Understanding Disclosures: Adult Women's Experiences of Disclosing Childhood Sexual Violences

by Louise Livesey BA(Hons), MA A thesis in partial fulfilment for the degree of PhD Submitted March 2002

School of Sociology and Social Policy University of Surrey Roehampton Southlands College 80 Roehampton Lane London SW15 5SL

UNIVERSITY OF SURREY

Understanding Disclosures:
Adult Women's Experiences of Disclosing Childhood Sexual Violences
Abstract Drawing upon qualitative testimonies and in-depth interviews with 10 women who have experienced childhood sexual violences, this thesis examines womens experiences of disclosing childhood sexual violences over the life-course. It pays particular attention to the sorts of responses women received when they disclose to others. The thesis challenges the conceptions of disclosure in academic / practitioner literature as being synonymous with first disclosures or disclosures by children. The thesis analyses the nature of disclosures and the assumptions previously made about disclosures as both event and narrative. In particular it questions the idea that there are universal good and bad responses to disclosures and argues for a movement towards appropriateness of responses. Womens stories about disclosures, including the responses they received, are influenced by cultural narratives about childhood sexual violences. This work proposes a new understanding of disclosures based on an acknowledgement that storytelling is an everyday activity. As such the nature of disclosure, narrative and language is considered alongside responses to disclosures, the nature of judgement, the allocation of responsibility and the concept of normality. The thesis develops some understandings of the nature and role of cultural narratives and patterns of disclosure over the life-course before suggesting a new direction in thinking about disclosures and responses to them. Finally the thesis raises questions for support services and relevant professionals working with adult women survivors.

Acknowledgements
I would like, first of all, to acknowledge the massive debt of gratitude I owe to those women who invited me into their lives by volunteering to participate in this study. Without Alice, Claudette, Debbie, Elizabeth, Ellie, Lisa, Loa, Lucy, Samantha, Silvia and Tiha this thesis could never have been written. I feel very fortunate to have met so many wonderful, inspiring, courageous and forthright women in the process of doing this research. Particular thanks must go to Tiha who has also become an inspirational friend and muse during this work and to whom I owe a massive debt of gratitude for welcoming me into her life, her home and her thoughts as we discussed the progress and the arguments in this thesis. I would also like to thank my supervision team for their guidance. Dr Lorraine Radford, Professor Jen Coates and Professor Pat Mahony have between them seen me through the stages of this PhD. I would also like to thank Linda Wilson of the Social Research Unit for her tireless work and guidance through the paperwork connected with this thesis and Linda Clapham for her support in the Research Office. Amongst other colleagues I would like to thank Josie Fraser, Steven Lize, Darren O'Byrne and all the women on the postgrad-women's mailing list and those involved in the Women's Studies Network (UK) Association for their unfailing support. I would also like to thank everyone on the MA Women's Studies course, tutors and students, who gave me the confidence to get here. Finally to those friends who have offered their support, intellect and generous access to their beverages - all my thanks. To Tam who convinced me that the application was a good idea in the first place! To Pam and Keith, Andrew and Eleanor, John, Madeline, Carolyne, Alison amd Kathryn. And to Simon who, perhaps more than anyone, went through the trials and tribulations of this thesis as much as I did and who still makes a great cup of tea.

Finally this thesis is dedicated to the memory of Susan Pearson. A great friend, confidante and fellow researcher whom I missed greatly on the final stages of this journey.

Contents
ABSTRACT..............................................................................................................................................2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS....................................................................................................................3 CONTENTS.............................................................................................................................................4 INDEX OF TABLES...............................................................................................................................5 INDEX OF FIGURES.............................................................................................................................6 CHAPTER ONE - INTRODUCTION...................................................................................................7 1.1 LOCATIONS, IDENTIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCES 1.2 PLAN OF THE THESIS 1.3 NOTES ON SCOPE AND LANGUAGE OF THESIS 1.4 NOTE: ON THE USE OF FIELDWORK DATA 7 10 13 18

CHAPTER TWO - CHILDHOOD SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND DISCLOSURE: WHAT THE LITERATURE TELLS US..............................................................................................................................................20 2.1 STRUCTURE OF THIS CHAPTER 20 2.2 THE BACKGROUND LITERATURE PROBLEMS AND ISSUES 20 2.3 PREVALENCE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF CHILDHOOD SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN THE UNITED KINGDOM....................24 Abuser Relationship with the Victim..............................................................................................30 Duration of abuse in years.............................................................................................................32 2.4 AFTER EFFECTS AND PERCEPTIONS OF CHILDHOOD SEXUAL VIOLENCE 35 2.5 CONSTRUCTING WOMEN WHO HAVE EXPERIENCED CHILDHOOD SEXUAL VIOLENCES 41 2.6 DISCLOSURE OF CHILDHOOD SEXUAL VIOLENCE THE LITERATURE 48 2.7 CONCLUSIONS THE STATE OF THE LITERATURE 53 CHAPTER THREE - NARRATIVE APPROACHES TO DISCLOSURE.....................................58 3.1 STRUCTURE OF THIS CHAPTER 3.2 NARRATIVE AND STORYTELLING 3.3THE USE OF NARRATIVE IN SOCIAL RESEARCH 3.4 WOMENS RELATIONSHIP TO NARRATIVE 3.5 DISCLOSURE AS NARRATIVE AND NARRATIVES OF DISCLOSURE 3.6 DISCLOSURE AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY 3.7DISCLOSURE AND TESTIMONY 3.8 DISCLOSURE AND CONFESSION 3.9 THE NATURE OF DISCLOSURE AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, CONFESSION AND TESTIMONY 3.10 THE PROBLEMS OF USING NARRATIVE STORIES 3.11 CONCLUSIONS 58 58 64 67 69 72 76 78 82 85 87

CHAPTER FOUR - TOWARDS A NEW THEORISING OF DISCLOSURE...............................88 4.1 STRUCTURE OF THE CHAPTER 88 4.2 PREVIOUS UNDERSTANDINGS OF DISCLOSURE OF CHILDHOOD SEXUAL VIOLENCE 88 4.3 CULTURAL NARRATIVES AND CHILDHOOD SEXUAL VIOLENCE 90 4.4 PROFESSIONALISATION 93 4.5 FEMINIST WORK TOWARDS A NEW THEORY OF DISCLOSURE OF CHILDHOOD SEXUAL VIOLENCE.98 CHAPTER FIVE - METHODS AND METHODOLOGY..............................................................102 5.1 STRUCTURE OF THIS CHAPTER 5.2 WHAT CONSTITUTES FEMINIST RESEARCH? 5.3 GROUNDED THEORY METHODOLOGY AND FEMINIST METHODOLOGY 5.4 METHODS USED FOR THIS STUDY - RECRUITMENT 5.5 METHODS USED FOR THIS STUDY - INTERVIEWS 5.6 METHODS USED FOR THIS STUDY - ANALYSIS 5.7 CONCLUSIONS 6.1 INTRODUCTION 6.2 THE WOMEN PARTICIPANTS 102 102 105 113 116 121 123 125 125

