Dear Lucy: Preventing Abuse in Psychedelic Spaces, part 2
(Continued from last week’s column: “So, what can you do to promote safer spaces in the psychedelic community?”)
On an individual and community level it starts with normalizing and modeling consent in everyday interactions with the goal of prioritizing respect for personal, physical and emotional boundaries. You should also actively call out and disassociate yourself from ideas and activities common in spiritual communities that promote rape culture like victim blaming, defining “manhood” as dominant/sexually aggressive and “womanhood” as submissive/sexually passive.
As a community, it’s critically important to promote a culture that believes victims. Creating safe spaces and easily accessible resources for survivors should be priority one, preferably before something like this happens. Many communities are beginning to formalize support networks for people who have been harmed in the context of psychedelic therapy or ceremony. Tarana Burke, the originator of the #metoo movement offered this framework for helping people mobilize to support victims within their communities:
Create publicly available resources for survivors of sexual abuse and their allies.
Organize survivor leadership-training programs to teach trainees to start their own survivor support programs
Proliferate healing circles for comunity processing of sexual abuse and assault
Training on sexual ethics for practitioners is also crucial. If you still have contacts within the organization for your training program you could ask them about adding more instruction on ethics, consent and boundaries. You could also approach your community leaders about organizing, helping to develop and promote workshops for the following:
Consent and Boundaries 101
Sexual violence bystander training for practitioners and attendees of group events
Maintaining boundaries as a practitioner
Respecting the autonomy and dignity of clients and participants
Harm reduction - dosing, contraindications and common impairments of specific substances
Real or perceived power dynamics that may exist in professional relationships
Creating a safe and non-judgmental environment for people to express their needs and boundaries
Ensuring that clients or patients are fully informed and consenting to the treatment
Holding the container, not allowing for shifting boundaries when a client is altered
Lastly, ask your community leaders to help you do a red flag analysis to look at the way the situation was handled and to brainstorm ways of how it could be handled better in the future. While there is no common narrative or profile for survivors or offenders, having a game plan in place for how to handle community members who consistently violate the boundaries of others is helpful. This task should be handled with care directly by community leaders themselves and should NEVER be asked of survivors. There should be very clear guidelines about documenting incidents and reporting crimes when they have been committed, when to ban someone from community events and online forums and also what resources there are for resolution services for offenders, if any.
This is a complicated issue that truly takes a village to address. Putting these measures in place will not guarantee that sexual violence will not occur in your community, but it’s a start.
Dear Lucy is a community sourced advice column on consent, ethics and etiquette in psychedelic spaces compiled by Josephine Embry. Submit your anonymous questions here.
