There is no point in my calling or trying to chat online with volunteer counselors at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center to sarcastically tell them all of that in response to being told by two of their counselors in a row that it's BARCC policy not to encourage (read: to discourage) people who contact BARCC for help from telling the "details" of a sexual abuse trauma.
The rationale that they're giving for shutting up people who call or connect to the chat is that "telling the details can retraumatize you."
What is a "detail" of a sexual assault? My feeling is that a detail is what someone was wearing or what time it was, not, as I was repeatedly told by these idiots, the facts of what happened.
I don't think this policy is about the safety of the people who ask for help. I think it's a policy that BARCC is using to avoid liability for having its phone hotline and chat staffed by unpaid volunteers who don't have counseling degrees. It's worse than if there were no hotline or chat, to have the person that you're asking for help tell you not to talk about what you witnessed or what happened to you.
This is what Charity Navigator says about BARCC's finances:
https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.profile&ein=042974983
They have money, but you can't buy brains.