CHAPTER SIX - DISCLOSURE AS LIVED EXPERIENCE........................................................125

6.3 THE CONTRADICTIONS OF DISCLOSURE 126 6.4 RESPONSES TO DISCLOSURE 129 6.5 EMPATHIC RESPONSES 130 6.6 RESOLVING 134 6.7 AMBIGUOUS / NO RESPONSE 136 6.8 CRITICAL OF DISCLOSURE 140 6.9 MACHO / ILL-INFORMED RESPONSES 143 6.10 DISBELIEF / BEWILDERMENT 147 6.11 PITY 149 6.12 ABUSIVE 151 6.13 DISCLOSURES WITHIN PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIPS 153 6.14 UNDERSTANDING RESPONSES WITHIN PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIPS 154 6.15 DISBELIEF / INACTION IN RESPONSE TO DISCLOSURES MADE WITHIN PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIPS...............160 6.16 ABUSIVE RESPONSES TO DISCLOSURES MADE WITHIN PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIPS 163 6.17 CONCLUSIONS 171 CHAPTER SEVEN - THEMES AND ISSUES.................................................................................173 7.1 STRUCTURE OF THIS CHAPTER 173 7.2 PASSING ON DISCLOSURES 174 MANY OF THE PARTICIPANTS TALKED ABOUT THEIR DISCLOSURES OF CHILDHOOD SEXUAL VIOLENCE BEING REPEATED TO OTHERS WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT. ALMOST WITHOUT EXCEPTION THIS HAD LED TO UNPLEASANT OR ABUSIVE SITUATIONS ARISING FOR THE WOMEN WHO HAD EXPERIENCED CHILDHOOD SEXUAL VIOLENCE......174 7.3 SEXUAL VIOLENCES BY WOMEN 176 TWO OF THE PARTICIPANTS (ELLIE AND LISA) IN THIS STUDY HAD EXPERIENCED CHILDHOOD SEXUAL VIOLENCE PERPETRATED BY WOMEN, IN BOTH CASES BY THEIR MOTHERS. BOTH TALKED IN INTERVIEW ABOUT THE EXPERIENCE OF DISCLOSING SEXUAL VIOLENCE BY WOMEN. 176 7.4 SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND MOTHERING 178 7.5 DISCLOSURE AND LANGUAGE 186 THE QUESTION OF LANGUAGE AND DISCLOSURE IS ONE THAT MUST INFLUENCE ANY DISCUSSION OF DISCLOSURE. HOW A WOMAN DISCLOSES IS A WIDER QUESTION THAN SIMPLY CONTEXTUAL FACTORS BUT IS ALSO CONCERNED WITH THE INTRICACIES OF LANGUAGE AS WELL. FOR EXAMPLE ISSUES OF HOW THE STORIES OF DISCLOSURE ARE CONSTRUCTED, WHAT METAPHORS AND REFERENCES THEY DRAW ON, AND HOW THEY FIT WITH WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE SOCIAL ASPECTS OF WOMEN'S TALK ARE ALL CENTRAL TO UNDERSTANDING DISCLOSURE AS A SPEECH ACT AS WELL AS A SOCIAL ACT. 186 7.6 PLAYING THE RESPONSIBILITY GAME 199 7.7 BEING JUDGED 202 7.8 NORMALITY AND RENORMALISATION 204 7.9 CONCLUSION 206 CHAPTER EIGHT DISCLOSURES OF CHILDHOOD SEXUAL VIOLENCES...................207 8.1 STRUCTURE OF THIS CHAPTER 8.2 THE JUST SO STORIES: STEREOTYPES AND CULTURAL NARRATIVES 8.3 PATTERNS OF DISCLOSURE OVER THE LIFE-COURSE 8.4 DISCUSSING DISCLOSURES 8.5 LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY 8.6 CONCLUSIONS 9.1 SCOPE OF THIS WORK 9.2 IMPLICATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH 207 207 211 214 218 222 223 230

CHAPTER NINE - A THEORY OF DISCLOSURE.......................................................................223

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR POLICY AND PRACTICE...........................................................232 BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................................................235

Index of Tables
Tables Table 1: The Victim / Survivor Dichotomy. Reproduced from Kelly, Burton and Regan 1996, p.91 Table 2: Prevalence rates for childhood sexual violence against girl children from Page p.21 p.33

studies with female sample sizes of more than 1000. Table 3: Relationship between type of sexual violence and age at which sexual violence commenced. Adapted from Kelly et al. 1991, p.17 Table 4: Relationship between type of sexual violence and victims relationship with the perpetrator (% relates to percentage of all reports by women across all categories of activity). Adapted from Kelly et al. 1991, p.19 Table 5: Relationship between duration of abuse and victims relationship with the abuser ranked by duration of abuse in years. Taken from Ussher and Dewberry 1995, p.181 Table 6: Comparison of results from Ghate and Spencer 1995 and other studies Table 7: Perceptions of abusive experiences. Studies giving results for men only have been excluded as have all studies not giving full results across the three categories. Adapted from Rind, Tromovitch and Bauserman, 1998, p.36 Table 8: Demographic Comparison of Respondents with General Population. Adapted from Baker and Duncan 1985, p.460 Table 9: Reasons for First Disclosure of Abuse. Taken from Lamb and Edgar-Smith 1994, p.319. Table 10: Responses to disclosure. Adapted from Ussher and Dewberry 1995, p.183 Table 11: Conditional distribution (i.e. fraction of row total) of Attitudes towards men given Support by parents and others. Taken from Wyatt and Mickey 1987, p.410 Table 12: Methodological and Findings Comparison across the major five studies. Table 13: Methods of Recruitment for the study Table 14: Brief summary of the codes allocated to instances of disclosure discussed by participants Table 15: Psy-science professionals and responses to disclosure Table 16: Description versus Response Type in Disclosure Events discussed by Lisa (organised by order in transcript) Table 17: Description versus Response Type in Disclosure Events discussed by Debbie (organised by order in transcript) Table 18: Strategies of Disclosure amongst the participants

p.39 p.42 p.45 p.47 p.52 p.66 p.71 p.73 p.75 p.78 p.178 p.204 p.265 p.308 p.308 p.342

Index of Figures
Figures Figure 1 - The relationship of effects within the disclosure situation. Figure 2 - Professionalisation of Childhood Sexual Abuse Figure 3 - Respondent views on helpfulness of professionals responses. Taken from Hooper et al. 1999 p.19 Figure 4 - Synthesis Model of the Factors for an Understanding / Helpful Response within Professional Relationships (elements in italics refer to Hooper, Koprowska and Milsom's factors, non-italicised elements refer to factors from this study). Page p.141 p.149 p.244 p.245

Chapter One - Introduction 1.1 Locations, Identifications and Experiences Experience One: I saw a consultant surgeon for a joint problem. He already had my full medical history. During the consultation he remarked on the childhood sexual violence I experienced. It was not a question. It was a non sequitur in the consultation. I was shocked by the breach of professional boundaries. For the rest of the consultation I felt uncomfortable and vulnerable and only wanted to leave. Experience Two: I was having drinks with a friend. We talked about my work. I mentioned something about my own experience of childhood sexual violence. My friend was shocked and surprised. Our conversation continued but later he askeds me why he didnt know before. Experience Three: I saw a medical professional (not a doctor). She asked about my PhD. I briefly explained the work I was doing. She asked me whether many women have experienced childhood sexual violences. Before I could answer she asked whether I experienced childhood sexual violence. When I said yes, she asked me what my relationship was like with my parents now. I explained to her that I did not experience incest. She instantly replied that she found the topic unpleasant. She ended the conversation by telling me that her department offers a Counselling Service and I should avail myself of it. Her implication is clear - she thought I would need to access the service. Her suggestion was not an option but a given. I begin with some experiences from the three years I was researching this topic. I do so because they illustrate some aspects of the work that follows. They also locate me, the writer, within the topic and hint at the genesis of my interest in this subject. The first experience is an example of the explicit exercise of power that sometimes happens in disclosure situations. The Consultant felt it unproblematic to mention my experiences of childhood sexual violence despite their irrelevance to the actual consultation. This exercise of power left me both uncomfortable and literally speechless. In breaching these boundaries (between the medical problems and my experiences) the Consultant was mirroring a more general process through which the medical profession, alongside the psy-sciences1 and social work professions, has long laid claim to childhood sexual violences. As a medical professional, the Consultant undoubtedly felt ownership over the story of childhood sexual violences mentioned in my medical notes. This affirmation of his feelings of ownership, however, immediately displaced my own, in the same way that the medical and social work professions and psy-sciences have displaced any ownership of the story/stories by women who have experienced childhood sexual violences. However my response to his broaching the topic is, admittedly, contradictory. I was writing a thesis about responses to disclosure and in some ways the content of my medical notes can be read as
1

Psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis are summarised here are psy-sciences.

indirect disclosure. As such the direct acknowledgement of the abuse should, perhaps, have been something I embraced as a sign of a more open and co-operative attitude within the medical establishment. Had the remarks been offered in a way that was accepting of my expertise in the area then I may have reacted differently. However his comments on the topic emphasised my vulnerability as my past is laid bare in the medical notes available for scrutiny and commentary by any medical professional that sees them. I am reconstituted in this situation as an immediate and life-long patient because of experiences noted years ago. I am written, therefore, as a victim and interpreted as a patient within medical discourses. Similarly the third experience relied on the (re)writing of me as a patient, but it also shows a particular tension which can arise. The medical professional on this occasion asked about my work, yet her interest was contradictory, as she expressed distaste at the subject. Whilst some might argue this shows a tension between the personal and professional, in that the professional had to ask despite a personal distaste, this dualistic, and disembodied, thinking cannot be maintained, as I shall later show. The professional cultures which have laid claim to childhood sexual violences must be seen as a collective of those who work within those professions and the professional culture cannot be divorced from the personal characteristics of these people. The key point here is that these professions have often talked of the problem of disclosing childhood sexual violences as being getting women to do so. This incident suggests (and this is borne out through this research) that the problem is not necessarily getting women to disclose, but in getting others to listen and respond appropriately. This medical professional, however, also assumed that childhood sexual violences were synonymous with incest. This demonstrates how the attempt to highlight the fact that sexual violences do occur within families has been misinterpreted by some as suggesting that childhood sexual violence is exclusively synonymous with incest. Previous studies (see Chapter Two) have consistently shown that perpetrators of childhood sexual violence are most likely to be known to the victim but not related to them. Whilst this work does not accurately reflect these studies2, this difference is probably due to the sample being self-selected. The third experience also highlights the urgent need to inform and educate professionals. The process of professionalisation (see Chapter Four) operates to divorce the professional from nonprofessional relationships. One assumption made is that professionals are specially trained to deal
2

