Transcript

Josie Pickens 

Welcome back to The upEND Podcast, where we’re reimagining safety, care, and community beyond punishment and policing. Today, we’re in conversation with journalist and author Roxanna Asgarian, whose essay in our Reclaiming Safety series takes on one of the most difficult and often silenced issues, child sexual abuse. 

Roxanna’s work asked us to look closely at how our systems feel survivors and how communities might respond differently with empathy, accountability, and the radical belief that everyone is capable of transformation.

Jaison Oliver

Roxanna Asgarian is a Texas-based journalist and author whose reporting on family policing and child welfare has reshaped national conversations about safety and justice. Her debut book, We Were Once a Family, which you can see right here, we’re fans, earned the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Carnegie Medal for excellence in nonfiction.

Roxanna’s work has appeared in the Washington Post, Texas Monthly, and New York Magazine. She continues to amplify the voices of survivors through storytelling and investigative journalism. Welcome, Roxanna. Thanks for joining us.

Roxanna Asgarian 

Thanks for having me.

Josie Pickens 

We’re excited to have you here. We feel like you’re a friend of upEND, and we are definitely fans of yours, as Jaison said, and we’d like to begin talking about how you came to this work. So, if you can tell our listeners who may be meeting you for the first time a bit about your background, both as a journalist and as a survivor of harm, and how that shaped your commitment to writing about these issues and advocating for family policing abolition.

Roxanna Asgarian 

Yeah, it’s kind of a two-part thing, I would say. You know, I went to grad school for journalism, and right after that, I started reporting on the juvenile criminal legal system. And I kind of fell into that. And then I started doing breaking news reporting, which is a lot of violence, essentially. Basically, seeing people right in the moment where something bad just happened to them or someone they love. So yeah, think there were, I just kind of got started on a path where I was thinking a lot about kids and a lot about violence. As I kind of followed that trail, I started realizing that I was drawn to this work, and I started asking myself questions about why that was, why I felt so called to really talk to you and report on kids who are surviving harm. And I grew up in Las Vegas, and I had a pretty unstable childhood. My parents, after they separated, weren’t really around very much. And my friends and I were kind of on our own in a lot of ways. So we were encountering and dealing with situations that were outside of our developmental ability to really handle. During that time, I experienced sexual violence and never really processed it because…

It’s hard to process, and you want to move forward, and you don’t want to really think about that stuff. And so I think that doing this work actually brought that stuff up for me in a way to kind of look at the process and deal with it. And I think in that, going through that process is what brought me to abolition because I was both looking at all the harms of the system, like day in and day out in my work. And I was thinking back to the things that had happened to me and what I wished that I had that I didn’t have to help me get through it. I thought a lot about how every survivor is different, and they want different things, but I never felt like I needed the person who harmed me to be punished. I just really thought like, and there was no really way to talk through what had happened to me without causing this big punishment, this big, that I knew was going to be really, going to blow up my life essentially. Right. So, I think that has all led me down the path of thinking about other ways to handle harm against children. Yeah, long answer.

Jaison Oliver

No, no, but an important one because these, we treat this as if we need to target and severely punish these people, these monsters that we have, and as if these are isolated incidents that are completely dealing with strangers.

But it’s far more common and more prevalent than we really acknowledge, at least in the ways that we approach addressing these issues. Your essay in UPN’s Reclaiming Safety series really talks about that and opens with Trish’s story, who, for people who haven’t yet read it, is a survivor who experienced sexual abuse both at home and in the foster system.

What about her story captures the failures of the child welfare and carceral systems? And what made you want to write about this through an abolitionist lens?

Roxanna Asgarian

Trish was someone whom I interviewed in my very first story about foster care. So she was a really important person. Her story really impacted me and actually really made me realize that I had to do a lot more work in the space because the harm she experienced was so intense and repeated, also like the complete lack of support that she got in handling and dealing with the stuff that she went through. Ultimately, Trish was bounced around in 10 foster homes, at least something like that, shelters, and treatment centers. And then when she aged out, she had no one, no support, nothing. And she was essentially unhoused and ultimately ended right back up in her family home with the person who had harmed her initially. And that just really stuck with me because it was like, what did we do for Trish? Like, what did we do for her? We essentially re-traumatized her, added to her trauma history, and then did not give her any of the tools to move forward. And I think that it stuck with me all these years because it showed that what we think about people outside of the system, who maybe don’t interact with it, you have an idea of what the system does. And I find that the people who do have experience with the system really don’t see, really know that that’s not what happens, right? And so Trish was one of the first people that I interviewed, where I was like, wait a second, this isn’t anything like the way that we are told that it is.

