement of this responsible storytelling that you guys are doing
a Betrayal.

Speaker 1 (02:24):
You know, when I look back on the canon of Betrayal,
there are certain things that our team would probably write
differently today. I'm curious from your point of view, when
you look back on a body of work that still
survives and exists in the world and is there for
people to meet it at any given time. What type

(02:44):
of obligation do creators and writers have to address that
work if it's outdated culturally with language like what do
you feel is the obligation of those producers and creators.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
It's a really interesting question, particularly for something that you
put out into the world and then still have some
measure of control over. You produce a movie or a film,
you produce a book, and it goes out there, and
the level of effort that it would take to recut, redo,
republish all of that is a challenge. But for serialized

(03:17):
shows like yours, the question of going back and looking
at the things that you wish you had done differently
is a really valid one. And I think what I
hope people who are creating this kind of content do
is that they give themselves a degree of grace for
what they knew at the time and for the best

(03:40):
that they were doing at a time, and that if
they get it really wrong, that they have some sort
of clear discussion or apology or hey, that really was
not what I wanted to do, and then they move
forward and change the behavior, and then they change how
they approach, because that's really the measure, and that's really

(04:00):
where the learning happens.

Speaker 1 (04:03):
Yeah. I think one of the places that we often
struggle with is the language around victim and survivor. And
I'm curious if there is like a hard and fast
rule for you in terms of that language.

Speaker 3 (04:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
The hard and fast rule is it's what the person
wants to be called and respecting that and respecting what
it means to them. And then the idea that if
you get it wrong, you say that somebody is something
that they don't feel they want to be, you change it,
you say you're sorry, you change it.

Speaker 1 (04:39):
It's interesting because we tell stories over ten episodes, and
in those ten episodes where we're talking about one person's story,
it's one person's journey, so episode to episode, they can
be in a different place in relation to what happened
to them, and that language can be tricky to know.

(05:01):
And I think you're validating something for me, which is
having constant conversations with our storytellers to feel like, at
this point in the story, how would you identify it?
You know? Yeah, but also holding in consideration where the
audience is meeting this person in this journey too. So
for season two of Betrayal, I remember a big discussion

(05:23):
was does our audience know what c SAM is and
does our audience know why we can't say what people
would colloquially say that material is curious what your thoughts
are even just saying it as a manner of explaining
and showing why we're not going that route, like how

(05:45):
how do you feel about that?

Speaker 2 (05:47):
We talked about this with media training a lot. So
I'm going to say the words that people will say.
So you're going to say kitty porn, that's what ces.
It's kitty porn. No no, no no. But when you
say child's sexual abuse material, for the person who has
no connection, they have no idea what that actually means.

(06:09):
But you know that that person, if they knew what
it meant, they'd be like, oh my god, that's horrible.
So like explaining and breaking down why the sentence doesn't work,
but acknowledging that people may need to see that to
make that next connection is important and that's something that
in the media people are now getting really comfortable with.

(06:32):
But if we go back to the beginnings of RAIN
in the nineties, when we were trying to get people
to recognize that this issue was important, networks weren't saying
rape on TV, right, and it's so important, So you know,
euphemisms around rape as a storytelling device because you couldn't

(06:54):
say the words like so, how important is it to
be able to say, you know all these all these
kind of work around phrases, what you're actually talking about
is rape. And that's actually something I saw with Saskia
a season and it struck me. One of her friends
saw the videos and instantly the words that came out

(07:14):
of her mouth were She's being raped. There was no hesitation,
no working around it. No, her husband is doing something
terrible to nothing, she was raped. That is progress. You
go from not talking about rape, not saying the word
rape thirty some odd years ago, to a everyday individual
who is looking at something happening through the lens to

(07:37):
a intimate partner violence and naming it, naming it immediately.
That's the kind of progress we're talking about.

Speaker 1 (07:44):
Then, my producer Caitlin chimed in.

Speaker 3 (07:47):
In season three, we were telling the story from the
perspective of both Stacy and Tyler, Tyler being a child
victim of sexual abuse and Stacy being a mother who
had her life absolutely torn apart by what her husband

(08:09):
did to her Son. I think as a show we've
changed our approach a little bit in how we've learned
to balance the perspectives of multiple victims without getting into
that comparative trauma piece. And I also think as creators
we struggle with, well, are there ways we could have
done even better as storytellers and doing right by the

(08:32):
victim of child abuse? So, at Rain, when you think
about that issue of how do you tell stories from
the perspectives of multiple victims, what are some of the
strategies that come to mind.

Speaker 2 (08:44):
To the point of comparative trauma in any kind of storytelling.
I think about it as a handful of different size
rocks that you throw into water. No matter the size
of the rock, there is a ripple, But every single
person is the same of their own ripple. Every single
person is feeling a impact, feeling a ramification, an emotion.

(09:10):
They're all coming to it from their own center of
the story. And as long as we acknowledge that everybody's
ripples matter to that person at the center of them,
then we can stop comparing the trauma of other people
and then just start thinking about the individual humans involved.

Speaker 1 (09:30):
To me, it's not a zero sum their space for
every version of this conversation, and that's something that we're
often discussing. You know, I knew that the way that
Stacey and Teason three, the way that she talked about
her ex husband, would be really difficult for people to hear.

(09:51):
But I also knew that there were people who were
alone in bed in the middle of the night, staring
at their ceiling thinking, I just wish my life could
go back to before times, before the knowing, before everything
came apart, was.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
The version of my life where I didn't have to
be wrestling with all of these terrible thoughts and feelings.
And Yeah, the purpose of all of these different viewpoints
is really what do you want people in the end
to be able to connect to?

Speaker 1 (10:24):
The clarity for me is purpose is just doing it intentionally?
What is the purpose? If one person feels less a
long by listening to this, we've done our job because
that was the intention going into the project. Yeah, well,
thank you for everything that you do, and thank you
for everything that Rain does and contributes, and thank you
for contributing to Betrayal