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livEastercon has a Hay lecture given by an actual scientist, and the BSFA instituted a talk by a social scientist to match this. This year's talk was by sociologist Dr Louise Livesey, about the politics of sexual abuse of children. The talk generated really a lot of discussion over the course of the con, and I'd like to carry on that discussion here. Please don't hate Dr Livesey because my summary doesn't do her talk justice; it was a very good talk and also a contentious one, and I wasn't taking notes and I'm not a sociologist.
The subject of the talk is what it is. It wasn't graphic, because it was mainly about the politics of how society reacts to accounts of child sexual abuse rather than the act itself, but still.
To summarize very crudely, Livesey's thesis was that there are two traditional frames for survivor accounts of sexual abuse of children: confession and testimony. Confession implies that talking about such an experience is an overwhelmingly terrible horrifying thing. Testimony implies that the only acceptable aim of describing an experience of abuse is to obtain justice against the perpetrator. Confession means everybody has to rush around panicking about the terribleness, and testimony means that the focus is determining to the highest possible degree of certainty exactly what happened. There's also an issue that these frames reflect badly on the survivor: confession implies guilt and a need for absolution, and there's the idea that having been molested as a child is shameful. Testimony means that, as notoriously happens, defence teams will do their utmost to question the reliability of the witness in order to avert the punishment that must follow if the accusations are true.
Livesey thus proposed an alternative mode: narrative. There ought to be a space to simply tell the story of what happened, a deeply unpleasant thing, certainly, but not a completely unspeakable thing completely outside all other paradigms of human experience. She mentioned that about 1 girl in 5 and one boy in 20 is molested as a child, which on one level is a horrifying statistic, but on another it seems fair to say that child sexual abuse is not actually so exceptional. Apparently something over three quarters of people molested as children do in fact disclose this at some point in their lives, but not necessarily in a going to the media to break a terrible scandal about how their life was completely ruined kind of way, nor in a seeking prosecution of the perpetrator kind of way. Just they tell people they know about something that happened to them.
Of those who don't disclose, it's assumed that the reason is because they are ashamed and feel damaged by what happened, but when survivors are surveyed, it's almost always because they fear they won't be believed. In fact, most people who do disclose... are not believed, so Livesey held that this fear is justified. It seems like the reason for non-belief is because people are assuming the only frames are confession and testimony. If child sexual abuse is the most unbearably terrible thing ever, people feel unable to even listen to an account of it. Or they may subconsciously judge that the speaker must be exaggerating, either because that means they don't have to accept that such a horrible thing happened to someone they know, or because they assume that anyone who went through something so devastatingly awful couldn't possibly be a normal, functional human being having a conversation. If disclosing child sexual abuse always means hunting down and punishing the evil paedophile, you have to start thinking about "beyond reasonable doubt" standards of proof. Also, if the listener has in their head an idea that a paedophile is the most terrible monster imaginable, they find it very hard to believe that a seemingly decent, socially adjusted, superficially pleasant person could possibly have done something so heinous. If someone's just telling a story about an unpleasant experience they had, they're a whole lot less likely to be retraumatized by someone they trusted not believing them.
Livesey focused on the Savile affair, partly because it's very much in the media right now, and partly because there's been some extensive studies of Savile's alleged victims. In line with the general view of survivors of child sexual abuse, most did tell someone when it happened, and most were not believed. Of those coming forward now the story has broken in the media, they are being forced into "testimonial" mode. People don't believe them because they didn't say anything until now (except they did, but nobody believed them), or because they are only in it for the fame and hope of financial compensation (which in fact hasn't been offered), or because they just aren't credible people (remember that headmistress who said that the pupils bringing accusations against Savile were "no angels"?) People don't believe them because Savile was a well-liked celebrity who made important contributions to society, so couldn't possibly have done something like that, or because it's unjust to posthumously accuse someone who can't have his day in court and should be presumed innocent.
