Empowerment to Sexual Assault Survivors: The Role of Family and Trustworthy Person

Abstract

The purposed of the research are (i) to explore effects of sexual assault (ii) to investigate the ability of family and trustworthy person to empower the sexual assault survivor. This study is a documentary and qualitative research, that used in-depth interview techniques in collecting data from 1 sexual assault survivor and 3 family and trustworthy persons with consent from the survivor.

The result showed that there are numerous effects of sexual assault survivor: shame, guilt, sleep disturbances, depression, fear, distrust, sadness, continuing anxiety, flashbacks, panic attacks, phobias, dissociation, relationship difficulties, withdrawal/isolation, paranoia and lack of control. However , the sexual assault impacts not only the survivor, but also the family and trustworthy persons. 

 The empowerment to survivors has a wide range of action approaches, including non-aggravating admissions and reflection survivors, secrecy, setting a safe place, observing the survivors' physical and mental state, opening the survivor make decisions by themselves, and the self-management of the family and trustworthy person not to be affected by their empowerment. However, the family and trustworthy person is often inexperienced, they do not know how to empower survivors.

Therefore, a non-formal education program should be developed to strengthen the competence of family and trustworthy persons in empowerment to sexual assault survivors. They should include an understanding of sexual assault survivors, skills in empowerment to sexual assault survivors, and social action guidelines and cases against sexual assault cases.