Only 45% of the women participants identifying the perpetrator in their case as being from their immediate family , another 18% identified intrafamilial abusers from outside their immediate family, the remaining 36% identified perpetrators who were not part of their familial structure.

with disclosures of childhood sexual violences. The truth is that, across professions, many receive little or sometimes no training, or the training does not challenge their preconceptions. Conte has highlighted that there is little or no research on the attitudes of individuals involved with childhood sexual violences, including professionals, and on how those attitudes may impact on women and children who have experienced childhood sexual violences (Conte 1994 p.230). Teachers, medical professionals, those working within the psy-sciences, and social workers are amongst those who can reasonably expect to hear disclosures of childhood sexual violence during their working lives. All have been criticised by participants in this study for lacking in understanding of the issues surrounding such sexual violences (see Chapter Six). Professionals are entangled in cultural narratives about women who have experienced childhood sexual violence just as much as those to whom women disclose within non-professional relationships. The second experience brought home how challenging this work has been - to myself and to others. It illustrates how talking about childhood sexual violences is still stigmatising. This is not because speaking about childhood sexual violences is transgressive, a process Foucault has written about in relation to talk about sexuality (Foucault 1976, p.6), but rather it is because speaking about childhood sexual violences invites stigmatisation and leads others to employ their own repertoire of cultural narratives about childhood sexual violences (see Chapter Four). Importantly these experiences also clearly locate me in this research. I am a woman who has experienced childhood sexual violence. My experiences of disclosure prompted my interest in the way disclosure had previously been written about in both feminist and malestream traditions. This interest led to a realisation that the treatment of disclosure in existing literature was singularly detached from the individual events that I had experienced and that other women had told me about. This is not surprising as before feminist interventions in the fields of incest and childhood sexual abuse the treatment of these topics had also been detached from actual experiences. For example, Linda Burtons 1968 article, The Problem of Studying the Sexually Assaulted Child begins by arguing that: The problem of assessing the degree of damage physical and psychic sustained by the child victim of a sexual assault is a problem which appears increasingly to occupy the time of the courts. Conclusions as to the degree of physical damage caused can generally be reached by a simple medical examination. An assessment of the psychological damage is not too easily obtained. No simple tests are as yet to hand to assess how far-reaching or short-lived the results may be and expert advice is rarely sought. Instead a highly subjective rating is made, usually in the Court itself. Inevitably the picture presented by such a subjective assessment is the popularly accepted clich of an innocent child harmed irreparably by the wayward behaviour of a mentally unbalanced adult. No account appears to be taken of the degree of co-operation given by the child to his [sic] adult seducer, nor of 9

the effects of any such co-operation on his subsequent psycho-sexual development. Legally, this picture of abused innocence is a satisfactory one. (Burton 1968, p.87) As explored in Chapters Two and Three, the treatment of disclosure in the academic literature has previously been both limited and skewed. Nowhere has it been discussed as an event that takes place within the context of women's everyday lives. Often, the term disclosure has been seen as synonymous with first disclosures. Creating this synonymous meaning transforms first disclosures into primary disclosures where they come to be seen as holding an overwhelming importance as disclosure events, whereas in reality, the listeners often do not hear first disclosures. The focus on first disclosure as a primary site of importance has precluded discussion of disclosures over the life course. Disclosure should not be over-simplified as a cry for help made by a child or adult. Instead disclosures occur for a myriad of reasons, as Roesler and Wind (1994, p.333) have previously commented. Yet the cry for help explanation / image is an enduring one and it maintains understandings of childhood sexual violences as specialised. Disclosures, instead, need to be understood as a part of everyday life to demystify childhood sexual violences themselves (this argument is explored further in Chapter Four). 1.2 Plan of the Thesis

In this section I outline the thesis and raise a few key ideas, in particular the way childhood sexual violence and disclosure are treated and appropriated by the professions. This idea forms a background to this work and is explored most fully in Chapter Four as well as playing an important role in the results presented in Chapters Six and Seven. Chapters Two and Three examine the current literature in relation to disclosure. Chapter Two focuses on social science literature relating to childhood sexual violences: its prevalence, characteristics, and how disclosure has been treated within the academic and practitioner contexts prior to this work. It attempts to contextualise discussions of disclosure within an overall understanding of how widespread experiences of childhood sexual violences are and therefore how widespread disclosures may be. Chapter Two traces the discussion (and absence) of disclosure through discussions of prevalence, characteristics, long-term effects and the limited discussion of disclosure itself within the existing literature. In particular it begins to examine some of the cultural narratives about childhood sexual violences. The Chapter then moves on to examine previous work dealing directly with disclosure. Examining the emphasis on (i) first disclosures and (ii) childhood disclosures, this section looks at what we do know about disclosure and at what we dont and cant know because of omissions in current literature. Finally, this Chapter examines the existing

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framework for understanding disclosure and how it is lacking in terms of coherence and relevance to womens everyday lives. Because discussions of disclosures have been so limited in previous academic and practitioner literature, Chapter Three explores the importance of disclosure as a speech act by looking at the nature of disclosure in social research and within social life. Focussing on narrative and storytelling it seeks to reflect the importance of stories within everyday life. This section is based on an understanding of the fundamental nature of storytelling within human societies. It also explores some of the issues relating to the telling of stories and particularly to the telling of stories about womens lives. This Chapter then moves on to look at disclosures as narratives and narratives of disclosure, and traces the way in which narrative forms in relation to sexuality have been fragmented into separate understandings of narratives (confession, testimony and autobiography). The final section of this Chapter seeks to bring together the notions of disclosure, narrative, and storytelling as a starting point for developing a theoretical framework within which to discuss disclosure of childhood sexual violence. Chapter Four builds on this theoretical framework, also examining the ways in which disclosure has been an invisible presence in other works (feminist and non-feminist) about childhood sexual violences. It looks at both the omissions and the partiality of discussions of disclosure in existing literatures and explores the importance of disclosures in terms of lived experiences. The Chapter then examines the inter-subjective nature of disclosure and the way in which disclosure actually operates as an event. The Chapter then goes on to explore the nature of professionalisation and medicalisation in the ways in which childhood sexual violences are discussed, and in the ways in which childhood sexual violence is viewed in the lived experiences of women. To contrast the professionalised approaches, Chapter Four also examines the grassroots movements of feminism which aim to empower women, focussing particularly on Louise Armstrongs critiques of both professionalisation and feminist history in relation to childhood sexual violence (see for example Armstrong 1991 and 1994). These two concerns are explored in some depth to highlight the way that disclosure has become a contested site on both a macro and micro scale. Chapter Five examines the methods and methodology of this research. It examines what constitutes feminist research and explores the potential benefits of combining both feminist research methods and Grounded Theory Methodology. Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM) influenced the methods used in this study (see Glaser and Strauss 1967 and Strauss and Corbin 1990 for more background on GTM). However the relationship between feminist precepts for research and GTM 11

is not wholly unproblematic and these tensions are explored in this Chapter. The Chapter then outlines the specific methodology used including recruitment, interviewing, analysis and participation involvement throughout the research process. Finally the Chapter looks at analysis and interpretation as a particular issue within feminist (and non-feminist) research. Chapters Six and Seven explore the results of the research and are split into two sections because of the importance of the findings from the fieldwork. Chapter Six explores disclosure as lived experience and examines the types of reactions to disclosure recounted by the women participants in this study. This Chapter maintains the boundary between disclosures within non-professional relationships and within professional relationships, that is, disclosure to professionals within their role as professionals. Although Chapter Nine goes on to challenge this distinction as false, it is important at this stage to examine whether there are any major differences between disclosures within non-professional and professional relationships. Chapter Six opens with a discussion of the participants and the imperative to disclose before analysing the different types of responses received to disclosure and how they impacted on the lives of the women participants. Chapter Seven examines themes and issues raised within the data provided by the women participants in this study. This Chapter is divided into five subsections looking at the breaking of confidences, abuse of girl children by women, mothering by women who have experienced childhood sexual violence, aspects of language within the research, and finally responsibility within the disclosure process and how it is handled by both the speaker (the woman who has experienced childhood sexual violence) and the listener (the person to whom the woman is disclosing). Although these themes and issues are disparate, their exploration is important because it offers a range of different facets of disclosure that have been overlooked. The emphasis placed on these themes and issues by the women participants in this research may show the way in which facets of disclosure have been previously excluded from the agenda by deductivist research, which has excluded open exploration of issues around disclosure. Chapter Eight brings together some of the outstanding themes present throughout the research. It includes the role of cultural narratives and how they operate within the disclosure process, the disclosure process over the life-course, and issues of discussing disclosure, in particular how childhood sexual violence is still not discussed with women who have experienced childhood sexual violence. The Chapter then moves on to explore of some of the limitations of the study including interpretation, analysis, and the role of the researcher.