She did this scary discourse analysis of The Sun and The Guardian's reporting of the accusations. The Sun came off much better: it tells human interest stories which largely show sympathy for the molested girls. The Guardian, on the other hand, either focuses entirely on Savile and doesn't mention any victims at all, or else makes the accusers look non-credible, portraying them as money- and attention-grabbing. It was only a very preliminary study, and some of the response to the lecture was about picking holes in the statistics there.
One of the ways that Livesey was controversial was that she advocated that, in narrative mode, anyone can hear a story of child sexual abuse; you don't need special training in child protection or helping someone to deal with a terrible trauma. You can just follow the basic common sense provisions of: give them a proper space to talk, listen respectfully, let them tell their own story as it seems to them even if it doesn't fit your preconceived ideas of what child sexual abuse is like, and believe them. You don't of course have to assume that believing them means going to the police right now, because for a start that might well not be what the person telling the story wants, and also you probably don't have good enough evidence to want to start that kind of train in motion. At the same time, she did point out that everybody has a moral and legal duty to report if they have any reason to believe that a child is being harmed. I felt she was a bit glib about simply trusting that if you report, the police, social services, children's charities etc would act proportionately and not start a massive investigation that would turn the life of both the child and the putative perpetrator upside-down without a good reason.
It was interesting to me how Livesey presented this material on a meta level. For a start, she followed her own advice, she simply talked about the topic in a matter-of-fact way with no disclaimers about how the material might be distressing, no pussy-footing around the topic. Very different to the ways that child sexual abuse is discussed in online feminist and social justice circles. In some ways Livesey was arguing that a culture of treating child sexual abuse as The Ultimate Horror protects the perpetrators; very few are the kind of "monsters" that people imagine paedophiles to be, so they get away with their crimes. And because the accusations are so horrible, any possible flaw in the victim's character or testimony is enough to protect them from any consequences, whether judicial or even social. But feminists insisting on trigger warnings and being very circumspect and respectful of the topic is aimed at protecting victims, yet may still contribute to the problem of the confession / testimony dichotomy.
Also she pre-empted the obvious objections. She said that she was mainly talking about sexual abuse of girls not because she thinks abuse of boys isn't important, but simply because that's her academic field. And because she thinks that misogyny has an important role to play in how this kind of stuff plays out in society. In fact very little she said seemed to me to be inapplicable to boys, but anyway, she laid her cards out up front. She also headed off the absolutely bog-standard response that if you automatically believe people claiming to have been molested, there is a danger of making false accusations. The whole point of the talk was that someone may simply be telling a story of their experience, not seeking police intervention or judicial punishment, so it doesn't make sense to apply a standard of "beyond reasonable doubt". In fact, if people would stop insisting on absolutely watertight proof before they even believed someone's story, it would be a lot more common to be able to get to the position of bringing cases to court where the accused would in fact have a proper chance to defend himself. And if one simply listened to the story, it might do the victim more good than haring off to punish the perpetrator.
One thing Livesey did which I think may not have been so strategically effective was that she blamed the bad situation where confession and testimony are the only modes on "neo-liberalism", illustrated with that infamous quote from Thatcher that
A more useful discussion arising from the talk was that someone said that they had had personal experience of someone making a disclosure of childhood sexual abuse which had later in fact turned out to be made up. Though as I believe is typical of false reports, they did not accuse an individual, just said that this had happened to them. So a reason for not believing accounts might not only be being brainwashed by the dominant cultural narrative, but one's own personal experience.
nanaya also linked to this article about living through rape which I think supports Livesey's points in many ways. The article talks about the harm that may come from treating rape (in general, not just child abuse, though interestingly several of Shane's examples refer to children's experiences) as the Ultimate Terrible destructive trauma which ruins your whole life. Unlike Livesey's primarily political talk, Shane's essay includes graphic descriptions of the exact anatomical details of some of the acts she's describing, again living up to her own view that this kind of thing isn't unspeakable, it is something that can be described in a matter-of-fact way.