Josie Pickens

Yeah, you’re right. In telling Trisha’s story and throughout this essay about these cycles of harm and cycles of abuse, you also write that our culture has built real and imagined monsters to justify punishment, right? How does this narrative shape how we respond to sexual abuse, and what harm does it cause to survivors?

Roxanna Asgarian

As Jaison was saying, like, we think that this issue is something that just happens to other people, right? We all know about the idea of child sexual abuse, but we think it is something…

I think that people talk about it with a lot of pity, right? If they talk about it at all, a lot of people don’t talk about it and feel uncomfortable bringing it up. And I think it’s really, really important to look at the stats, right? About just how common it is. because it is so common. It’s so common. And I think the reason why I like to talk about my experience is that it helps to know that lots of people experience it.  When I was young, I thought of it as like, “This is just happening to me.” And even something like I messed up somehow so that it happened to me, right? Like, I really thought of it very individually.

And I think that because no one talks about it and because we have this very way that we think about it, or at least in the public consciousness, is that there are these shadowy bad men, right? Like hiding and going to follow you home and ask like, like there’s this idea of this monster, this person who, you know, is sexually aroused by small children that is very far removed from the reality of most child sexual abuse, which is occurring largely in families and is also just a lot more the fact that it’s so common, right? And we look around, and we know a lot of people whether or not we speak about it. We know people who have experienced both the harm and have perpetrated the harm, right? We know that happens. And so the idea of the monster is a way I think that we can shift out of actually dealing with the actual harm, the real complicated situations that come up amongst family members, amongst people in our communities that have power that we don’t necessarily want to stand up against.

Or I think these big cases, like Jerry Sandusky, right? Like these things, they’re all over; they’re splashed everywhere.

But like, what that really shows is just how many people knew and felt weird about pushing up against it, right? I think a lot of child sexual harm happens, and people know about it, right? And kind of like there’s a lot of victim blaming, there’s a lot of weird adultification of children, especially girl children and Black girl children, that makes it sound like what’s happening is not sexual abuse. And I think the way we talk about it confuses the issue and makes so many people who have been harmed not even understand how to own or acknowledge the harm that’s happened to them.

Jaison Oliver

Yeah, you’re getting at a point about agency, right? And like the ways that everybody in this process gets dehumanized, not just the harm-doer or perpetrator, but also the survivor gets dehumanized in this. And what they want or what they believe isn’t really a factor in how this ends up playing out.

Many survivors in your essay say they want to be believed and listened to and to have choices, right? Just a broader array of options to pull from. To not have to, like Trish had to, just go back to the home with a family member who harmed her because she didn’t really have any other choice after aging out of the system.

Why is survivor agency such an essential part of safety here? What might it look like in practice?

Roxanna Asgarian

I think it is absolutely crucial, and it’s something that very rarely actually comes up when we’re talking about child sexual abuse and child sexual harm. The agency of a survivor. I think everyone’s agency is important. Because we’re all human beings and we all deserve dignity and autonomy over our bodies. But I think for survivors, that autonomy has been violated, right? That agency has been violated. And so to have your agency denied when it comes to your own trauma is incredibly re-traumatizing. It’s compounding the harm. And I think for a lot of the survivors I spoke with, for this story and throughout my career, because it would come up a lot even when I’m not necessarily reporting on child sexual abuse. A lot of people have these experiences. And I think…something that a lot of people said that has stuck with me is that the abuse was terrible, but the reaction from their family members was, in some ways, worse because it felt like a betrayal to them, and it made them feel ashamed. A lot of survivors have experiences of not being believed and or being blamed. They say that it makes it feel like it was their fault. And I think that that is a very common reaction. And it essentially says, “What happened to you doesn’t matter.”

But also like my bond, like if you have a bond with a family member. If your mom doesn’t believe you, like if anyone, your mom doesn’t believe you, that is a whole other core wound in your life and its own unfolding that comes from it.

And I think that the other option, the other reaction that a lot of people experience, is that they are believed, but they’re kind of eclipsed by the process. So the parent who is told or the person who’s told gets really angry and wants to react with violence, or they call the police, and then all of a sudden, nobody has any power to influence how things turn out because the protocol is the protocol and the cops are after what they are after.