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Chapter Nine finally brings together the major conclusions from the preceding Chapters, to begin to develop a set of new theories around disclosure of childhood sexual violences, whilst reminding us that, given the lack of previous work on the topic, these can only be a starting point. In particular this Chapter seeks to make links from the thesis between the wide-ranging data presented herein. 1.3 Notes on Scope and Language of Thesis

The thesis explores only womens experiences of disclosing childhood sexual violences. The reasons for this are threefold. Firstly, from prevalence data it is apparent that female children are more likely to experience childhood sexual violences than are male children (for example, Baker and Duncans (1985) study found comparative prevalence rates of 7.5% for male children and 11.6% for female children). Secondly, women make many disclosures of childhood sexual violences over their lives. Eighty-nine disclosure events were discussed during this research by only ten women, and whilst many of the women also discussed disclosures made to them by other women, only one participant spoke about a male friend who had disclosed to her. Whilst I am sure men who have experienced childhood sexual violences do disclose to others I, as a researcher, was unsure as to whether they would be willing to talk about their experiences, both of disclosure and of childhood sexual violences, to me. Finally, women are oppressed and subordinated in contemporary British society and they are represented and repositioned in a myriad of ways that do not represent their truths. The same is true of women who had experienced childhood sexual violences. As a feminist researcher part of my interest was in how women who have experienced childhood sexual violences are represented and positioned in both popular and academic discourses, and how these related to womens own truths about childhood sexual violences and the experience of disclosing it. Whilst childhood sexual violences and experiences of disclosure by males are just as urgently in need of exploration, the discourses surrounding the two genders differ enormously, and to study both in a comparative way would have made the thesis too unwieldy and the sample sizes too small to have been able to draw any meaningful conclusions. As such the limitation of the study to women who have experienced childhood sexual violences is both a political and pragmatic decision. Similarly the decision to employ the term disclosure rather than telling or speaking out was a pragmatic one. In early interactions with women who had experienced childhood sexual violences the term disclosure appeared to hold some common meaning and was understood by all the women who subsequently participated in the study. When I used terms such as telling or speaking out the women I talked to were unsure of whether I was referring to a specific form of disclosure like a speak-out. Whilst disclosure is a professionalised term common in the psy-sciences and social 13

work, its use here is solely to be understood as the term participants seemed most comfortable with in interviews and other correspondence. The language used to describe both the act(s) of childhood sexual violences and the women and children who have experienced them has become a major political issue over past decades. Feminist work on sexual violences informed a movement away from the language of victimism towards the language of survival. In doing so feminism has established childhood sexual violence as a social act with wider influence than criminological perspectives had previously illustrated. To designate women who have experienced childhood sexual violence as survivors of those acts rather than victims expanded discussions of childhood sexual violence. However, the term survivor has not been universally accepted as a fitting term for women who have experienced childhood sexual violences. It has been criticised for obfuscating the nature of childhood sexual violences and, in particular, drawing attention away from the legal aspects of crimes committed against children. Additionally it operates in such a way as to create sub-class of women who have experienced childhood sexual violence, in particular those who have survived (however that is constituted) and those who have not (and who presumably are still victims or, we assume, dead). Finally it has allowed the psychological sciences to take a firm hold in terms of clinical practice where survivorship is discussed in terms of a journey towards healing rather than the after-effects of a criminal act. My decision not to employ either term (victim or survivor) partly comes from the discussions amongst the women participating in this study. Some participants clearly and strongly identified as either victim or survivor for a variety of reasons. Alice Survivor, definitely survivor cos its like Ive come through something absolutely horrendous and yet Im still here and Im still alive and I have survived. Ive survived, Ive not totally lost my sanity, Im not completely wrecked physically although I have had an eating disorder for years but thats getting better. I cannot think of another word that would better describe it really. I think maybe one day Ill be able to say that Im triumphant over adversity, I think Im becoming that really because it hasnt destroyed me, I have survived it. And I cant deny that it was a horrendous experience, it was something to be survived from or destroyed by, it could have destroyed me.

Here Alices identification as survivor is predicated on her feelings of having dealt with her experiences. She identifies as a survivor because she feels on her way to triumphing over her past. For other women in the study, however, the fact that they have physically and mentally survived

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the experience did not encourage them to embrace the term survivor. Others, like Tiha, highlighted both the ubiquity of victimhood and its political uses. Tiha I dont personally think that you ever stop being a victim. I think what happens is that you learn to deal with the fallout of being a victim, I mean when I hear, you hear on television people saying Oh you dont have to be a victim, well Im sorry but personally I think as I say that you always are, you always will be a victim but what youve got to do is learn to deal with what that means and how you react to it.

The issue is not what Tiha has accomplished but rather what was done to her and what position she was in. For her the moniker of victim is a life-long one, not because she finds it better but because it more adequately describes what happened to her. To Tiha what happens after is important but does not remove that fact that childhood sexual violences were perpetrated upon her. Tiha, here, is careful to differentiate the nature of the act(s) that constituted her childhood sexual violence and what she has achieved since. The separation of the two, as she sees it, is a positive message in terms of controlling the monolithic identity assumptions made towards women who describe themselves as survivors of childhood sexual abuse. However it should be remembered that the term victim is connected with a set of pre-existing images. Claudette I think theyre thinking that if you have been abused youre going to be, walking around with your hair in your face all <scared noise> a victim. Looking like a victim, I think thats what they expect, they dont expect to see you walking down the road looking confident or being at ease with yourself. I suppose they do expect to see a victim, displays of a victim.

Kelly, Burton and Regan also trace the differing images connected to victim and survivor. They summarised the situation using what they describe as the victim / survivor dichotomy (Table 1) and go on to say that: The notion of phases or stages positions individuals as either victim or survivor. This misrepresents both material and emotional reality. All sexual violence involves an experience of victimization, and if individuals do not die as a consequence they have physically survived. The conceptual separation over time produces an understanding which focuses on an either / or positioning of individuals, and presents an alternative conceptualization where the two concepts refer to different aspects of experience: being victimized is what was done a statement of historical fact; survival is what individuals who are victimized achieve in relation to, and often in spite of, that historical realityIn the setting up of these two as identities and opposites, a binary opposition of value results, where victim carries all the negative meanings and survivor the positive. Rather than challenge the stigmatizing meaning of victim as initially intended, it is, in fact, reinforced, with the only route out being an identification with, or attribution of, the alternative of survivor. (Kelly, Burton and Regan 1996, p.91-92)

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Victim Survivor Passive Active Helpless Resourceful Weak Strong Vulnerable Courageous Shame Pride Small Gutsy Hurt Angry Powerless Powerful Confused In control / coping Controlled Fighting back Guilty Not guilty Table 1: The Victim / Survivor Dichotomy. Reproduced from Kelly, Burton and Regan 1996, p.91 The discussions about how to describe (or inscribe) people who have experienced childhood sexual violence is both a matter of individual preference and a long-running debate. As a matter of political and personal preference I have chosen to use neither term (victim or survivor) to describe the women participants in this study. Because of the dissent within the participants in this study and my own personal conflicts over the terms I have chosen another term women who have experienced childhood sexual violence. Although more verbose this description actually strips away much of the imagery connected with the victim / survivor dichotomy. By doing so it also makes the cultural narratives much more clearly visible. If all a victim or a survivor is can be encapsulated in the phrase who has experienced childhood sexual violence then the assumed characteristics of the aftermath of that experience are no longer easy to place. By uncoupling the what was done from the identity, the monolithism of victim / survivor identities are prevented from taking hold, as are assumptions that the what defines the who even in later life. As a descriptor, I think it allows much more acknowledgement of the variety and diversity both of the women who participated in this study and also of those who have experienced childhood sexual violence in general. I have also decided not to use the term child(hood) sex(ual) abuse as a description of the experiences of the women participants. Child sex abuse has become the shorthand term used to denote a range of experiences that constitute the variety of sexual crimes committed against children. However the clinical nature of the descriptions and the obfuscation of the issues involved are rarely discussed. Rather than providing clarity the term child sex abuse (or its variants) actually mask both the acts and perpetrators. Although it makes clear the crimes are sexual it does not acknowledge the issues of power involved in committing sexual violence against a child. The

