New Feminist Stories of Child Sexual Abuse

Sexual Scripts and Dangerous Dialogue

Paula Reavey, Sam Warner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134512225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

The international feminist contributors to this book look through the lens of poststructuralism at how child sexual abuse is differently represented and understood in the populist, academic, clinical, media and legal contexts. Reworking earlier feminist analyses, they show how child sexual abuse is not just about gender and power but also about class, race and sexuality. The first, theoretical section of the book critiques normative theories of the 'effects' of abuse, explores the impact and consequences of feminist interventions and critically examines the potential usefulness of a feminist post-stucturalist approach. In the second part, these understandings are applied to specific arenas of practice with the aim of providing a framework for critical intervention and alternative and better ways of working with child sexual abuse.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Paula Reavey and Sam Warner

This book is about women and child sexual abuse. It is about the ways in which women and child sexual abuse are talked about, how their relationship is understood and the multiple practices this gives rise to. This book is also about dismantling taken-for-granted truths. It is about daring to ask questions concerning the constructed nature of child sexual abuse; how it is produced, rather than merely represented in the ways in which we speak about it (Reavey and Warner, 2001). In this book we demonstrate that child sexual abuse is never transparent in terms of what it means: either as an event itself or in the memory of it. It is something that, as survivors, theoreticians or practitioners, we make sense of in the re-telling, and how we make sense of it shifts according to the contexts in which we speak, with whom we speak with, and who we speak about. It shapes the ways we see ourselves, the way we view others and it structures what we decide our actions around child sexual abuse should be. As such, we argue that child sexual abuse is a matter of translation, debate and politics, and not simply a taken-for-granted fact. Our aim is to enter the debate in order to untangle some of the complex ways we translate stories of child sexual abuse through, and into, personal and social politics. This book, then, provides a sustained and critical engagement with those stories of child sexual abuse that shape our sense of reality and the actions these give rise to.

Sexual scripts and feminist politics: social economies of women and child sexual abuse

It is self-evident that child sexual abuse takes place in a socio-cultural setting (Hacking, 1995), wherein concepts such as ‘truth’ (about who is guilty or innocent and the aftermath of abuse) are subject to a wide range of interpretations. As argued, this is dependent on who is doing the speaking and the position she (or he) is speaking from. Is the speaker invested with authority and expertise, and by what means is this authority and expertise warranted? In order to elaborate how authority is conferred, and which understandings are most readily accepted, we need to directly address the socio-cultural settings in which such judgements are made. We do not believe that there is an objective standard, by which all understandings can be judged, because any such standard is subjective to the culture that defines it. Indeed, such culturally sanctioned ways of knowing are themselves part of the mechanisms through which specific cultures can be recognised and their dominance and subjugation of other cultures can be sustained.

Hence, we are interested in exploring how particular versions of reality, in respect of child sexual abuse (Warner, 2000a), are maintained through the cultural privileging of particular, yet widely available, sexual scripts that position social actors in familiar ways. Specifically, we are interested in the ways that discourses (ways of speaking) produce particular versions of womanhood/femininity that act to reproduce power relations and sustain social hierarchies.

This involves making visible the often-unacknowledged assumptions about sex, gender and childhood that are drawn on to sustain dominant accounts of child sexual abuse. This means socially situating such narratives in order to ward against the instillation of universal and all-pervasive world-views. When we do this we are able to contextualise the way professional and populist understandings about child sexual abuse impact on how sexual abuse can be recognised, and its effects experienced. It allows us to explore how we hear these experiences and what kind of expert and everyday language is used to reconstruct, not just the past but also the present ‘effects’ of such abuse. Is the language we use, for example, mindful of not just the ‘abusive event’ itself but the cultural context in which survivors live their lives? Acknowledging the cultural specificity of language domains promotes an awareness of how categories such as ‘woman’ are socially produced and culturally bound. When investigating child sexual abuse it is, therefore, important to examine wider sexual scripts that frame the identifications women may make with, not only the original abuse(s), but their identifications as women living in a heterosexualised society. Hence, we maintain a clear commitment to an explicitly feminist agenda. In order to situate the sexual scripts that we draw on to explicate our understandings of ‘the reality’ of child sexual abuse, we locate ourselves in our own histories of feminism.