The whole process of prosecuting someone is incredibly traumatizing again for the survivor who’s experienced it. Everyone’s talking about it, everyone knows about it. I had a girl, one of my sources, who was in high school, and somebody that she knew told a bunch of people. So that means everyone at school knows, and it becomes this defining thing about you. And I think like, I think back to my experience, and I thought like, that’s what I don’t want to happen, right? I’d rather nobody knows than everybody knows, and it being this thing hanging over me. Right?

And I think that the agency piece is like… we have mandated reporting. So it’s very hard to even talk about it, even with someone who wants to be supportive and helpful. Say you want to tell your counselor, and you want to tell your therapist; they are required to report it. And if you’re not ready and you know that that would happen, a lot of young people disclose to their friends, disclose to other young people, other minors. I did that, you know, like, and thankfully, I had people that I could disclose to and who I could at least talk through it with. Because otherwise, what’s happening? You’re just holding it on your own, you know?

Jaison Oliver

Right.

Josie Pickens

Yeah, and you’re continuing to talk about these cycles of harm. The harm in the experience with sexual abuse, sexual violence, and harm that comes after in so many different ways, as you just demonstrated through this storytelling.

Can we discuss how shame, secrecy, and silence feed intergenerational cycles of harm? Like, what have you learned from survivors about how those cycles can be broken, especially within families?

Roxanna Asgarian

Shame is such a huge piece of this, and it’s huge for everyone, all of the people involved. It’s one of the major things that people who are survivors have to work through, but also the person who did the harm, they are thinking, “If anyone knew this about me, they would think I am a monster.”

Josie Pickens

Right. Often, people who are perpetrating harm have also experienced harm. And so there is another cycle of shame and harm that goes into that.

Roxanna Asgarian

So there’s shame, for sure.

Totally, totally. I think that shame is a corrosive thing, and it eats away at your self-image. And I particularly think that for men who have this so much around masculinity kind of foisted on them, the shame of surviving sexual abuse is really acute. And also that, because of that, because of that idea of masculinity being so threatened or feeling so important to maintain or something, definitely contributes to being, and in my piece, I talked to a survivor who was also a person who became someone who did harm to another person. He talked through that with me, and he talked through needing to prove that he was like manly contributing to the things that he did, which then gave him more shame.

And then what do you do with that? And I think his response, his way of coming to healing, finding compassion, finding someone who could hear and hold the things that he had done and the things that had been done to him without shaming him. He said, “That transformed me. That was where I became transformed.” And so that’s what they’re doing over there in St. Louis. He has his organization doing this work, just sitting with everybody involved.

Because so many people have, when we think about one in four girls being survivors and one in six boys being survivors. And then we think about the people who harm them. And then we think about the people who love them, right? Maybe their other parent, their sibling. How many people have been touched by child sexual abuse? Like, how many people have been impacted? And because we don’t talk about it because everyone has shame around it.

If we knew all of that stuff, think about how many direct links we could make through the generations of harm. Do you know what I’m saying? And that’s something that, when you have the goggles on, you can see it. I feel that way. I think because I’m a person who is a public survivor, people feel comfortable talking to me about it. But I definitely think it impacts society so much, you know? And that shame piece is basically the weapon of that, which really makes this intergenerational and continual.

Jaison Oliver

I’m glad you brought up the man in the essay who could speak to this from multiple angles of someone who has done harm but also experienced that harm. And you talk about the transformation that he’s been able to experience in community. And in the essay, you highlight examples like the Freedom Community Center and Hidden Water Healing Circles, these spaces where survivors, harm doers, and families engage in accountability and healing outside of state systems. What lessons can we draw from these models about building community-led responses to child sexual abuse in a time where we are not having productive conversations about it, if we’re having conversations about it at all?

Roxanna Asgarian

Hidden Waters, that model was really interesting to me because it’s essentially support groups. And they separate the support groups by where you’re sitting in relation to the harm. So the people who have done harm are in a group with other people who have done harm only. And it’s not like the group is led by a therapist or, you know, a paid person. So this is more like a kind of like an AA model, you could say. And then the survivors have their own group, and then they call it bystander parents, but the parents who want to be supportive might be in a situation where their partner has done the harm, and so they’re kind of navigating their role as a parent and as a partner, and where they fit in all their feelings that come up. And then there’s the siblings, right? Like siblings, if there is harm happening in the family home, even if it’s not happening to you, if it’s happening to your sibling, that is a harm to you. And all of the resulting harm.

