If a ban on CE for touch is not needed for CE reciprocity with APA, why is it important to have? Here is my understanding of the reasons AASECT has given for this policy:
- Touch is overstimulating. Traumatized and neuro-atypical trainees might be overstimulated by emotionally intense content.
- AASECT has a problem with sexual solicitation and harassment in its programs, and a strong barrier against touch in educational programs is needed to protect against such abuse.
- AASECT is assuming additional organizational risk to defend touch programing which could lead to pushback from powerful social conservatives and might threaten AASECT’s other work. Educational touch is too dangerous to defend with AASECT’s limited resources.
- BDSM and other touching activities are more dangerous than other sexual activity and need special treatment by AASECT to teach with adequate safety to their trainees.
- AASECT is entitled to set its own boundaries, just like any individual is, so it has every right to declare educational touch to be outside its boundaries.
- AASECT has an obligation to protect the public, and that same obligation applies equally to trainees. Therefore, if AASECT thinks clients should be protected from touch by our professionals, trainees must be protected in the same way.
- There are power differences among various members of the AASECT community. Programs where trainees have the option to consent to educational touch constitute coercion to participate because of what powerful members of the AASECT community might think, and this kind of opportunity might affect later professional evaluations of trainees.
- Other organizations exclude educational touch from their training policies (perhaps not APA as noted in the previous post) so AASECT is behaving normatively and prudently to decide similarly using their examples.
- Implicitly, AASECT has argued that declining their proposed boundary rules constitutes unfair coercive treatment. AASECT’s changing its boundary rules should not be cause for adverse consequences.
- AASECT also says that touch goes against their Ethical Code of Conduct because it forbids touch with “consumers.”
I will tackle these in turn:
1. AASECT, myself, or other outsiders do not get to decide what is triggering or overstimulating for others, including trainees. It is entirely possible that an AASECT trainee might be triggered by intense material. Because the ‘decision’ about what material is triggering is highly personal and subjective, any AASECT trainer might incorrectly estimate what is triggering. In fact, traumatized people may have imperfect ability to anticipate what will trigger them, even with content warnings. There is legitimate scientific question and mixed research evidence that such warnings significantly protect readers. However, AASECT does not shrink from presenting didactic material that might be triggering, and furthermore deliberately requires SAR material that might be triggering because AASECT has determined that the educational objectives of such programs justify the risks given the cautions and safety features of the program in question. It is therefore marginalizing to ban consensual educational touch programs categorically as it implies no adequate safety could be programmed, nor that educational objectives could ever justify the risk. AASECT’s own history of educational programs has repeatedly demonstrated such assumptions are not justified. Past complaints of triggering by AASECT trainees does not justify banning any programs categorically, there have been too few such incidents to constitute reliable and representative data. It is fair and reasonable to accurately describe content to be presented and allow trainees to decide whether they wish to undertake the risks and benefits of enrolling in it.
2. AASECT may have a problem with sexual harassment, although I am unclear that our problem exceeds that of similar organizations. Many of them have genuine problems with this too. AASECT should act to further discourage sexual harassment. What is clear that AASECT already has a good policy against sexual harassment and support for respectful communication, yet the incidence of such behaviors remains too high. But AASECT completely lacks scientific evidence that programs containing consensual educational touch constitute any sort of additional risk of harassment than other AASECT programing including dances, fundraisers, munches and other activities that AASECT has not categorically banned, even though they carry no CEs. AASECT’s Code of Ethical Conduct would suggest that regulation of professional conduct be based on sound clinical or scientific evidence. No such evidence has been provided for this CE policy. Likewise, changes in sexual harassment policy need to take into account differences among diverse populations about how solicitation behavior is understood, and be evidence-based as to its effectiveness. The presence of some sexual harassment in the AASECT community does not constitute sufficient evidence for banning CE programs categorically. This is evidence of prejudice against touch and kink, not of their association with harassment.
3. It is true that it is riskier for AASECT to support experiential programing, and to support consensual educational touch, than to avoid them. I argued earlier that AASECT cannot afford to cede responsibility for some of these risks and continue to claim leadership in the field of sexuality training. Indeed, AASECT has an important training role because other organizations declined to undertake the risks of human sexuality training. Yes, touch is riskier, but it is necessary risk given AASECTs Mission, Vision of Sexual Health, and AASECT’s role in the training community. While I am inclined to discount the risks of social conservatives per se, AASECT does deal with large hospitality corporations. Some, like Marriott, have policies against single women at the bar in the hotel restaurants and discouraging sex talk in the hallways where minors and families might hear. The law is very clear that Marriott has that right. This might require some training be conducted off-site to protect AASECT, but doesn’t justify a change in CE policy for AASECT’s strict adherence to business contracts. AASECT has less stigmatizing options it has failed to take.