It is now thirty years since second wave feminists forced the issue of sexual violence onto the political agenda, making clear the connection between male privilege and the abuse of women and children. Through the various arenas of consciousness-raising groups and self-help forums, women began to narrate their own lives and to articulate their own experiences of sexual exploitation. Women drew on their own personal experiences of violence in order to illustrate the connection between individual life histories and wider gender inequalities. The fact that sexual abuse was a common feature of women's life stories highlighted the need to view issues of abuse as a political/societal problem rather than a private event confined to a few ‘unfortunate’ individuals. Feminists argued that the sexual exploitation of children generally, and girls specifically, is endemic to all patriarchal societies that prioritise the needs of men in public as well as private settings. In emphasising the effects of patriarchy on all women and promoting the need to speak with one voice, feminists were able to marshal an attack on a social world that was founded on male privilege and maintained through, amongst other things, (enforced) female silence.

Feminists, therefore, enjoined women to participate in the (organised) Women's Liberation Movement in order to struggle against male oppression and to break the silence around abuse. It is this history of activism and theorisation by women in Western cultures that has shaped current understandings of child sexual abuse and the many practices these give rise to. This is not only in terms of the influence this history has had on women writing in this book (indeed, many of us have been part of this movement), but more generally in terms of the influence this has had on the diverse and dispersed cultures in which we variously reside. These women ensured that sex and gender politics could no longer be entirely marginalised and both self-help and professional services made some moves to take real-life oppression seriously. Yet, the Women's Liberation Movement foundered.

For some women in Western cultures the early gains made by feminists led to a premature belief that gender equality had arrived. For other women, inequality was still all too real. Indeed, whilst the Women's Liberation Movements around the (Westernised) world had found their strength in a shared belief in a common identity and common cause, similarity had become over-determined. Many women within, and outside of, Western cultures felt misunderstood, marginalised and ultimately excluded from the very movement that sought to represent them (see Warner, 2000b). Speaking ‘as women’ was no longer an easy solution for addressing social inequality, as patriarchy could no longer be considered the primary social oppression and women struggled with their troubled and troubling relationships with each other. It was time to find new ways of speaking about gender and abuse that could still recognise commonality, but that never closes down difference nor predetermines political strategy. It was in this context that some feminists, at the end of the twentieth century, turned to post-structuralism to fashion new ways of theorising difference and commonality.

This book is about these new narratives. They are new in as much as they are intimately tied to our own specific historical and geopolitical moment and so are nascent and evolving. But their newness is also illusionary, as they are rooted in our various, at times conflicting, histories of womanhood. There may no longer be a movement of women that can be spoken about, but it is the interventions that women have made in theory and practice that provide the foundation for our current actions. Without reference to our pasts we lose sense of our achievements and lose sight of all that we have learnt (Warner, 2000b). This is why we do not call for a rejection of feminist politics. We still believe that emancipation and equality are useful goals – however variable and socially specific emancipation and equality may be.

Dangerous dialogues: speaking between feminism and post-structuralism

We recognise the role that feminists have played in ensuring that child sexual abuse can be spoken about and its effects addressed. We note that, in Western cultures, ‘sex’ is now readily acknowledged as a significant context in which children are abused. What was once depicted as a marginal concern to ‘feminists’ is now a central issue in the mainstream and that professionals have recuperated what was a political social agenda into a more individual, therapeutic one. We do not deny that child sexual abuse is prevalent nor that it can have devastating effects, but we do challenge the too-ready presumption of inevitable harm and the narrowing of concern that this has given rise to. As such, we maintain a (feminist) commitment to ensuring that concerns about ‘the personal’ effects of child sexual abuse do not restrict our concerns about ‘the political’ ramifications of it. At the same time, we recognise that feminists have been in danger of replacing one truth totality with another totalising story of patriarchal privilege. We argue that abuse, power, gender and sex are fragmentary and that they exist in a multiple array of knowledges, practices and strategies. There can never be, therefore, a final account of what they are or how they correspond to each other. Rather, as post-structuralism suggests, our concern is with how individuals come to be known through discursive practices, rather than claiming to be able to provide an objective account of who these individuals really are.

If feminism is to remain relevant then it must engage with the specific as the impact of feminist theories and practices will always be socially mediated and historically located. As such, feminism can no longer make claim to being the truth-sayer about child sexual abuse, as what is ‘true’ can never be absolute. So if we are suggesting that truth is always relative are we then saying that child sexual abuse is a myth or that women's stories of abuse are mere fictions? Is this book then a backlash against previous feminist work or a denial of women's lived experience? The simple answer is ‘no’. All of the authors in this book share the conviction that these voices are real, and that child sexual abuse can give rise to distress, both in the short and long term. Yet, what we experience and talk about as ‘real abuse’ and the forms that our distress may take in relation to it, are already constructed through language. In order to tease apart what we ‘know’ about child sexual abuse and its ‘effects’ we need to revisit existing theories of power, experience and identity.

