The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women & Girls:

Dreamstorming from Sexual Abuse to Liberation

By Jennifer M. Gómez

Board Member & Chair of the Research Advisors, Center for Institutional Courage
Assistant Professor of School of Social Work, Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Innovation in Social Work & Health, Boston University

 After retiring from my career as a ballet dancer with Dance Theatre of Harlem, I discovered research in college, including the Center for Institutional Courage Founder, Dr. Freyd’s betrayal trauma theory. In this work, Dr. Freyd identified the harmful betrayal that happens when people close to us, like our parents, abuse us.

So inspired, I began my own theorizing that would become cultural betrayal trauma theory (CBTT) during my graduate education with Dr. Freyd. In CBTT, my Black feminist theorizing was rooted in the reality that some Black males sexually abuse Black women and girls. Worser still, I witnessed how accountability rarely found these perpetrators, while backlash, silencing, and further harassment routinely followed Black women and girls who were known victims.

Sitting in the uncomfortability of acknowledging a painful dialectic of harm—unsafe in racist society, unsafe in sexually abusive corners of the Black community—I searched for answers with CBTT:

Why does sexual abuse in the Black community carry the unique harm of cultural betrayal?

What makes speaking about Black male perpetrated sexual abuse so dangerous? To ourselves? To the Black males who perpetrate? To the many Black males who do not? To the Black community as a whole?

In my book, The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women & Girls: A Black Feminist Approach to Healing from Sexual Abuse, I tackle these questions. And so many more.

In my chapter, Institutional Courage To Change The World, I dreamstorm:

If the world were one that were so perfectly peaceful and equitable that no Black woman or girl, cis or trans, was ever sexually abused or discriminated against again….

  1. What would that world be like?

  2. How do we get there?

The genius of the Center for Institutional Courage is that it promotes such change-the-world dreamstorming within the research foundation that will let us know what works to transform organizations and society. In an age of pressing problems amidst the allure of quick fixes, research also shows us what doesn’t work, so we do not waste precious time and resources.

Of course, fundamentally changing the world is neither simple nor easy. But The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women & Girls points us to a path of dreamstormed liberation that we can create together.