Shane, more directly than Livesey, tackles the problem that if people can survive rape as an unpleasant experience and just get on with their lives, does that give an excuse to let rapists off lightly? She argues, I think sensibly, that violating someone's autonomy is a crime that should be taken seriously regardless of how well the victim copes with the aftermath of the attack. In some ways and in the right circumstances, people can be remarkably resilient; I know several survivors of the Nazi death camps or of extended torture as political prisoners who are extremely well-balanced, psychologically healthy people, for example. I also know people who have been raped and, like Shane, consider it an unpleasant experience they'd rather put behind them, as well as others who have been raped and still struggle with the aftermath. That doesn't make it in any way acceptable to brutalize people, and it also isn't intended to impute blame to people who do find it difficult to recover from trauma, the difference is not about moral strength but about being lucky enough to find yourself in the right circumstances with the right support.
One area where I do disagree with Shane is that she seems to have a very negative view of counselling. There is nothing wrong with seeking support from a trained professional to help you overcome a bad experience; getting counselling doesn't in itself mean you are allowing your whole life to be defined by your trauma and you are irreparably broken! I do agree with her, and if I understood her correctly I think Livesey would too, that if there is a single possible cultural narrative of how terrible it is to be raped, people trying to talk about their experiences don't get listened to, but instead the intended listener just imposes their expectations on the person telling the story. This may mean that they don't believe something so awful could really have happened, or it may mean that they respond in an exaggerated and unhelpful way and actively make things worse for someone who might otherwise have been coping pretty well.
So, in conclusion, if someone tells you they were sexually assaulted, you should at least default to believing them, and you should listen to what they actually say happened and how they feel about it, rather than assuming. But believing them doesn't necessarily mean you should get into a huge panic about how everything must be completely terrible, nor does it mean that you be in a rush to punish the alleged perpetrator. I don't know, does that seem like a helpful way of looking at things?
The subject of the talk is what it is. It wasn't graphic, because it was mainly about the politics of how society reacts to accounts of child sexual abuse rather than the act itself, but still.
To summarize very crudely, Livesey's thesis was that there are two traditional frames for survivor accounts of sexual abuse of children: confession and testimony. Confession implies that talking about such an experience is an overwhelmingly terrible horrifying thing. Testimony implies that the only acceptable aim of describing an experience of abuse is to obtain justice against the perpetrator. Confession means everybody has to rush around panicking about the terribleness, and testimony means that the focus is determining to the highest possible degree of certainty exactly what happened. There's also an issue that these frames reflect badly on the survivor: confession implies guilt and a need for absolution, and there's the idea that having been molested as a child is shameful. Testimony means that, as notoriously happens, defence teams will do their utmost to question the reliability of the witness in order to avert the punishment that must follow if the accusations are true.
Livesey thus proposed an alternative mode: narrative. There ought to be a space to simply tell the story of what happened, a deeply unpleasant thing, certainly, but not a completely unspeakable thing completely outside all other paradigms of human experience. She mentioned that about 1 girl in 5 and one boy in 20 is molested as a child, which on one level is a horrifying statistic, but on another it seems fair to say that child sexual abuse is not actually so exceptional. Apparently something over three quarters of people molested as children do in fact disclose this at some point in their lives, but not necessarily in a going to the media to break a terrible scandal about how their life was completely ruined kind of way, nor in a seeking prosecution of the perpetrator kind of way. Just they tell people they know about something that happened to them.
Of those who don't disclose, it's assumed that the reason is because they are ashamed and feel damaged by what happened, but when survivors are surveyed, it's almost always because they fear they won't be believed. In fact, most people who do disclose... are not believed, so Livesey held that this fear is justified. It seems like the reason for non-belief is because people are assuming the only frames are confession and testimony. If child sexual abuse is the most unbearably terrible thing ever, people feel unable to even listen to an account of it. Or they may subconsciously judge that the speaker must be exaggerating, either because that means they don't have to accept that such a horrible thing happened to someone they know, or because they assume that anyone who went through something so devastatingly awful couldn't possibly be a normal, functional human being having a conversation. If disclosing child sexual abuse always means hunting down and punishing the evil paedophile, you have to start thinking about "beyond reasonable doubt" standards of proof. Also, if the listener has in their head an idea that a paedophile is the most terrible monster imaginable, they find it very hard to believe that a seemingly decent, socially adjusted, superficially pleasant person could possibly have done something so heinous. If someone's just telling a story about an unpleasant experience they had, they're a whole lot less likely to be retraumatized by someone they trusted not believing them.