We draw on recent developments in post-structuralist theory to enable a more critical reading of women and child sexual abuse: to do more than simply articulate women's experience but to theorise why particular experiences are raised or ignored and what institutions and institutional practices these invite and sustain (Foucault, 1978). As argued, we need to be mindful of our own desires to circumscribe want counts as the truth. Hence, rather than situating power in a fixed system structured around patriarchy, we view power as a complex of knowledges that, although reified through repetition, ultimately remain unstable. Thus, our concern is with those forms of knowledge (professional and everyday) that claim to be able to speak the truth and consequently fix identities as a result – this does not reside in one place, therefore, but in a multitude of private and public spaces. And such claims to truth are powerful precisely because they exhibit ‘an ability to hide [their] own mechanism[s]’ (Foucault, 1978: 86). This is about making our own ways of understanding and the positions from which we speak explicit.

Our aim in this book, then, is to come together, as women, to articulate new feminist stories about women and child sexual abuse. We do not presume to speak, with one voice, for all women. Rather, our aim is to continue debating and arguing in order to illuminate how women's lives are regulated through the particular ways we are enjoined to theorise child sexual abuse and its effects. Our strategies are local and specific and never final. Hence, whilst all the authors share a feminist orientation and commitment, the forms and application of this commitment are varied. Our interventions into, and our dialogues with, feminist politics, post-structuralist theories, mainstream and everyday practices are dangerous because we are no longer prepared to rely on received wisdom (even when from feminism) to justify our actions.

This book aims to contribute to a continuing critical engagement with academic, professional, activist and everyday practices around, and understandings of, women and child sexual abuse. We argue that if critique is to be sustained, then political action can nowhere be presumed in advance (see Butler, 1990). We aim to contribute to the ongoing development of critical practices in respect of child sexual abuse. We maintain a commitment to the emancipatory politics that feminism speaks of. However, we note that although ‘structural change is important … it is conceptual change that is revolutionary’ (Warner, 2000a: 9). Our introduction of post-structuralist ideas into feminist debates is an act of politics that is about furthering this revolution. Our aim is to disrupt mainstream understandings of child sexual abuse that continue to rely on and, thereby, reproduce structural inequalities. We view gender and power as mutable terms rather than concrete and invariant objects. Part of our aim, then, is to deconstruct not only psychological and sociological knowledges about child sexual abuse, but also feminist ones. This reflects a shared commitment to socially situating the issue of child sexual abuse such that issues of gender and power cannot be separated from those of class, race and sexuality.

This book systematically explores the ways in which recent feminist and post-structuralist practices have converged to illuminate the issue of child sexual abuse in a wide variety of theoretical and practical arenas. We draw on our varied experiences, as academics, clinicians and/or activists across (some of) the world, to interrogate child sexual abuse in terms of its representation and understanding within populist, academic, clinical, legal and media contexts. Post-structuralism, like feminism, also takes many forms and it is the sustained and evolving dialogue between these areas of theorising which locate this book and which give rise to its particular contribution regarding the issue of child sexual abuse. We recognise that there are multiple ways in which women and child sexual abuse can be understood and their utility is provisionally located in specific historical and geopolitical contexts. The authors speak from a range of discursive and actual locations around the world and our writing reflects this. This is not a corporate body of work, but a selected sample of the various ways we have taken up ideas from feminism and post-structuralism to fashion our different stories about women and child sexual abuse.

The chapters

The book is organised into two main sections. In Part I we explore the cultural and political landscape of child sexual abuse in both Western and so-called non-Western contexts.

The aim is to examine the multiple ways in which child sexual abuse is spoken about within, and between, different societal and cultural contexts in order to elaborate what is constructed as the relevant field of interest. The authors variously demonstrate the particular formations of authority and authenticity that are implicated in regulating different cultural understandings and practices in respect of child sexual abuse. The chapters move from discussions regarding the ways radical aspects of feminism can be undermined within Westernised cultures to considering the ways dominant Westernised ideologies regarding childhood, sex and gender have been used to structure discussions about child sexual abuse across the world. The authors resist the globalising of theory through specific discussions of child sexual abuse within an African context and with respect to critiquing dominant understandings within Western cultures regarding the nature and status of memories of abuse and populist action around child sexual abuse. Consideration is also given to the potential for non-Western theories and practices to impact on, and to inform, Western approaches to addressing the aftermath of child sexual abuse.