Because a lot of these times, the families who come to this program are really stuck in their identities. Like, a lot of survivors are really angry at their Bystander parent. Like, “Why did you not protect me, and why did you not believe me?” and a lot of the harm-doers and the bystander parents are very defensive. Sometimes they’re just not accountable. They still are not, or they’re still not willing to see it, you know.

And these are grooves that are so deep that every time they try to have a conversation, they keep going back to these like things, where nothing is transforming, nothing is changing. The way they’re relating to it isn’t changing. And so these circles where it’s just the people who are like you, who have had your similar experience, it can be really powerful because even for the most defensive person, when you’re hearing other people who are in your position, handling it differently or talking about how they sort of changed the way they thought about it or came to a different place with it, that can soften you up without the need to be so defensive that comes up when they feel like they’re being accused of something. And so that was really interesting to me because I had wondered this too. There is the carceral response, but then there’s the other piece, which is that nothing happens.

Jaison Oliver 

Mm-hmm, which is a part of the carceral response, right?

Roxanna Asgarian

It is right. It’s saying, okay, we’re not doing that because, for whatever reason, ike, the harm-doer, is the breadwinner in the family, and we can’t lose that money. Or many, many reasons, a pattern of intimate partner violence is another one, right? Like, where a mom doesn’t have the ability to see it and to be protective. Those are things that are really common. And when nothing happens, that’s just as bad. When nobody does anything, again, it’s like a compounded harm. And so it’s interesting to think about ways where you can engage with people and with accountability, where the point isn’t necessarily to make everybody…

Nobody’s perfect, and these situations are really complex and often intergenerational, and you know it’s really hard to solve this.

Jaison Oliver

Definitely not a plug-and-play type of situation, right?

Roxanna Asgarian

Absolutely not, absolutely not. That’s something that makes the cycles keep happening: adding in all those layers of complexity, and those things that you can’t forgive or that you can’t admit to. So I think it’s interesting to hear about any kind of way that people are working towards, maybe just changing the response. And I think a lot of that is trial and error. And I think a lot of people are scared to try things. Yeah, the stakes are really high, but you know what? It’s not working, right? Like what we’re doing is not working. So you do have to try things if you’re gonna find any other way.

Jaison Oliver

Right, was about to say, which is terrifying. Yeah, which is terrifying.

Unless we think it’s okay that the average… what’s the average age of people disclosing child sexual abuse, like in their 50s, right? It’s like people in their 50s. So, unless we’re okay with that status quo…

Roxanna Asgarian 

Yeah, in their 50s. When I heard that, yeah… When you’re in your 50s, you’ve likely, if you were going to have children, you’ve likely had your children and raised your children. And if you’re just disclosing, if you’re maybe just processing what happened to you, how can you sit with this if your child comes to you, if you haven’t done that, if you haven’t processed it?

Josie Pickens

We hope you’re enjoying The upEND Podcast.  A quick note: upEND is funded through the generosity of people like you who believe that ending the harm of the family policing system will help us to create a safer future. If you’re enjoying this podcast, we hope that you’ll consider donating to our work. Visit upendmovement.org/donate for more information.

Josie Pickens

Yeah, this conversation in your work, talking about these justice models and what we can do as a community to support survivors and to support everyone that surrounds survivors, right? So important.

I do have a question for you around what it means to be both a survivor and a journalist writing about this topic. How do you navigate writing about child sexual abuse in ways that are both trauma-informed, which your work is and is so important, but also rooted in possibility rather than despair? How do you find the balance in that?

Roxanna Asgarian

That’s a really great question. I think it’s maybe a guiding question for me as I do the work. It’s hard. I think being trauma-informed as a reporter and an interviewer is incredibly important. And I feel like I sort of intuited that, and that was part of what allowed me to realize I’m a survivor, and this is what makes this easier for me to understand how to be sensitive to people. But also as a survivor, I get triggered, you know, and that’s a piece that is really real. I have PTSD, so doing the work can be very challenging for me as a survivor. And also, I have an editor, right? And that editor is usually not trauma-informed. And so I often experienced that friction there where I’m kind of speaking on behalf, cause you argue with your editor, not in an aggressive way, but that’s part of it. The conflict there is part of making a story.