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term child sex makes the power dynamic less clear we may be talking about consensual sex play between peer children, or the violent rape of a child by a parent, step-parent, or family friend. As Elizabeth Ward has discussed the challenge of finding an adequate linguistic shorthand for the varied experiences of sexual crimes committed against children is difficult. Ward describes her own search such: When I began the research that is the subject of this book, I used the term child sexual abuse. That quickly changed to incest, since the vast bulk of child sexual abuse occurs within the family and the largest single group of offenders is comprised of natural fathers. However, the more I read, and the more that women talked to me about their experiences, the more it became clear to me that not only was I looking at father-daughter rape, but also at a phenomenon of epic proportions, which could only be named by the capitalised form: Father-Daughter Rape. (Ward 1984, p.3) I have chosen the term childhood sexual violences because it makes the issues of power clearer. As Hearn has argued violence is understood as a major, perhaps even the prime, form of power, and at the same time, violence is considered unfair, inappropriate, wrong-headed, as well as painful, damaging and sometimes illegal (Hearn 1998, p.vii). However violence is itself not an infallible word, as Hearn also says violence is simply a word, a shorthand that refers to a mass of different experiences in peoples lives. And as a word, violence, like other words can be used and abused it can be reduced through normalization and reification (Hearn 1998, p.15). The use of the word violence does also obfuscate the power relationships involved in the acts under discussion, however, the power and the pain involved in violences are made clearer. Violence is both a matter of experience of change in bodily matter and a matter change in discursive constructions (Hearn 1998, p.15). The discussion of finding an adequate phrase, or, indeed, whether one is needed at all, is not easily resolved and is one that raises strong emotions. As Claudette said during her interview: Claudette It makes me really angry because even the word, erm, when they say children have been sexually abused it kind of like, its like they want to diminish what has actually happened, because if you say a child has been repeatedly raped, then it brings across what has been done to that child but when you say sexual abuse it sounds as though, as if someone, there are different kinds of abuse but I think it makes people just turn away from it, its like a blanket over people, thats whats really happening.

Childhood sexual violences does make clear the range of sexual acts committed upon children but does not make any mention of who commits the acts. It means that the social relations in the case of violence are reduced to things without human agency, or even social structure (Hearn 1998, p.15). Childhood sexual violences is therefore not an adequate term in itself to denote the 17

experiences of the participants in this study. However it is a marginally better term than those previously employed. 1.4 Note: On The Use Of Fieldwork Data

Three issues about the use of fieldwork data must be acknowledged at this point. The first, perhaps already obvious from the section above, is that I intend to be true to my interpretation of the processes involved in Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM). GTM offers a way to create theories from the data collected rather than using data as a mere test for a previously constructed theory. As such the theoretical development in this study comes from the data and to present the theory divorced from the data would deny this circular process. So I have taken the decision to include the results (data) where important to the theoretical development prior to those Chapters designated as results Chapters. This decontainment of the data is, I feel, important in acknowledging the position of the participants of this study as co-constructors of the theories developed herein. It also challenges those conventions of social science which demand a hygienic write-up to research which is necessarily and unavoidably messy. The second issue relates to the fact that the fieldwork data operates on multiple levels. As such it became increasingly clear to me that it was impossible to always use material only once as an example of a single aspect. Instead multiple use of the fieldwork data throughout the thesis was not only unavoidable but, in fact, desirable. Often research has utilised fieldwork data, be it interview transcripts, fieldwork notes and so forth, as singular and clear-cut examples of a certain point. But in truth interview data is conceptually dense and layered with meaning so this one-shot use oversimplifies the participants meanings. Throughout the thesis, therefore, the same quotes are used in different contexts to illustrate different points. Re-using the data shows the ways in which multiple interpretations are involved in the texts that we deal with as researchers. By discussing the different layers of meaning I also illustrate the ways in which multiple aspects of one narrated experience or event can be examined. I also hope that it begins to build a less superficial understanding of what has been given to me by the participants in this study. Finally, the fieldwork data collected in interviews has been transcribed as far as possible to retain the meaning and emphases of the spoken word. To try and ensure this I have limited notation in the transcripts to a bare minimum of punctuation where it was clearly needed. However, this verbatim transcription, reproduced in the text of the thesis, also facilitates other interpretations of the data to be made by readers and the minimum notation of interview text is designed to aid these other interpretations to be made. In places this may make the reading of excerpts more difficult and less 18

straightforward than might be expected. A final note refers to the use of quote marks around excerpts from womens interviews and written pieces. I have retained the use of quote marks around an excerpt from an interview to act as a reminder to readers that they are reading transcribed speech acts. The absence of quote marks indicates that these excerpts are from womens written accounts.

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2.1

Chapter Two - Childhood Sexual Violence and Disclosure: What the literature tells us Structure of this Chapter

This Chapter sets the background by exploring work on childhood sexual violences in general and work on disclosure in particular. It examines the research to date and also the ways in which childhood sexual violence has been constructed in academic discourses. The first section examines the problems inherent in the current literature (2.2), the prevalence statistics for childhood sexual violence in the United Kingdom (2.3), and some of the work on the long-term impact of childhood sexual violence (2.4). In terms of disclosure of childhood sexual violences the prevalence of sexual violences, the long-term effects, and the way in which disclosures are constructed are important factors. The Chapter then examines the construction of childhood sexual violence through research on the long-term impacts of childhood sexual violences (2.5). The final section of this Chapter examines the existent research on disclosure of childhood sexual violence and how disclosure has been treated to date in the academic and practitioner literature (2.6). 2.2 The Background Literature Problems and Issues

Ten years ago Kelly, Burton and Regan wrote the knowledge base is weak (1991 p.5) in terms of understandings of childhood sexual violences in the United Kingdom. The situation has changed little over the past decade, despite the unprecedented amount of research, observation, and supposition that has been carried out in the myriad fields that examine childhood sexual violences. However, within this certain issues have come to dominate the research agenda. Particularly dominant at the current time is research concerning the long-term effects of childhood sexual violence carried out from a mental health perspective. The second most influential field of research appears to be research into the prevalence and incidence of childhood sexual violence. This field of research gives us some idea of how many women have been affected by childhood sexual violences. If, as two recent studies in the United Kingdom have shown, somewhere between 21% (Cawson et al. 2000) and 27% (Kelly et al. 1991) of women have experienced contact childhood sexual violence then we may surmise that the ripples of disclosures spread wide. However, prevalence statistics have a number of problems despite their importance. Three problems are especially relevant. As Kelly et al. said practitioners, academics and policy makers [are] still reliant on American research (1991 p.4). In fact cross-cultural analysis of prevalence rates has become standard practice in reviews of the current literature. The second problem is that figures for sexual violence committed against boy children and girl children have often been 20