4. Despite the prima facie evidence that some BDSM activities are dangerous, I hasten to point out that many sexual activities that AASECT undertakes to teach about are less safe than most kinky activities and that did not dissuade it from teaching about STI transmission, dating apps, sexual assault, child sexual abuse and exploitation, problem sexual behavior, and trauma, all of which are fraught content. It is stigmatizing to single out the risks of kink behaviors or touch as special cases of such risks given the severity of content AASECT routinely assumes the responsibility to teach. Indeed, AASECT has the responsibility of dealing sensitively with all content, touch or not. That requires sensitivity to context. This policy is an egregious example of marginalizing sexual diversity AASECT should shrink from modeling. It is setting a terrible example for education about touch, too, and marginalizes others who use touch completely unnecessarily and unprofessionally. Much of this content does not lend itself to being taught experientially or with educational touch. But where experiential training and/or touch can be effective, they should get full credit.
5. In claiming the right to set its own boundaries, AASECT is failing to acknowledge its powerful role as a regulator. AASECT is depriving its trainees and its professional members the right to consent to programs that involved sexual touch by refusing to grant full credit for them. That is boundary setting for everybody else, not just for AASECT. This boundary analogy breaks down because of the inherent power imbalance between AASECT and its members. I do not get to unilaterally set my boundaries so as to limit your professional freedoms. The best analogy here is to the behavior of American fundamentalist religious organizations who are claiming that it violates their religious freedom to limit their ability to regulate the behavior of nonbelievers, a position AASECT rightly opposes as repressive. Ultimately, AASECT does get to set its own boundaries. Prior to this policy it was completely able to deny CE to any program, touch-based or not, that fails to protect it trainees or discredited the field in any manner and it had that power before this policy change without marginalizing anyone gratuitously.
6. It is my contention that AASECT’s primary responsibility is to protect the public first, and trainees second. This is where their boundaries belong. This does not license the abuse of trainees, but neither does it prevent training experiences that may be effortful and even painful to some. If AASECT declines to certify experiential training that includes touch, it is reasonable to think AASECT will be unable to tell if trainees are emotionally and intellectual competent to handle such material. That would abrogate its responsibilities to assess that trainees have adequate self-knowledge and emotional control to safely provide services to the publics the trainees intend to serve under the aegis of legitimacy conferred by their AASECT certifications. While it would be better if no trainees were ever stressed or triggered by such instruction, it is far better that AASECT discovered their vulnerabilities now when it could support addressing such vulnerabilities than have them emerge in educational or therapeutic services later with clients. Anyone evaluating whether AASECT certification provides any assurance that people are qualified to work with kinky clients should be alarmed to hear that it has entirely banned programs that might better assure that trainees or certified professionals can handle the emotional stressors of working with this population. This educational policy assures that AASECT is failing to guarantee that trainees are taught the skills to manage their personal feelings about content in the areas in which the trainees intend to practice. All of this is emphatically true given that no AASECT touch based CE has ever been required for certification, and most such approved programs have had safeties, security arrangements to keep out the public, and even signed waivers as evidence of consent to participate. Because touch is fraught content, mostly presenters who used it have been very careful with it.
7. It is a general flaw in our efforts to support consent education that we too often assume that there is relative social equality in negotiations for social contracting. In fact, considerable discrepancies in social power are the norm, and contracting between relative equals is simpler, but far from common. There are differences in status, education, power, attractiveness, historical service to the organization, as well as race, ethnicity, sex preference and gender identity in the AASECT community. AASECT handles some of the differences better than others, but inequality exists and cannot be fully mitigated. In consequence, the criticism that consent to AASECT’s rules, including the Code of Ethical conduct and AASECT’s Certification guidelines and educational policies and credit bearing programs is fraught. It is partly out of recognition of these differences that I left AASECT. I could afford to do this to oppose AASECT educational touch policy. Others cannot professionally abandon their certifications, even if AASECT has acted to decrease their value. Apprehensiveness about what supervisors and presenters may think is real. It figured very prominently in my graduate training. We were always discussing what clinical supervisors might think of our work. Some of my colleagues were marginalized and their careers harmed by supervisors’ poor opinions of their work. That is an inevitable consequence of the power which we cede to others when we submit to education. But banning educational touch to reduce this does not make sense unless you imagine that consensual educational touch constitutes a special vulnerability that doesn’t apply to written work, presentation ratings, and every other conduct that might be evaluated in AASECT’s professional space. We do not ban social activity because a supervisor might think badly of a supervisee in such a setting, or ban fundraisers where a powerful person might make a judgment about a less powerful person’s generosity. Eventually, this boils down to AASECT not being willing to stand behind the professional conduct of supervisors. It is natural for trainees to have these fears. It is one of the obligations of having the power to supervise not to abuse that power. A ban on educational touch is a crabwalk away from standing up for professionalism. I frankly have not seen failure to supervise professionally about touch content in any AASECT educational content. There has been a program where unapproved touch was demonstrated by a guest presenter from outside the professional community. I will discuss that in the next part of this series. There have been too few programs for such a pattern to emerge, nor to make an evidence-based case that they are dangerous.
