13th stepping
Surprise surprise: there’s a lot of sexual predation in Alcoholics Anonymous. You don’t say! Who would ever think that a quasi-sacred secretive all-anonymous “program” to rescue alcoholics with a success rate of around 6% would foster predators?
“AA has absolutely saved my life,” says Amy Dresner, who has been in and out of AA for 20 years, and recently published a memoir about her addiction and recovery called My Fair Junkie. “I was never sexually harassed per se,” Dresner says. “What I did feel happened to me was that I was preyed upon when I was very vulnerable. When I came in and I was new, no girls pulled me aside and said ‘Hey, these are the guys who usually wait for the fresh meat to come in. These are the guys that fuck the newcomers.’ I was fucked multiple times by guys with who had double digit [years of] sobriety while I was still counting days. I was 13th stepped.”
“13th stepping” is a phrase all of the women I spoke to were familiar with. It is not an actual step in the program, but rather an expression commonly used within the fellowship to refer to the practice in which elder members with more years of sobriety sexually pursue newcomers because they’re in a vulnerable state and more open to manipulation. A 2003 study in the Journal of Addictions Nursing showed that 50 percent of the female AA members surveyed had experienced the 13th stepping phenomenon.
In spite of this, Dresner says it’s the responsibility of those entering the program to go in with their eyes open. “If you’re expecting it to be a room full of saints, you’re an idiot. It’s a place where sick people go to get better. It’s a looney bin. Wherever there’s a power hierarchy there’s going to be sexual abuse. AA is no different. There is a power hierarchy,” she tells me.
Hmmmm yes it’s a place where sick alcoholic people go to get better that fails around 94% of the time and is all anonymous. There’s going to be sexual abuse, you can’t do anything about the abuse because anonymous, and it won’t help you – but it’s awesome all the same.
Monica Richardson was a member of AA for 36 years before she walked away and embarked on a personal mission to expose abusive practices in the 12 step community. She produced a documentary about sexual and financial exploitation in 12 step groups called “The 13th Step,”and states that since starting her blog LeavingAA in 2010, she has received “thousands” of emails from current and former members who have experienced sexual harassment, assault and abuse from other members of “the fellowship.”
One of Richardson’s major points of contention with AA is their refusal to warn newcomers to the program that they may be sitting next to someone who has been court ordered to attend meetings as a condition of probation or parole. AA’s own 2014 membership survey states that 12 percent of members were referred to the organization by the criminal justice system.
They’re not there by choice, and they’re protected by anonymity, and for all you know they’re rapists. Cozy.
“AA needs to warn its members that there could be a sex offender or violent offender who’s been sent there, so be careful who you trust,” Richardson says. She also thinks that the group should tell the court system to stop requiring attendance for violent offenders, that the program should institute a hotline for members to call if they’ve been sexually assaulted by another program member, and that safety guidelines stating that sexual harassment, assault, and exploitation within the group are “not okay” should be read and posted at all meetings. Meeting leaders and sponsors are not required to go through any sort of training.
And there’s no question of evidence or comparing outcomes. It’s just a thing, and you go to it and take what you get. There are actually medical treatments for addiction, and AA is not that.
She also rejects AA’s assertion that the program is a “microcosm of society” where sexual harassment and assault are no more likely to happen than they would anywhere else. “It’s not a microcosm,” she says. “You’re pulling together a group of people who are malfunctioning. They’re addicted to drugs and alcohol. They may have issues with self-esteem and being assertive. And they’re all reading a book from the 1930s.”
It doesn’t work, and there are a lot of risks – yet AA is widely seen as an unquestionable good. It’s nuts.
Is it not also the case that one of the 12 steps is to “accept god” (in some form or formulation)?
That seems to make judicial orders to attend ultimately unconstitutional in the US. Am I wrong here? Don’t think so.
What’s the point exchanging one type of spirit for another, holier, anyway? Apart from the predatory opportunities.
Rrr – These are the 12 steps:
Sorry, didn’t finish my thought.
It is obvious that God permeates the entire business. I wonder if he is part of the 13th step, too?
There have been several court cases regarding court-ordered spiritual guidance, and sometimes the person who doesn’t wish to be court-ordered to God wins, sometimes loses. Depends on the court, the mood of the judge, whatever.
Thanks #2! So, more than one step — more like at least half of them? God’s wiener, yeah.
#3: So, god sometimes trumps the constitution in juris? Not surprised so much as disappointed.