conflated. The final problem is that varying definitions of childhood sexual violences and differing methodologies have been used. The first problem, cross-cultural review, assumes that the factors affecting the rate of childhood sexual violence across countries are similar. However, even between relatively similar countries (in terms of economic and political world standing such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom) the cultural mores regarding childhood sexual contact vary enormously. As La Fontaine has argued: In all societies there are commonly accepted ideas about sexuality, human reproduction and the relations between parent and children but they are not the same everywhere. The fact that the content of them varies from one society to another shows that they are not immutable truths, facts of life, but products of particular cultures or social arrangements. This does not mean, however, that these notions are lightly held or easily changed; on the contrary they are unquestioning accepted and firmly believed. (La Fontaine 1990, p.20) The socially constructed nature of sexual rules is not surprising. Anthropologists have long studied the differing sexual mores of remote populations. Jon Conte (1994) has also discussed what he describes as the barriers to cross-cultural understanding of child sexual abuse (p.225). Korbin suggests that, from a cross-cultural perspective, child sexual abuse can be defined as proscribed sexual conduct between an adult and a sexually immature child for purposes of the adults sexual pleasure or for economic gain through child prostitution or pornography. But she also points out that there is considerable cross-cultural variation in how each of the italicized concepts is defined. For example, in some societies, sexual conduct with prepubertal children is not considered inappropriate. Sexual pleasure is also not a simple concept to define cross-culturally, and not all sexual conduct with children can be called abuse from a cross-cultural standpoint. For example, sexual conduct between children and adults may occur in religious or ceremonial events. (For example, ritualized homosexuality is a component of male initiation rites in some New Guinea societies). Also, sexualized behaviors such as fondling or kissing genitals occur in some societies as part of daily, normative, child rearing practices. (Conte 1994, p.225) The broad variation in prevalence rates highlights issues of definition and cultural practice but also reflect the differences in histories of each country as regards childhood sexual violence. Certainly definitional aspects play an important role and this is discussed in more detail below. Crossnational comparisons may be fruitful in terms of trying to understand the differences in prevalence rates and the effect of varying cultural, judicial, and social influences on the prevalence rates of childhood sexual violence. However for the purposes of this study it is the data from the United Kingdom that is of most interest. Thus this review focuses mainly on the findings from the United Kingdom. Statistics from the United States and Canada are briefly reviewed, as solely using the United Kingdom statistics would limit the review to only seven studies with a total combined

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sample size of 5115 women3. Additionally to only limit this discussion to the United Kingdom studies would lead to problems in the discussion of the perception of abusive experiences, the after effects of those experiences, and the psychological literature relating to disclosure of childhood sexual violence. This is because research in the United Kingdom into these areas is sparse compared to international data. Only four studies, to date, have explored issues relating to perception and long-term reported effects in the United Kingdom (these are Baker and Duncan 1985, Nash and West 1985, Ussher and Dewberry 1995, and Kelly et al. 1998a). The second concern, the practice of conflating statistics relating to men and women, serves to continue to other womens voices in research on childhood sexual violence. Whereas feminists have attempted to highlight the highly gendered nature of childhood sexual violences they have been responded to in recent times with an emphasis on the prevalence and impact of sexual violence committed against male children. I do not intend to argue that sexual violence against male children is less worthy of attention than sexual violence committed against female children. However this othering process in unavoidable in these comparisons. As Marilyn Strathern has argued there is a constant rediscovery that women are the Other in mens accounts [which] reminds women that they must see men as the Other in relation to themselves (Strathern 1987, p.288). To guard against this othering of womens voices in this research project I have, during this review, attempted to only present those figures relating to women respondents wherever possible. This gender segregation also acknowledges the fact that, as Baker and Duncan have argued, we may be comparing different phenomena when we look at the sexual abuse of boys and girls (1985, p.465). Baker and Duncan found the nature of childhood sexual violences experienced by boys and girls to be qualitatively different. Boys tended to experience sexual contacts at a later average age (p.459); seemed less likely to experience incestuous abuse (although differences in the rates of sexual violence perpetrated by members of the wider family were not statistically significant) (p.459); and were less likely to attribute permanent negative consequences and more likely to attribute a positive outcome to their experience of child-adult sexual contact (p.462-463). Nelson and Olivers (1998) research into the perception of consent within child-adult sexual contact found that in general, girls were more likely to interpret their experiences as coerced and harmful, while boys were more likely to interpret their experiences especially their experiences with women as consensual and not harmful (p.565). Nelson and Oliver conclude that this suggests that the results:
3

This figure has excluded male respondents from those studies that did also interview men.

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can be interpreted as summarising the behaviour of perpetrating adults. Man-child contact usually was experienced as coercive by the child, whilst woman-boy contact was often experienced as noncoercively offering a sexual experience. The key to most respondents interpretations of their experiences was whether the adult asked or persuaded the child into sexual activity, rather than taking, unilaterally initiating sexual activity without trying to gain the childs co-operation. (p.568) Nelson and Olivers results certainly reinforce Baker and Duncans thesis of qualitatively different experiences for boys and girls. There are, however, two occasions where this gender separation is not possible. Ghate and Spencers feasibility study for a national prevalence survey on childhood sexual violence (Ghate and Spencer 1995) presented their pre-pilot results in such a way that means separation by gender is not possible. For this reason Ghate and Spencers work is discussed separately at the end of the prevalence and characteristics section. Similarly Cawson et al.'s (2000) results are also occasionally presented in a way that does not allow for gender separation. These results are, however, presented in the main discussion because Cawson et al. represents the largest sample to date in studies of prevalence and characteristics of childhood sexual violence. The final problem, that of the definition of childhood sexual violence, now has a literature of its own. It is, however, still worthwhile noting here. The operationalisation of definitions of childhood sexual violence within prevalence research serves to exclude or include various acts and as such has an effect on the prevalence rates reported. The issue is, however, complex, as Cawson et al. (2000) argue: The review of previous research showed the complexity of possible definitions and their likely effect on results in a prevalence survey. It would clearly not be possible to achieve a definition of sexual abuse which would be universally accepted and which would apply without qualification to all cultures and generations. (p.77) As a (brief) example, Baker and Duncan (1985) asked about any activity between a child and a sexually mature person that lead to or was designed to lead to sexual arousal for the mature party (p.458). Nash and West asked about sexual contact or experience between the respondent when under the age of 16 years and anyone five or more years older than themselves (1985, p.14). Both studies carried out by Kelly et al. (1991 and 1998a) used a broad definition of sexual violences as any [sexual] event / interaction that the young person reported as unwanted / abusive before they were 18. Necessarily Kelly et al.s work returned a higher prevalence rate because they included unwanted / abusive experiences after the age of consent (UK). Although the definitions only vary slightly the influence is considerable. For example excluding those between the age of 16-18 years old from Kelly et al.s results delivers a prevalence rate of 48% which rises to 50% when abusive

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telephone calls are included (also included in Nash and Wests prevalence rate) compared to 12% in Baker and Duncans study. Aside from these problems, however, prevalence research offers some idea of the scope of both the experiences of childhood sexual violence and, therefore, disclosure. If, as previous studies suggest, somewhere between 12% and 52% of women in the United Kingdom have experienced some form of childhood sexual violence then the issue of disclosures obviously reach widely into society. As this research shows women who have experienced childhood sexual violence disclose multiple times over their life-course and thus the scope widens further still. The varying methodologies and sample sizes of the UK work are reported in Table 12 at the end of this Chapter. 2.3 Prevalence and Characteristics of Childhood Sexual Violence in the United Kingdom

Prevalence of Childhood Sexual Violence Cross-national reviews of prevalence statistics on childhood sexual violences have found that between 17% (Laumann 1994, USA) and 53% (Badgley 1984, Canada) of women have experienced some form of childhood sexual violences. Prevalence rates from studies over the past twenty years with sample sizes of over a thousand women are summarised below: Study Year Country Sample Size Prevalence Rate 53% 21% 13% 28%

Badgley et al. 1984 Canada 1006 Cole 1988 USA 2740 Harter et al. 1988 USA 1066 Finkelhor et 1989 USA 1476 al. Wisniewski 1990 USA 3187 29% Laumann et al. 1995 USA 1608 17% Table 2: Prevalence rates for childhood sexual violence against girl children from studies with female sample sizes of more than 1000. In the United Kingdom, however, to date five studies have set out to specifically study the prevalence of the experience of childhood sexual violence amongst population samples (Baker and Duncan 1985, Nash and West 1985, Kelly et al. 1991, Kelly et al. 1998a and Cawson et al. 2000). These five studies are furthered by Ghate and Spencers exploratory work on the feasibility of a national prevalence study. In terms of overall prevalence rates reported by these studies, Baker and Duncan, analysing results from a MORI survey of 1050 women, reported a 12% prevalence rate for women respondents. Their definition was sexual violence experienced before the age of 16 years old by someone who was sexually mature. Nash and West (1985) in their study, which combined a student sample with 24