Livesey focused on the Savile affair, partly because it's very much in the media right now, and partly because there's been some extensive studies of Savile's alleged victims. In line with the general view of survivors of child sexual abuse, most did tell someone when it happened, and most were not believed. Of those coming forward now the story has broken in the media, they are being forced into "testimonial" mode. People don't believe them because they didn't say anything until now (except they did, but nobody believed them), or because they are only in it for the fame and hope of financial compensation (which in fact hasn't been offered), or because they just aren't credible people (remember that headmistress who said that the pupils bringing accusations against Savile were "no angels"?) People don't believe them because Savile was a well-liked celebrity who made important contributions to society, so couldn't possibly have done something like that, or because it's unjust to posthumously accuse someone who can't have his day in court and should be presumed innocent.
She did this scary discourse analysis of The Sun and The Guardian's reporting of the accusations. The Sun came off much better: it tells human interest stories which largely show sympathy for the molested girls. The Guardian, on the other hand, either focuses entirely on Savile and doesn't mention any victims at all, or else makes the accusers look non-credible, portraying them as money- and attention-grabbing. It was only a very preliminary study, and some of the response to the lecture was about picking holes in the statistics there.
One of the ways that Livesey was controversial was that she advocated that, in narrative mode, anyone can hear a story of child sexual abuse; you don't need special training in child protection or helping someone to deal with a terrible trauma. You can just follow the basic common sense provisions of: give them a proper space to talk, listen respectfully, let them tell their own story as it seems to them even if it doesn't fit your preconceived ideas of what child sexual abuse is like, and believe them. You don't of course have to assume that believing them means going to the police right now, because for a start that might well not be what the person telling the story wants, and also you probably don't have good enough evidence to want to start that kind of train in motion. At the same time, she did point out that everybody has a moral and legal duty to report if they have any reason to believe that a child is being harmed. I felt she was a bit glib about simply trusting that if you report, the police, social services, children's charities etc would act proportionately and not start a massive investigation that would turn the life of both the child and the putative perpetrator upside-down without a good reason.
It was interesting to me how Livesey presented this material on a meta level. For a start, she followed her own advice, she simply talked about the topic in a matter-of-fact way with no disclaimers about how the material might be distressing, no pussy-footing around the topic. Very different to the ways that child sexual abuse is discussed in online feminist and social justice circles. In some ways Livesey was arguing that a culture of treating child sexual abuse as The Ultimate Horror protects the perpetrators; very few are the kind of "monsters" that people imagine paedophiles to be, so they get away with their crimes. And because the accusations are so horrible, any possible flaw in the victim's character or testimony is enough to protect them from any consequences, whether judicial or even social. But feminists insisting on trigger warnings and being very circumspect and respectful of the topic is aimed at protecting victims, yet may still contribute to the problem of the confession / testimony dichotomy.
Also she pre-empted the obvious objections. She said that she was mainly talking about sexual abuse of girls not because she thinks abuse of boys isn't important, but simply because that's her academic field. And because she thinks that misogyny has an important role to play in how this kind of stuff plays out in society. In fact very little she said seemed to me to be inapplicable to boys, but anyway, she laid her cards out up front. She also headed off the absolutely bog-standard response that if you automatically believe people claiming to have been molested, there is a danger of making false accusations. The whole point of the talk was that someone may simply be telling a story of their experience, not seeking police intervention or judicial punishment, so it doesn't make sense to apply a standard of "beyond reasonable doubt". In fact, if people would stop insisting on absolutely watertight proof before they even believed someone's story, it would be a lot more common to be able to get to the position of bringing cases to court where the accused would in fact have a proper chance to defend himself. And if one simply listened to the story, it might do the victim more good than haring off to punish the perpetrator.