And I’ll find myself in the situation of kind of defending a survivor to my editor, who is saying things just like in a way where I’m like, don’t say it like that to me. Because you know, like that’s also triggering for me to hear that response.

So I think part of being trauma-informed is being trauma-informed to myself, right? Like understanding what my needs are and being able to say that in the meeting with an editor, for instance, which took me a long time because a lot of mainstream journalism is very uncomfortable with thinking about survivor reporters, survivor writers. I think the Washington Post told a reporter who had experience and was public about experiencing sexual assault that she can no longer cover sexual assault.

Jaison Oliver

She’s partial, right? Yeah, you can’t be objective.

Roxanna Asgarian

Mm-hmm, exactly. You can’t be objective. And it’s sort of like, but who can be objective about child sexual abuse? Who can? Like, show me the person who can be objective. And that’s exactly true too. Like that person, there are some things missing, right?

Jaison Oliver

“I’m completely indifferent. I can take it either way.” Like, do you really want that reporter?

Roxanna Asgarian

What are you bringing to the work if your work is all about neutrality at the expense of just seeing really, really harm, right? Like it is human. It’s human when you’re hearing things, and taking these things in, and writing about [sexual abuse] to experience sadness and anger. I mean, those are the two main ones for me. And I get really mad. And I think these are the things that the industry itself is really bad at. And so I think navigating doing work that is trauma-informed and also about these possibilities.

I will tell you, I wrote a story about an abolitionist’s perspective on child sexual abuse that took me so long—I’m a freelancer—it took me so long to find an outlet that would accept it. Because of people’s reactions to talking about child sexual abuse.

Which, you know, that process was really triggering for me also to be blunt, you know, because you’re like, you know, I knew it was a story. I know it’s an important story. And it’s very difficult to navigate the journalism world.

You know, because my thing is like, I can write about the terrible things that happen all day, and people want that. They want that for me. And so, me bringing this thing that looks at how people are trying things differently, and having that story have a hard time selling? It is challenging, you know?

Josie Pickens

Because we only want to have one response, right? And that is, as we continue to say, to punish. And so trying to have these conversations and present these conversations through an abolitionist lens just seems impossible. It’s difficult to speak. It’s difficult to hear.

Everyone would just, first of all, rather not even talk about this at all. and especially not talk about, well, how do we create transformative care-centered spaces for everyone involved? As we said earlier, for those who have perpetuated harm, for those who have experienced harm. In many cases, everyone is involved, everyone in the family in some way or another, which is why this is how the series of Reclaiming Safety came about.

And as I continue to think through all of these questions that we’re attempting to answer, the question around child sexual abuse is the one that seems to be the most challenging to push through. So if someone were to ask that “what about” question to you, and I know that you’ve offered so much of the answer in your responses to all of our questions, what would be a very straightforward and clear answer to how abolition solves and fixes this problem?

Roxanna Asgarian

I think first and foremost, abolition allows us to talk about the problem in a new way, allows us to talk about the problem in general, right? Like you just said, people don’t want to talk about this. This touches something in most people, like an instinctive no thank you, right?

I think if you engage with abolitionist principles and you think about ways of dealing with harm that aren’t carceral, it allows you to address all the nuance of situations that happen with individual experience, and allows you to center the people who have experienced the harm. Because right now in our society, we do not do that. Survivors are secondary to punishment. Survivors are bearing the brunt of the load of society’s inability to look at the problem, which is a systemic problem. Survivors are carrying the burden that everyone else refuses to acknowledge.

Jaison Oliver

This isn’t a beat that reporters seem to really be picking up. Like, I don’t see a lot of mainstream publications that are covering [abolition of the family policing system]. They’ll kind of sensationalize a lot of the violence that may happen in our home in the same way that we sensationalize a lot of the violence that happens. Right, a car crash, whatever, all of that is placed together. But I’m just wondering about how we invite and encourage more reporters because your role is so important in helping shape the ways that we think about these issues and shifting that over time. I’m wondering how we can invite more reporters to talk about this in different ways, different and better ways?