8. It has been argued that some organizations, e.g. The Woodhull Freedom Foundation, have bans on educational touch in their events so AASECT should do the same. That is nice for Woodhull, is certainly their prerogative, but except APA, which I have already much belabored, most other sexuality organizations do not have the responsibility of certifying fitness for professional practice in sexuality education, counseling or sex therapy. The risk/rewards and advocacy purposes of such an organization like Woodhull are fundamentally different for those of AASECT. I fail to see why anyone would find Woodhull’s behavior relevant. Removing a total ban on CE for programs that involve touch in no way requires AASECT or its CE providers to offer them, although the field would be ill-served if no one offered any. Someone will design quality programs if AASECT doesn’t prohibit CE for them.
9. AASECT is not entitled to freedom from pushback of their policies, even from non-members, under any reasonable boundary rules about consent. In BDSM social organizations, Safe Sane and Consensual never meant that anyone had to agree to play with everyone else. But neither did it imply that there were no consequences to declining to consent. If I decline to consent to AASECT’s educational policies, I have to leave AASECT. If you violate your contract with me, as AASECT has, I might be offended or speak ill of your professionalism, which I have. And if you marginalize a community by your behavior, it may choose to take social action against you. Consent does not mean that that everyone lies down together in a peaceable kingdom, the lion lying benignly with the lamb. Consent means orderly agreement when there is agreement about boundaries. Sometimes it means war where boundaries cannot be negotiated. To paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, war is not just policy by other means, but peaceful agreements about boundaries are policy, too. They reflect shared common interests. Where consent cannot be secured, nonconsensual conflict resolution continues. In creating social justice and mutual alliance, that matters to community, too.
10. While it is crucially important that the consumers of services from AASECT’s certified professionals can trust that they will be treated ethically and professionally, it is not true that this requirement prevents AASECT trainees from ever consenting to AASECT approved educational credits that might involve consensual touch. There is nothing inherently unprofessional or unethical about approving CE’s of professionally conducted instruction that is apt to the content being conveyed and offers adequate protection against mishaps or problems. Touch is not that risky, and some content is best conveyed in that manner, and if a trainee does have problems with material they have consented to participate in, the resolution of those problems is an opportunity to protect the trainee and the consumer from later problems that it is AASECT’s mission to address. To treat trainees as if they were the same as general consumers makes the mistake of equating trainees’ power and responsibilities with those of people seeking mental health services. If trainees seek to become providers, they must shoulder the responsibilities of protecting consumers even if that sacrifice is stressful. This is the decision AASECT made about SARs, and it is appropriate to extend it to other well designed content that involves consensual touch. I know of no AASECT program where touch was offered where trainees couldn’t elect to opt out, and no AASECT content except SARs that is compulsory. No one is suggesting that touch be compulsory, or kink training be compulsory in an organization in which only a large minority of trainees are interested in working with this population
Other arguments have been made in favor of the marginalizing aspects of this educational touch policy that deserve even less serious rebuttal. Some have claimed superior knowledge about kink because they are community insiders. This is identity politics and based upon very weak critical thinking. The kink/consensual non-monogamy/swinging communities which NCSF represents are very diverse. It took NCSF about 5 years to hammer out agreeable wording on what constitutes consent, and this by no means levelled all the differences in how it is implemented across our various Coalition Partners. Other organizations in kink declined to join, complaining that outside moralists were trying to control them. NCSF represents over 100 different kinky and non-monogamous organizations, some very large and of longstanding such as The Eulenspiegel Society and Kink.com, and others, like a single kink-aware psychology practice which just joined last week. Research by Debby Herbenick suggests that while NCSF represents only a fraction of all kink organizations, all ‘out’ kinky social clubs and events have only touched about 10% of the Americans who do kinky behaviors once a month of more often. We at NCSF are more representative than any one person’s opinion, but we do not encompass everyone. What NCSF has found is that people who try to assert that their version of kink is better than everyone else’s are often self-interested and those least deserving of consideration. Worst among these are the predators whose claim to expertise about kink is really a power play intended to seduce the inexperienced. Any claim to credibility my personal views have in this matter has to do with correctly predicting what Ruby Bouie Johnson and the Philadelphia demonstrators, the NCSF Board, and APA were going to do, not my personal standing or experience in kink being better than someone else’s. Indeed, Herbenick et al have the first data set capable of speaking to what the 90% of non-joiners are like. I mention this because most clients who come to AASECT professionals for education or training are likely to do so because they have avoided, rather than joined kinky communities. In fact, given our fraught professional histories kink social organizations compete to some extent with AASECT educators and with the health professions in educating their members and helping them resolve conflicts. There are good reasons to suspect that kink insiders do not understand these people particularly well.