One thing Livesey did which I think may not have been so strategically effective was that she blamed the bad situation where confession and testimony are the only modes on "neo-liberalism", illustrated with that infamous quote from Thatcher that
there's no such thing as society. In other words, sexual abuse is seen as something perpetrated by an evil individual on an individual child, making it impossible to see any kind of social pattern to explain why this kind of thing is so shockingly common. And also reinforcing the situation where the person telling about their experiences has to be an absolutely impeccable, perfect witness in every way in order to be believed at all. From what I could gather from the conversations I was having about this later on during the con, this basically just alienated most of the audience because they assumed she was just talking left-wing sociology dogma. I don't think her argument was really strengthened by saying "because neo-liberalism"; without that, she contended that there is a problem because too many children are abused, and nobody believes them when they disclose this, and here's what I propose we can do to improve this. People can get behind that (or critique it on its merits) without getting entrenched in tribal political positions.
A more useful discussion arising from the talk was that someone said that they had had personal experience of someone making a disclosure of childhood sexual abuse which had later in fact turned out to be made up. Though as I believe is typical of false reports, they did not accuse an individual, just said that this had happened to them. So a reason for not believing accounts might not only be being brainwashed by the dominant cultural narrative, but one's own personal experience.
nanaya also linked to this article about living through rape which I think supports Livesey's points in many ways. The article talks about the harm that may come from treating rape (in general, not just child abuse, though interestingly several of Shane's examples refer to children's experiences) as the Ultimate Terrible destructive trauma which ruins your whole life. Unlike Livesey's primarily political talk, Shane's essay includes graphic descriptions of the exact anatomical details of some of the acts she's describing, again living up to her own view that this kind of thing isn't unspeakable, it is something that can be described in a matter-of-fact way. Shane, more directly than Livesey, tackles the problem that if people can survive rape as an unpleasant experience and just get on with their lives, does that give an excuse to let rapists off lightly? She argues, I think sensibly, that violating someone's autonomy is a crime that should be taken seriously regardless of how well the victim copes with the aftermath of the attack. In some ways and in the right circumstances, people can be remarkably resilient; I know several survivors of the Nazi death camps or of extended torture as political prisoners who are extremely well-balanced, psychologically healthy people, for example. I also know people who have been raped and, like Shane, consider it an unpleasant experience they'd rather put behind them, as well as others who have been raped and still struggle with the aftermath. That doesn't make it in any way acceptable to brutalize people, and it also isn't intended to impute blame to people who do find it difficult to recover from trauma, the difference is not about moral strength but about being lucky enough to find yourself in the right circumstances with the right support.
One area where I do disagree with Shane is that she seems to have a very negative view of counselling. There is nothing wrong with seeking support from a trained professional to help you overcome a bad experience; getting counselling doesn't in itself mean you are allowing your whole life to be defined by your trauma and you are irreparably broken! I do agree with her, and if I understood her correctly I think Livesey would too, that if there is a single possible cultural narrative of how terrible it is to be raped, people trying to talk about their experiences don't get listened to, but instead the intended listener just imposes their expectations on the person telling the story. This may mean that they don't believe something so awful could really have happened, or it may mean that they respond in an exaggerated and unhelpful way and actively make things worse for someone who might otherwise have been coping pretty well.
So, in conclusion, if someone tells you they were sexually assaulted, you should at least default to believing them, and you should listen to what they actually say happened and how they feel about it, rather than assuming. But believing them doesn't necessarily mean you should get into a huge panic about how everything must be completely terrible, nor does it mean that you be in a rush to punish the alleged perpetrator. I don't know, does that seem like a helpful way of looking at things?
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-03 12:42 pm (UTC)The concept of expected narratives is a really interesting one. I've often thought that treating something as "OMG most terrible thing ever" is useful in getting people to take it seriously at all, but may easily make it harder to talk about.
And it's a good point that expecting to treat someone's experience as an accusation may be more likely to trigger the awful "what if it's false" response, when that may or may not be what they actually wanted as step #1.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-03 04:46 pm (UTC)But I do agree that excessive focus on the terribleness does make it harder to talk about issues and experiences that are important to talk about. And yes, jumping straight from an account to an accusation is exactly why everyone wants to talk about false accusations all the time.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-03 12:49 pm (UTC)But I think the idea of just listening rather than immediately demanding evidence that would convince a jury is sound - though that applies over so very many areas.