a wider population sample drawn from General Practitioners patient lists, reported a prevalence rate of nearly 46% for all forms of childhood sexual violence including both contact and noncontact experiences. Kelly et al. (1991), analysing a sample of Further Education students including 784 women, reported a 27% prevalence rate for contact sexual violence before the age of 16 years. When Kelly et al. included non-contact sexual violence the prevalence rate rose to 52%. In their later (and smaller) study, Kelly et al. (1998a) reported a prevalence rate of 57% including both contact and non-contact experiences. Cawson et al. (2000) reported overall prevalence rates of 21% for girls from a sample of 1,634 women. Cawson et al. include some non-contact sexual violences including indecent exposure and exposure to pornography or to other people performing sexual acts. However there is no mention as to whether non-visual / non-physical sexual violence such as obscene telephone calls were included. Although the rates appear disparate there are a few interesting notes. Both Kelly et al. and Nash and West used student samples for some or all of their research. For this population sample, the results are extremely similar with Nash and Wests student sample, reporting a 54% prevalence rate (compared to the 42% prevalence rate from the General Practitioner sample) whilst Kelly et al.s (1991) study reported a 50% prevalence rate for those under 16 years of age including obscene telephone calls (that is where the definition matches that used in the Nash and West study). This similarity is interesting and perhaps suggests that interviewing women at ages closer to childhood may reveal more reports of childhood sexual violence or that younger women see are more prepared to discuss childhood sexual violence. However Cawson et al. (2000) appear to challenge these suggestions, as this research too was conducted with young people of student age (although not necessarily involved in Further or Higher Education). However, Cawson et al.s exclusion of some non-contact forms of sexual violences, which formed a large section of reports, makes their results non-comparable. Overall we can only state with certainty that between 12% and 50% of women under the age of 16 experience some form of contact or non-contact sexual violence. Although relatively general this figures does show that a sizeable minority of women will have experienced some form of childhood sexual violence.

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Characteristics of Childhood Sexual Violence Research on the characteristics of childhood sexual violence have focussed on age at the start of the sexual violence4, frequency of the sexual violence, type of sexual violence experienced, and perpetrator relationship with the victim. Age at start of childhood sexual violence Discussions of age at the start of childhood sexual violence have two elements. Some studies report the average age at the start of childhood sexual violence whilst some studies stratify ages and report percentage scores for each age group. Baker and Duncan (1985) found that the average age for the start of sexual violence in their study was 10.74 years (p.461). Ussher and Dewberry (1995) found that their volunteer sample drawn from the readership of a national magazine reported a mean age at start of the sexual violence of 8.5 years. Nash and West (1985) reported an average age of 11.6 years for both their samples with a minor difference between the two samples. Their General Practitioner sample reported an average age of 11.3 years whereas the student sample reported an average age at start of the childhood sexual violence of 10.8 years. These differences may be the result of methodological differences. Both Baker and Duncan and Nash and West used general random sampling for their studies whereas Ussher and Dewberrys study drew on a self-selected sample from the readership of a national womens magazine. It is perhaps the case that those women prompted to respond to appeals are those who experienced more intrusive and violent cases of childhood sexual violences, rather than cases of non-contact violence or experiences perceived as consensual or not harmful (although why this assumption should be made is not clear). In terms of the discussion of breakdown into age groups I follow Baker and Duncan in categorising age of respondents at start of childhood sexual violences into those under the age of 10 years old and those eleven years or older. Although arbitrary, this categorisation represents both a legal and perceived developmental division. From the age of 10 upwards children can be held legally responsible for their actions in the Court of Law if proven that they know the difference between right and wrong and had some comprehension of what they were doing. The developmental
4

I have avoided the more common phrase of age at onset for this group of results because this phraseology implies some organic condition to childhood sexual violence. Onset is also a medicalised term used to describe the time at which conditions and diseases appear. Childhood sexual violence, however, is not an organic condition and therefore should not be discussed using the same sorts of language.

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division is that the majority of young women now experience puberty between ten years and thirteen years old making the distinction one of pre-pubertal versus pubertal. In terms of the breakdown of ages, Baker and Duncan found that 48% of their female participants experienced childhood sexual violence whilst under the age of ten years old whilst 54% reported childhood sexual violence after the age of ten5. From their study, Ussher and Dewberry reported that 29.1% of their sample reported childhood sexual violence whilst over the age of 10 years whilst the remaining 70.9% were under the age of 10 years. Kelly et al. (1998a) found that 38% of women respondents in their survey reported sexual violence whilst they were under the age of 10, whilst 40% were between the ages of 10 and 16 years old. The remaining 22% were over the age of sixteen years which represents the legal age of consent for heterosexual sex in the United Kingdom but under 18 which is the legal age of consent for homosexual sex6 and the age of majority as defined by the United Nations. Nash and West (1985, p.24) found that from their combined sample 36% of their respondents experienced childhood sexual violence before the age of 10. Split into the separate samples this is shown to be 47% of their General Practitioner sample and 25% of their student sample. The corresponding percentages of 53% for the General Practitioners sample, 75% for the student sample and 64% overall reported childhood sexual violence after the age of 11 years. Mrazek, Lynch, and Bentovims (1983) incidence study of cases reported to family doctors, police surgeons, paediatricians, and child psychiatrists showed from the cases involving female children that 38.6% of the cases involved children under 10 years old whilst 61.4% were aged 11 years or older. With the exception of Ussher and Dewberry, the figures for the age at the start of the childhood sexual violence are relatively consistent. Between 25% and 52% are aged 10 years or younger at the start of the sexual violence (mean percentage 43%) whilst between 48% and 70% are 11 years or older (mean percentage 57%). The very disparate result from Ussher and Dewberry is probably a result of their sample being a volunteer sample. Frequency of the Sexual Violence Frequency of the sexual violence relates to the number of incidents reported by the respondents. There is little consensus over how to classify the results from these enquiries amongst the studies, however it would seem that Baker and Duncans (1985) classification of single event, multiple event by the same abuser, and multiple events by different abusers delivers most information.
5 6

Figures do not equal 100% due to some women reporting multiple experiences of childhood sexual violence. The age of consent has recently been reduced from 21 to 18 for homosexual sex.

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Unfortunately it is impossible to fit the other studies into these categories and therefore this section has to focus on trying to find the commonalities between the results as presented in other studies. Baker and Duncan (1985, p.461) reported that 66% of the women in their sample reported a single event compared to 18% reporting multiple incidents with the same abuser and 16% reporting multiple abusers (but no details are given as to whether these are single or multiple incidents with multiple abusers). Kelly et al. (1998a) found that 42% of women experienced a single event whilst 57% experienced sexually abusive incidents several times or often. Ussher and Dewberrys (1995) study found that only 12.7% of their respondents had experienced sexual violence less than five times, 15.4% between five and ten times, 15.9% between ten and twenty times, 19.6% between twenty and fifty times and 36.4% over fifty times. Type of Sexual violence Baker and Duncan (1985) categorise the incidents reported by their subjects according to the level of physical intrusiveness. They report that 55% of women reported non-contact sexual violence (such as indecent exposure), 40% reported contact sexual violence (such as genital fondling or oral sex) and 5% reported intercourse (anal or vaginal) (p.461). Fitting Kelly et al.s analysis into Baker and Duncans categories we find that 28% of the incidents were non-contact sexual violence, 47% relate to contact sexual violence but not penetration and 25% refer to penetrative sexual violence. In Kelly et al.s (1998a) study the same categorisation shows that 5% experienced some form of non-contact sexual violence, 65% non-penetrative contact sexual violence, and 30% experienced penetrative sexual violence. Both Sexes (% by age at start of childhood sexual violence) 0-11 years 12-18 years Unknown No % No % No % 5 15 32 2 9 violence

Act

Women No % of total Flashing 237 28.0 99 34 188 66 Touching 190 22.4 102 41 135 54 12 Attempt7 169 20.0 145 70 32 15 31 Pressurised Sex 139 16.4 1 1 111 67 54 Forced / Rape 43 5.1 11 21 40 77 1 Ambivalence 32 3.8 1 2 43 98 Masturbation 35 4.1 28 68 13 32 Pornography 2 0.2 2 67 1 33 Totals 847 100 390 37 563 54 98 Table 3: Relationship between type of sexual violence and age at which sexual commenced. Adapted from Kelly et al. 1991, p.17

Attempt here refers to any attempted act that did not reach completion.