Roxanna Asgarian

I think it really does start with trauma-informed journalism. And I think most journalists have heard this now as kind of a buzzword. You may get a week of training on it. I’ve been pitching a class for, I don’t know, 10 years, about trauma-informed reporting, because I think that it is not an add-on. It’s not like a little certification. I think it’s fundamental to the practice of better journalism because journalists are seeing a lot of really intense stuff. And really, honestly, in this day and age, scarier and scarier things. If you’re not giving people the tools to process this themselves, then that’s step one, right? You can’t see what you haven’t allowed yourself to see. So if your job is being a witness and you can’t witness certain things, right? If you can’t witness this trauma and hold it and process it, then you cannot do your job well. I believe that. And that’s not easy. That’s why I think it needs to be built into how we train and teach journalists.

And I also think when we talk about objective journalism, to me, it’s just like status quo journalism, because it usually defaults to the people who have the power. Basically, “objective” is saying we’re not pissing off powerful people. That’s fundamentally… we act like that’s not what that means, but it is in practice what that means. Yeah, it is.

And I think that, you know, the other side of trauma-informed reporting is recognizing the structures of power, who has power, who doesn’t have power. For me, instead of objectivity, I try to come from a place of power analysis, so I try to say that my job is to challenge the power structures, right? And so that helps me find my lens in a story, and it helps clarify what the goals are for the story. And it also helps me be the most, I believe, the most sensitive that you can be and should be for the people with the least power in the situation. And then it can go less and less to be honest, as you go up, right? Because a good journalist needs to ask tough questions, right? But these are not the same thing, right? Like the people who have the power and the people who have been systemically held down, those are two different approaches.

And I think we don’t talk about power openly. If you’re talking about child sexual abuse, you’re talking about power, you’re talking about domination. You’re also talking about survivors, who are a group of people who have experienced domination and the boot of power intimately at a very young age. And so a lot of these survivors are actually really well-suited. I think that has a lot to do with where my approach comes from. I feel like instinctively, I do think that is true. Listening to survivors and centering them is more than just helping them. It’s helping us as a society get better, be better. And I think journalists have a really important role in that and just need to be more honest about what it is that they’re trying to do.

Jaison Oliver

In terms of this power analysis, where do you feel like we should be focusing our lens more directly as observers, whether we’re both journalists or just everyday people who care about these issues?

Roxanna Asgarian

Yeah, there’s room for investigative journalism, right? That’s focused on power in terms of dismantling or critiquing or challenging power, right? And that’s super valid, important. I still believe that we’re in a crazy time, right? But like, it matters to call that out and to challenge it. But I also think there’s room to turn the focus on survivors, their perspectives, their ways of coming into… because this was the most amazing thing about this process of working on these pieces is talking to people who have survived child sexual abuse, sometimes from very young age and for a long time. So people who have had a very intense trauma load, who have so much to give and share from their process and experience growing and healing. It was so powerful to talk to these people, just me as a survivor. As a reporter, it was like, these are things that people need to know that people do not know and understand because we can’t even say the words. One of those people, Stacey Kay Haynes, is a somatic therapist. She’s working on the body and how trauma lives in the body and how you can heal using these body-based healing techniques. And she was saying like, people contract, right? Physically contract when you bring up child sexual abuse, and it makes sense. Right? Like, it’s a hard thing to think about, and nobody wants to think about it. Nobody wants that to happen, right? It’s objectively bad, right? We can say that. But she’s like, maybe there are ways that you can get to this place without encountering that immediate block. You know, in the story I worked on for the New Republic, I basically didn’t say the word abolition. And that was a conscious response, a conscious choice because I felt like…

If I explain abolition from the perspective of survivors, people might actually take it in. You have to know what your audience is and try to figure out how you are reaching the most people you can reach. And I think for some people, talking straight up, they’re ready to handle it because they’re thinking about it. And they’ve already kind of done a lot of the work. And there are people who are on the opposite end of the spectrum. You just want them to even have a kernel of more understanding.

Jaison Oliver

Yeah, there’s not just one way to approach a concept, right? Especially a concept that’s as complex as this, as complex and as prevalent as this. Yeah, for listeners who are survivors, advocates, or community members, what can they start doing today to create safer environments for children and to support healing and accountability without relying on systems of punishment?

Roxanna Asgarian

I love that question. And I love the part in the Reclaiming Safety paper that gives sort of action items, right? And that’s something that was so cool for me to be able to work on because it often happens, right? You read something, or you start to understand an issue, and you’re like, but what do I do? Where do I fit in here? And I think that everybody knows kids, right? I’m a mom, so I know a lot of kids, you know, all my son’s friends and all. But I think everyone knows kids, and I think everyone needs to take some ownership of the role that they have to play with kids.