This brings up another danger from the AASECT touch policy that I am eager to prevent in forcing its repeal. In the last two years, guidelines have been established for treating the kinky population have been generated mostly outside of the AASECT community. “Guidelines for the Treatment of Consensual Non-Monogamy” has been developed by the aforementioned American Psychological Association Division 44: Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity Task Force on Consensual Non-Monogamy. Leadership in developing the Kink Treatment Guidelines does not reside primarily in AASECT either having been taken up by the leadership in the Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities (CARAS) chaired by Richard Sprott, PhD and the Diverse Sexualities Research and Education Institute (DSREI) chaired by Charles Moser, MD. Although AASECT members are part of both of these bodies, and both of the clinical guidelines efforts, AASECT as an organization missed the opportunity to lead these efforts that are central to its mission.
Those missed opportunities, like the retrograde educational touch policy and discussions about weakening AASECT Certification standards, actually reflect growing fragmentation of the field in the age of Trump. His election is an example of a world-wide trend towards greater nationalism, less tolerance of diversity, and tribalism. In these conditions, people identify with micro-communities and are less willing to conform to the demands of larger polities. This is a problem for psychotherapy, which needs to be provided by practitioners that understand whomever walks through the consulting room door. I have often heard it said that it takes a kinky person to provide good kinky therapy, and that the first step to dealing with social stigma is out oneself and to join a local kink community. That is good advice for some clients, but by no means a sound general practice applicable to all clients. Needless to say, we would not say this about problem porn use, erectile dysfunction, and persistent genital arousal disorder! In those conditions, support groups are often helpful, but we do not encourage people to identify their diagnosis as an identity, and we do not assume that good education, which kink social groups often do provide, is all the treatment that is needed. Providing permission and information are the first steps in Jack Anon’s PLISSIT Model, not the equivalent of all the intervention that is ever needed. So any fragmentation of the communities that requires shared identity politics as a precondition for the best treatment is a barrier to fighting stigma and to the best client centered treatment.
Lastly, the argument has been raised that the AASECT touch policy change is about the educational program Taste of Kink. AASECT, NCSF, and I have all tried to dispel this idea, but because Taste of Kink was scheduled to occur in Philadelphia and had been run successfully in Minnesota and in Denver, the fate of the program has become emblematic of the policy change. I will discuss the history, program objectives, approval and implementation of Taste of Kink in my next post. For the record, Taste of Kink was cancelled by AASECT in Philadelphia when NCSF, backed by its designers, notified AASECT that the policy change revoking a full three CE’s for the three-hour program. That was a violation of the contract NCSF had with AASECT that rendered it impossible to recruit the demonstration teams. That dispute provides an instructive case study in boundary negotiation and consent, and intersectionality, but is not crucial to understanding the larger issues of AASECT’s policy role in sexuality education and sex therapy training, thus it merits a separate post.
AASECT is strongly encouraged to rewrite its policies regarding consensual educational touch so that all educational modalities are genuinely protective of AASECT trainees, but the legitimacy of all valuable instructional modalities, including touch specifically, are not marginalized. It is AASECT’s courage, leadership, embrace of diversity and expertise that legitimize its position of leadership in training for practice in the professional fields of sexuality, not its rejection of touch. That is weak, scared and divisive, and fails to protect the public, especially the erotically marginalized part of the public who are in most is need of AASECT’s protection.
© Russell J Stambaugh, PhD Ann Arbor MI, March 2020