The actual published case law on the subject is pretty clear, as I recall: the government cannot require you to attend AA or any other program that has a religious component. (And yes, AA has been found repeatedly to have a religious component. Sorry, all you atheist “Friends of Bill,” I’m very happy for you if you’ve found AA helpful and were able to reinterpret your Higher Power/God as nature or a really big rock, or Good Orderly Direction or Group Of Drunks or whatever rationalizing did the trick for you, that’s great for you, but courts aren’t buying into it.)
In fact, if I recall correctly, a couple of years ago the 9th Circuit held that this was a clearly enough established legal principle that prison officials who punished an inmate for not attending a 12-step program were not entitled to qualified immunity. (“Qualified immunity” is a doctrine that protects defendants in civil rights actions if it wasn’t clear that their actions were a violation of civil rights — the idea is that we don’t want to punish police or other officials for not predicting how a court would rule in the future, though in practice it lets a lot of dodgy shit go unpunished.)
But I think iknklast is right that when the rubber meets the road, a lot of people are getting forced — or strongly pushed — into 12-step programs. This can be because the D.A.’s office and the local courts are simply flouting the law, and there’s often nobody with an incentive to challenge it, because these requirements are often imposed as part of plea bargain or diversion program that the defendant is agreeing to, and that is highly discretionary on the part of the D.A. Defendants who are being offered a chance to avoid prison time, or sometimes even a criminal record at all, are not likely to try to challenge these routine referrals.
Also, I believe that courts will uphold mandatory attendance if the defendant is offered at least one secular option. So in a lot of places, you might see 99-100% of defendants getting sent to AA, and that isn’t necessarily a constitutional problem.
It is just tragic to hear that from an abused person.
I’ve been a member for 30 years, and have never had to ‘obey’ or ‘comply’ with any prescription of steps. Nor have I ever been required to pretend any supernatural belief. I have had to be rather tolerant of cheezy ‘spirituality’ that other people seemed to need though.
AA is not a therapy, nor is it a religion. AA does not have a publicity department or spokesheads. The treatment industry,probation departments etc. have introduced an atmosphere of coercion by which people approach AA unwillingly, and with a demand for obedience and conformity that is expressly rejected by AA’s own literature. Anyone pushed into AA with such a background is made more vulnerable to abusers who may be present.
There are other ways to handle alcoholics in the courts and treatment facilities. The ‘card’ system has metastasized into a monster. Years ago, Maryland AA voted to refuse to sign attendance cards after an anti drunk driving campaign flooded meetings with angry, disinterested, drunks.
Any sense that AA groups have an elite, or a charismatic leader is deeply mistaken. That’s how things like Synanon get launched,for example. The scandal of the Midtown Group in Washington DC is another instance where a cabal of insiders began to wield power and authority over others, and of course that included sexual exploitation.
http://aacultwatch.blogspot.com/2011/12/so-whatever-happened-to-midtown.html
An AA meeting is almost certainly safer than a bar. But the notion that AA has some enforcement arm to guarantee the behavior of anyone who happens to show up is simply unrealistic. So yes, everyone coming into AA needs to act in their own interest. ‘Surrender’ and obedience are NOT prescribed.
John @7 – I suspect that varies from group to group. I once dated an alcoholic (fortunately, not for long) and his group did prescribe surrender and obedience – and also advised getting rid of all your loved ones, since they were the ones causing you to drink (so he dumped me before I could dump him, because, I suppose, of all those times I held him down and forced beer down his throat because I liked it when he turned into a nasty, jealous, abusive drunk).
And I’ve heard similar things from other people. So I suspect the experience differs from place to place, from group to group, and from person to person. I attended two meetings of Adult Children of Alcoholics, found it ridiculous and offputting, and went into professional therapy which worked very well, though slowly.
The flipside of the potential for anonymous violent offenders being stuck into a program, of course, is that sometimes the women who are being targeted are the ones who are there ‘voluntarily’ (using the painfully ironic version of the term outlined by Screechy Monkey @#5). So a woman with, say, a drunk driving conviction takes a plea bargain that includes mandatory counseling (and she lives in a rural county where the only such free service is AA–tough luck if you’re broke), just so she can stay out of prison and not lose her kids.
And then she gets there, and there’s some guy in the group who is a rabid 13th Stepper. It’s literally about the only situation that’s worse than ‘bog standard’ sexual harassment in the workplace. She’s not just risking financial ruin if she leaves–she’s actually risking prison time.
John @7,
I can’t imagine it’s in the best interests of most AA attendees to have people showing up who don’t want to be there. I’ve read anecdotes about some meetings supposedly making an announcement at the beginning that if you’re just here to get your sheet signed, we’ll sign and now and you can GTFO and leave those of us who want to be here alone.