In Part II we trace the discursive effects of these wider cultural and political narratives through the various contexts in which the effects of child sexual abuse are theorised and around which interventions in the lives of women are structured. Central to this analysis is an examination of psychological and (some second wave) feminist constructions of enduring ‘harm’ which is said to follow episodes of child sexual abuse. The authors map out the various trajectories that narratives of harm can take in shaping lived-experiences of child sexual abuse. Specifically the authors discuss normative assumptions regarding child development, sexuality and mental (dis)order that are implicated in Western narratives of harm. Consideration is then given to how narratives of survival can work to destabilise narratives of harm, but still install naturalised and global representations of womanhood. Finally, the authors provide insight into the ways in which traditional approaches to understanding harm can be disrupted, challenged and reworked in practice, using alternative clinical/therapeutic models founded on feminist post-structuralist agendas.

Part I: exploring the cultural and political landscape of child sexual abuse

Chris Atmore opens this section of the book by exploring the ways in which we – as women/feminists engaged in work around sexual abuse are seen and represented in wider culture. By drawing on her own lived experience of recent political, intellectual and geographical migration (from New Zealand to Australia), she explores how changes in feminist theorising and activism around sexual violence have led to a growing reluctance by some to acknowledge the still radical potential of feminist politics. She illuminates the ways in which radical feminism has been characterised as being terminally essentialist and, hence, outmoded in our increasingly ‘postmodern’ world. She argues that this has occasioned a too-ready dismissal of what was radical and subversive about feminist work, and which may still be relevant today. She concludes that we need to maintain our relationship, however ambivalent, with feminism's ‘restless undead’ who offer a trope that provides a context in which to verbalise our enduring relationship (and fascination?) with sex and violence.

In the next chapter, Erica Burman elaborates critiques of identity to consider how pervasive Westernised notions of subjectivity mediate the territory of childhood generally and child sexual abuse specifically. Erica explores some of the political consequences that developmental and psychological theories of maturation have for children who have been sexually abused. She examines unacknowledged assumptions in these theories, regarding gender, authenticity and naturalness which sediment childhood as a ‘special’ state and which are implicated in how child sexual abuse and its effects are understood. She demonstrates that children and childhood are, in fact, socially constituted within multiple institutional relationships (such as those involving the family, school and healthcare) that vary within and between different cultural contexts. She argues that notions of ‘development’ are prescriptive, rather than descriptive and that they represent moral judgements regarding what an ‘ideal’ child is, which serve to regulate all ‘other’ children (whether abused, neglected, or from the so-called Third World). Erica concludes that the political and economic landscape (however fragmented) must be taken into account if the specificities of child sexual abuse are to be understood.

Ann Levett extends this critique to open up for debate the role that Western cultural imperialism plays in regulating how child sexual abuse is spoken about, not only in Western contexts but in African countries as well. She explores how Anglo-American understandings of child sexual abuse and its ‘effects’ are depicted as being able to speak to ‘all’ individuals, regardless of cultural context. Ann argues for mo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Exploring the cultural and political landscape of child sexual abuse
• 2 Feminism's restless undead The radical/lesbian/victim theorist and conflicts over sexual violence against children and women
• 3 Childhood, sexual abuse and contemporary political subjectivities
• 4 Problems of cultural imperialism in the study of child sexual abuse
• 5 Traumatic revisions Remembering abuse and the politics of forgiveness
• 6 Creating discourses of ‘false memory' Media coverage and production dynamics
• 7 The vigilant(e) parent and the paedophile The News of the World campaign 2000 and the contemporary governmentality of child sexual abuse
• PART II How we theorise and intervene in the lives of women who have experienced child sexual abuse
• 8 The ‘harm' story in childhood sexual abuse Contested understandings, disputed knowledges
• 9 When past meets present to produce a sexual ‘other' Examining professional and everyday narratives of child sexual abuse and sexuality
• 10 Diagnosing distress and reproducing disorder Women, child sexual abuse and ‘borderline personality disorder'
• 11 Writing the effects of sexual abuse Interrogating the possibilities and pitfalls of using clinical psychology expertise for a critical justice agenda
• 12 Working at being survivors Identity, gender and participation in self-help groups
• 13 Disrupting identity through Visible Therapy A feminist post-structuralist approach to working with women who have experienced child sexual abuse
• Index