One year ago, Emily Mellen made a right on Hereford and a left on Boylston, the thrumming of thousands of sneakers against pavement, cowbells and drumbeats, and cheers filling the air. She was completing a dream years in the making: she was running the Boston Marathon for the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center.
Mellen is a clinical psychologist and assistant professor at Tufts in the department of psychiatry. She studies the intersection of sexual trauma, hoping to fill the gaps in research about the way stigma impacts those who have experienced sexual violence.
During Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Mellen spoke to BINJ.News about her work and reflections on the 2025 marathon.
Could you speak to your work on stigma? Particularly demographics, identity-wise, things like social media, how that might play a role. What are you seeing there?
The way that I see it and the way that some other researchers in literature [see it] is that in a way, sexual violence can be an enactment of other forms of stigma. So, if you are perpetrating sexual violence on someone you’re sort of fundamentally not seeing them as equal in their humanity to you, and that could be because of their gender, their sexual orientation, their race, their socioeconomic status, their age, or a combination of those things.
Mellen’s work, alongside preexisting research, reinforces that sexual violence does not occur at random. Certain identities experience higher risk, notably women and LGBTQ+ individuals. Other risk factors include age, with over half of assaults occurring before 18 years old. Mellen said the implications are that a major risk factor has to do with systemic power dynamics.
Stigma creates isolation, Mellen said. Someone who has experienced sexual violence will not only pull away from the general public and the perpetrator’s circle, but tend not to confide in even their own identity communities because of the guilt and shame stigma perpetuates. “It creates a form of trauma that can create a risk of that happening in a way that a car accident, natural disaster or even another interpersonal trauma like a mugging or a physical assault does not,” said Mellen.
When did you start working on this particular topic and what drew you to it?
A lot of the time when I talk to my patients about PTSD, they’ve only ever heard of it in the context of military service and so they’re surprised that they might have it related to something else, especially related to sexual trauma. … But we actually know from epidemiological data that exposure to sexual violence creates the biggest conditional risk for PTSD of any other form of trauma by a pretty substantial margin, sexual violence, being sexual assaulted, intimate partner violence, childhood sexual abuse.
After majoring in psychology during her undergrad at Middlebury College, she landed her first research assistantship at McLean Hospital around 2017, where much of her work involved collecting the mental health histories of patients. At the same time, the #MeToo movement was on the rise. “I was starting to receive a lot of disclosures around sexual trauma from people, especially first-time disclosures,” she said.
For many of these patients, their first time disclosing their trauma was to the then-23-year-old Mellen. Sometimes they had held onto these experiences for decades. “How awful to live with not just this, but with the secret of it,” Mellen said. “I started to wonder about whether stigma might be something that we could actually study and explore as it relates to sexual trauma.”
I saw last year you actually ran the marathon, right? Are you running again this year?
No, [laugh] God no … Twice in a row would be crazy. I did run track in college, but I was actually a pole vaulter, so I was a jumper, so no distance running. On my pole vault run up, you know, you’re running like 100 feet, and so to be going 26 miles is a big leap.
It was a longtime goal of hers to run the Boston Marathon for the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. Mellen had volunteered there after her undergrad. “It just felt like an organization that I wanted to put some material support behind, especially, given that even though I’m a researcher and a clinician, I think community partnerships are really huge.”
There is a really emotional, introspective level to running in general, and especially with such a rigorous training regimen. Can you speak to the intersection of that and the content of your work? What was it like to train for something that you had such a powerful goal for?
Being a trauma psychologist means that I work clinically with folks primarily who have PTSD or complex PTSD or trauma related dissociative disorders, almost all of whom have a history of sexual trauma on my case load right now. That is just such intense heart work and soul work, and then compared to that, my research is emotionally a little bit less intense, but not by a whole lot.
I live a lot in my head and in my thoughts and a little bit in my feelings and needed a way to have a productive outlet for that and running really worked, especially during my PhD. I think that gave me a lot of structure, a lot of ways to quiet down my mind a little bit to focus on things that are not my job and also like, especially in our current sociopolitical environment, to vent some of the rage that I can be experiencing on a regular basis in a way that doesn’t harm anybody. I think it also creates some meaning and community.
Take me back to the day of the marathon. How was it running the race?