*Though historians are wont to say this of sociologists on just about anything!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-03 04:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-03 01:19 pm (UTC)There's evidence, separately, from both psychology and sociolinguistics that narrative is a powerful tool that we all use (in fact, that we all need to use) to make sense of our lives. Those two dovetail in this wonderful book by Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps, which remains one of my favourite books my field (the latter) has ever produced. It's both thoroughly academic and highly accessible, and I think you might like it if you felt like tracking it down.
-J
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-03 01:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-03 04:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-03 01:58 pm (UTC)(1) Interesting that people were focussed on picking holes in the statistics of reporting in the Sun vs the Guardian - in terms of, I wonder how much of that is "But that's our paper and everyone knows the Sun is terribly, so it must be wrong!"
(2) I am unconvinced by the portrayal of social justice/feminist circles "pussy-footing around the issue", or being very circumspect: it's in feminist and social justice circles that I do tend to see the narrative mode employed. And, yes, it is often prefaced by trigger warnings or content notes, but I don't think "narrative" and "straightforward" and "be aware that we will discuss Topic X" are mutually exclusive.
(3) Yes, counselling is great.
(4) Yes, listening and believing - and respecting people's autonomy and decision-making, and offering support but not imposing one's own view of What It Must Have Been Like, whether in the direction of "an unfortunate misunderstanding" or "THE WORST THING EVER CALL THE POLICE".
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-03 05:27 pm (UTC)1) I think the picking holes in the stats thing was partly partisanship for lefty broadsheets over tabloids. But it struck me as also partisanship against sociology, people were coming across as being annoyed that qualitative research and discourse analysis aren't physics.
2) I should be clear that "pussy-footing" was my characterization, not Livesey's. It really struck me that the way she talked would be considered the height of bad manners for SJ-engaged people. She didn't apologize for talking about a disturbing topic, she didn't give any sort of advance warning that she was about to mention something distressing or discuss a horrifying statistic or incident, she just took a completely matter-of-fact, academic tone. I mean, her talk had "sexual violence" in the title but I didn't know until she started speaking that it was going to be about child abuse.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not particularly intending to change my practice of making a note that a post I'm about to write or a link I'm referring to discusses sexual assault or child abuse or whatever. (I do content notes rather than trigger warnings because I don't want to put too much of a value judgement on what should or indeed shouldn't be triggering.) It's certainly possible to be straightforward and non-melodramatic while still giving people the choice of whether to read something; Captain Awkward does this rather well, for example. But I've also seen quite enough drama when someone posts an account of their experience of sexual assault and half a dozen people instantly jump in with condemnation for not using a cut and/or trigger warning. That's most certainly not helpful to the person telling their story, and I don't know whether it's helpful to random passers-by either.
I entirely agree on 3 and 4, thank you for stating those ideas so succinctly.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-03 08:15 pm (UTC)To me, it does.
Perhaps there is also the additional factor that the people we tend to meet these days, folks our age or not much younger, already reached relative positions of power and privilege; treating them as helpless victims waiting to be avenged belies everything they have been and done from that point onward.
I guess I'm saying this in light of what a friend of mine here told me, namely that she was molested by a family member when she was a child.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-04 08:35 am (UTC)I think one weakness in Livesey's talk (understandably, since she had to convey a whole lot in an hour to an audience she had to presume to be ignorant of her field) was that she didn't entirely distinguish between adults talking about what happened in their childhood, and children who are right now in danger. It seems like the response to a 30-year-old telling you that when she was 15 her uncle molested her has to be somewhat different to the situation of an actual 15-year-old saying that her uncle makes her do things she feels uncomfortable about. I can see that the same principles of treating the disclosure as primarily a narrative rather than a legal testimony might apply, but it's less clear-cut in the latter case.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-04 03:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-04 08:36 am (UTC)