And I think the way that you can do that is to talk to them and listen to them and treat them with respect and get to know them and listen to what they have to say about things, all sorts of things, right?

We’re not talking about like jumping into sexual harm with a kid that you’ve never met before, right? Ultimately, the way that people need to address child sexual abuse is within their family and community. And that can’t happen if you don’t have community. Right? 

Jaison Oliver

If you don’t have the community.

Roxanna Asgarian

And you can’t come and say, “Hi community! I have this extremely difficult thing to work through,” right? You have to build that trust.

Jaison Oliver

“Hi y’all, I’m Jaison. Let’s talk about this thing that…”

Roxanna Asgarian

Yeah. It’s hard for people to even broach this with people that they know very, very well, with their own family members, right? And so I think, to start, is allowing kids, accepting, embracing children in our society, right? And treating them with human dignity and giving them agency in their lives to whatever extent they can. First and foremost. Because if you’re, and particularly for child survivors, they’re struggling with agency, they’re struggling with autonomy, they’re struggling with feeling violated. And, you know, even like, I think back to some adults that were safe adults for me in my childhood, and I didn’t disclose to them.

And actually, one of my teachers, my favorite teacher, she read my book. And I disclose that I’m a survivor at the end of the book. And she said “Hey, I read that and I’m really sorry that I missed that. I wasn’t able…” and I said, “You know, I wasn’t disclosing at that time, but what you did do for me was you made me feel smart and you gave me like really interesting books and you took an interest in what I had to say. And like that is just as meaningful, just as valuable.” Cause for me as a survivor, trying to just get out of Las Vegas and go to college, and like have the life I wanted to live. Just having someone give me that genuine interest and encouragement, even outside of talking about specifically the harm, was so valuable to me. And I think back to my community, which was a lot of my friends’ families. We cobbled together a team, a care team, because a lot of my friends’ parents were struggling with things like addiction.

I wouldn’t say any of our parents really had it super together, but like as a cohesive, yeah. 

Jaison Oliver

But you made it work. Yeah, you made it work.

Roxanna Asgarian

Yeah! And the resiliency. I know people have a kind of a strong reaction to that word, but I think it’s so important for kids to feel like they can be okay and that they can go forward, and it’s not just like something bad happens to you and it has to dictate the rest of your life. And I think that community love and support is like the crucial, crucial piece of resiliency for kids.

Josie Pickens

Roxanna, thank you, thank you, thank you for this conversation. Jaison and Sydnie, our producer, and I were talking yesterday about how much we were looking forward to this conversation with you. I was sharing that in our communications, I kept trying to avoid the language of excitement, right? Like, I’m so excited about this conversation.

We knew that it would be a powerful conversation, and we knew that it would be a conversation that would be transformative for so many of our listeners. So we really appreciate you taking time to be with us today, for taking time to write the amazing essay that’s a part of the Reclaiming Safety series, and thank you for your courage and for helping us reimagine what safety can mean for child survivors of sexual abuse. Where can listeners learn more about you, your writing, your work, all of the things?

Roxanna Asgarian

They could start with my website. It’s RoxannaAsgarianWrites.com. That’s a good place to start. I have a few links there to stuff that I’ve worked on. And, also my book, We Were Once a Family, I think that’s the deepest I’ve ever been able to go on a story. And I think it really helped me come to the place of being able to talk about abolition, for sure.

[Jaison holds up a copy of We Were Once a Family]

Josie Pickens

I love that Jaison just continues to stand this book up almost like a bottle boy, you know, in the club when they’re like showing the bottles with the sparklers.

Roxanna Asgarian

(laughs)

Jaison Oliver 

I think this is officially the first time that I have ever been referred to as a bottle boy, but I will take it.

Josie Pickens 

A book boy! A book boy!

Jaison Oliver 

A book boy, exactly a book boy. I’ll take it.

Roxanna Asgarian

I love that.

Roxanna Asgarian

And I was gonna say, as a Las Vagan, I really appreciate that reference.

But also thank y’all. I really want to thank y’all because the work that you’re doing is so important, and also giving people the chance to think through this stuff is really rare, and it’s valued, and I think it will be valued for a long time. So I really appreciate y’all.

Josie Pickens 

Thank you so much again for being here.