It was such a special day. I think something that training … taught me is the way that I used to go about doing hard things is like: be as hard on myself and as rigid with myself as possible, and difficult input will equal excellent output. Becoming a clinician, especially a trauma psychologist, has taught me that doesn’t really work. For so many years, I was telling my patients that they need to practice flexibility and self-compassion, and it was only as I was trying to do these races to qualify for Boston … only after I started practicing some more of that flexibility and self-compassion was I actually able to get a little bit faster.
Come race day, Mellen didn’t care about her time. “It was really about just the experience of it,” she said. “To have a goal that took not only so many years to accomplish, but where I was a little bit fighting my inner demons in order to get there, and also for a charity that meant so much to me.”
She strategized a thought exercise for when the race got tough. “I made a list of 26 people who are really important to me, who have changed my life, who I’m really grateful for, and I kind of would meditate on each of those relationships in each mile,” she said. “I don’t think anybody gets anywhere, and I certainly didn’t get to the Boston Marathon finish line, without a lot of people to support me.”
There is a lot of discussion on how to teach people about assault as a thing that is going to happen as opposed to teaching people how to prevent it from happening in the first place.
There is a really interesting concept by Jennifer Freyd called institutional betrayal. Part of that concept is the idea that people can be really let down by the systems that we rely on to survive in a lot of circumstances, because it feels so awful to imagine that a system that we need can also be a system that lets us down. There’s also a concept of betrayal blindness where it’s really hard for humans … to hold up to the light the fact that people and structures that we need can also really betray and harm us.
Historically, those who experience assault often take on blame, Mellen said. The idea is often that “this happened to you because of something about you.” The mindset allows for a “cultural blindness to the reality of the situation.” She said it’s easier to explain away traumatic experiences rather than assess them systemically, not only for victims, but bystanders and perpetrators. As long as the blame is on the victim, “culturally we remain blind to [the perpetrator’s] culpability,” Mellen said. It’s excruciating to acknowledge the awful things that happen, but the consequence is that survivors “end up with this awful secret that they sort of end up holding alone,” Mellen said.
When we think about terms like survivor and victim, how do those feed into stigma, how do they reinforce it, or how do they deviate from it?
Most folks I work with prefer to just be like, “I am a person who has experienced X,” just kind of that fact-based language. Sometimes I work with folks who like the term survivor because it implies how much strength it takes to make it to the other side of something like this. Other folks I work with don’t like that term at all. Some people like victim because it acknowledges that they were wronged, which they were, and other people don’t like it because it has some implications around—I mean, I don’t think this is true—but weakness or it can sometimes be used as a pejorative, like “don’t play the victim.”
As a stigma researcher, Mellen understands the extraordinary power of language in its way to reinforce stigma or validate experiences and realities. “Something we know in the stigma literature broadly, not just sexual violence stigma, is that stigma is maintained through multiple reinforcing mechanisms.” What’s most important to Mellen is “using what actually feels right for that individual person and just validating their choice in that experience.” It’s always best to just ask.
You mentioned the current sociopolitical climate. As a professional, what do you do (besides running) to navigate the weight of that? What mindsets can people have to be as okay as possible?
Before I say what I’m going to say, there are many days I come home from work and I just have to cry or I just have to—my heart just gets broken and I just have to let it be broken. I can’t be effective at my job if I lose touch with my humanity, so it’s certainly not a situation where I’m just soldiering through by virtue of my perfect coping strategies.
[W]hen you spend all day thinking about trauma, it can make your world feel really small and really myopic and like you are like the sum total of your worst experiences. I think that the most touching and cool and interesting thing about my job is that it’s sort of my role to help people expand themselves and expand their sense of the world, to not push away the fact that trauma is there, but to incorporate the fact that there are miracles too … I’m trying to help people create space for both of those realities.
Mellen is inspired by imagery of the universe. “I kind of think that everybody is their own universe. So my job isn’t just the trauma part, it’s also the miracles part and I think I bring that into my life as well,” she said. “The things that are most humane about me, like my sensitivity and my gratitude and the fact that I have, you know, the list of 26 people, those are the things that actually fortify me most to go and talk about some of the most messed up things humanly possible all day long.”
The interview portion of this article was edited for clarity and length only.