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Nash and West (1985, p.23) found that of their General Practitioner sample 31% of the incidents reported were non-contact sexual violence. 57% of incidents consisted of contact sexual violence which was non penetrative whilst 12% reported attempted or completed intercourse (this figure, however, excludes anal intercourse which Nash and West categorised as other rather than intercourse. Amongst their student sample, Nash and West found that 44% reported non-contact incidents, 50% reported contact sexual violence, and 6% reported attempted or completed intercourse. Overall this equates to 37.8% of incidents reported consisting of non-contact sexual violence, 53.3% consisting of contact sexual violence which did not involve intercourse (but does include anal intercourse), and 8.9% reporting attempted or completed (vaginal) intercourse. Cawson et al. (2000) reported that of their respondents (including male respondents) who reported experiences of childhood sexual violence, 17.1% reported penetrative or oral acts, 18.5% reported attempted penetrative or oral acts, and 31.6% reported contact sexual violence which did not involve penetration, whilst 32.8% reported non-contact experiences (p.80). Although it is impossible to state the exact figures for women certain patterns are evident in Cawson et al.'s findings regarding the gendered nature of sexually violence acts. Girls were more likely to have experienced any form of childhood sexual violence, but in particular were much more likely to have experienced attempted or actual penetration or oral sex. In fact although girls were more likely to have experienced any form of childhood sexual violence as the level of physical intrusion increases so does the gap between boys reporting this experience and girls. The disparate results from Kelly et al.s 1998 study most likely arise from the circumstances of the data collection in that this was not strictly a prevalence study. Rather, the aim was to generate a non-clinical sample of adults who had histories of childhood sexual violences, to determine other issues. The focus of the research, in the case of Kelly et al.s 1998 study, was made explicitly clear, and this prior naming may have also have led to less reporting from those who see their experiences as relatively minor or unimportant or where they do not classify the experiences as violence / abusive. Lamb and Coakley (1993) noted that some subjects call coercive experiences normal therefore supporting the idea of a cultural assumption that force is a normal part of heterosexual relations. (p.524). This factor, as in Ussher and Dewberrys research, may have led to an unrepresentative spread of situations being reported which more adequately represented the more extreme, intrusive and violence end of the range of childhood sexual violence.

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Excluding this anomaly, the figures show that between 28-55% of respondents reported non-contact sexual violence such as flashing (mean 40.3%). 40-53.3% reported contact sexual violence which was not intercourse (mean 46.8%) (although this figure is somewhat confused by Nash and Wests definition of anal intercourse as other rather than intercourse). Whilst 5-25% reported intercourse (mean 13%)8. The figures for non-contact sexual violence and intercourse show some disparity, the figure for contact sexual violence is very consistent across all three studies with only a 13% disparity between the three results. Abuser Relationship with the Victim Baker and Duncan (1985) found that of their sample 16% of women experienced sexual violence from someone within their family, a further 30% from someone outside the family but who they knew, and the remaining 56% by a stranger (p.461). Kelly et al. (1991) found that from their student sample, 10% of women experienced childhood sexual violence perpetrated by a relative, 46% perpetrated by someone known to them who was not a relative, and 48% by a stranger (p.17). In their 1998 study they found that 32% of women were abused by a relative, 57% by someone known to them who was not a relative and 11% by a stranger (p.21). Cawson et al. (2000) found that 4% of women experienced contact sexual violence perpetrated by a relative, 11% experienced contact sexual violence perpetrated by someone known to them but who was not a relative, whilst 3% experienced contact sexual violence perpetrated by someone who was a stranger or whom they had recently met. For non-contact sexual violence the figures (as a percentage of the total sample) they report are 1% perpetrated by a relative, 3% by someone known to them, and 4% by strangers or whom they had recently met. Giving further detail, Kelly et al. (1991, p.19) found the following relationships between the victim and perpetrator:

These figures have a 0.1% error caused by rounding.

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Relative

Women Known

Stranger

No % No % No % Flashing 2 0.2 5 0.7 230 33.3 Touching 23 3.3 67 9.7 19 2.7 Attempted 14 2.0 72 10.4 43 6.2 Pressurised Sex 4 0.6 96 14.0 4 0.6 Forced / Rape 4 0.6 33 4.8 5 0.7 Ambivalence 31 4.5 1 0.1 Masturbation 19 2.7 14 2.0 3 0.4 Pornography 1 0.1 1 0.1 Table 4: Relationship between type of sexual violence and victims relationship with the perpetrator (% relates to percentage of all reports by women across all categories of activity). Adapted from Kelly et al. 1991, p.19 From Kelly et al.s work we can see that the majority of non-contact incidents (e.g. flashing) were committed by strangers, implying some degree of familiarity is normally required for contact sexual violence to take place. For those abused by relatives, the majority of incidents were contact sexual violence, which did not involve intercourse (forced / rape) with many falling into the touching / masturbation category. Nash and West (1985) found from their General Practitioner sample that 18% of their respondents were abused by a relative, compared to 33.3% who were abused by someone known to them who was not a family member, and 48.7% who were abused by a stranger (p.29). From their student sample, their results show that 16.3% were abused by a relative, 16.3% by someone they knew who was not a relative and 67.4% by a stranger. Overall, 17.4% reported sexual violence by a relative, 27.2% reported sexual violence by someone they knew who was not a relative, and 55.4% by a stranger. Excluding the Kelly et al. (1998a) survey (already mentioned) there is a close correlation between the other studies. Over the other three studies the percentage for sexual violences perpetrated by a relative varies little between 10% - 17.4% (a range of just 7.4%, mean 14.5%). The percentage for sexual violence perpetrated by a stranger varies slightly more between 44% - 56% (a range of 12%, mean 41.8%). Finally the percentage for sexual violences perpetrated by someone who is not a relative but is known to the child ranged from 27.2% - 46%, a larger range (18.8%, mean 34.4%), but at the same time not one which denies the correlative aspects of the general trend. Other studies have given vastly different results to the question of the relationship to the perpetrator of childhood sexual violence. However these can be explained by the possible bias of a self31

selected sample. For example Hooper, Koprowska and Milsom (1999) found from their respondents that 59.3% of their sample were abused by a relative, 32.7% by someone they knew but were not related to, and 8% by a stranger. Two factors play a role here, in Hooper, Koprowska, and Milsom (1999), Kelly et al. (1998a), and Ussher and Dewberry (1995) the sample was self-selected and the subject of the research was also named as childhood sexual violence before participation. For all three studies this prior naming of the subject was necessary. Hooper, Koprowska and Milsom (1999) were surveying the service provision in North Yorkshire for women who had experienced childhood sexual violence. Ussher and Dewberrys (1995) results were drawn from responses to a magazine survey and Kelly et al. (1998a) results, as already discussed, were drawn from a student sample, but this survey was designed to examine the legacies of abuse rather than prevalence rates per se. However not withstanding the range regarding the relationship of perpetrator to victim, Ussher and Dewberry (1995) also explored the interplay between relationship to the perpetrator and the duration of the sexual violences. The table of results ranked by duration is over the page but generally speaking the results suggest that those abused by non-relatives tend to be abused for less time than those abused by relatives. Abuser Valid % N Duration of abuse in years Mean SD

Abuser Mother and Father 0.1 1 10.0 0.0 Aunt 0.1 1 8.0 0.0 Father 28.4 219 7.4 6.0 Stepfather 12.6 97 5.8 4.7 Grandfather 6.6 51 5.4 3.8 Brother 10.5 81 5.1 5.0 Other (family) 1.7 13 5.1 4.4 Uncle 12.1 93 5.0 3.6 Brother-in-Law 2.3 18 5.0 3.5 Stepbrother 1.2 9 4.1 2.7 Mother 0.5 4 3.0 2.6 Sister 0.3 2 3.0 0.0 Family friend 11.0 85 3.0 2.7 Neighbour 2.9 22 2.5 2.4 Mums boyfriend 1.6 12 2.5 2.1 Other (non-family) 6.1 47 2.0 2.1 Cousin 2.1 16 1.9 1.7 Table 5: Relationship between duration of abuse and victims relationship with the abuser ranked by duration of abuse in years. Taken from Ussher and Dewberry 1995, p.181

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Summary of Results Ghate and Spencer (1995) begin by commenting, of the studies done by Nash and West (1985), Baker and Duncan (1985), and Kelly et al. (1991), that with each of these studies there have been questions about the size or composition of the sample, or about the definitions adopted and consequently about the generalisability and comparability of the findings (Ghate and Spencer 1995, p.3). These concerns are both relevant and founded. For example Nash and West (1985) used a small general population survey sample with only 565 questionnaires being despatched and 315 received back constituting a non-response rate of 44%, which is not unusually high, but when coupled with a pre-existing low sample size it does pose problems with generalisability. The Nash and West (1985) sample and the Kelly et al. (1998a) study both used student samples which have been criticised on grounds of elitism (although Kelly et al. drew their sample from Further rather than Higher Education which would be more representative). However when one compares the findings of Ghate and Spencers pre-pilot studies to the spreads and averages from the studies already quoted we find a close correlation, again, between the figures for most cases. Table 6 below presents the comparative results. This comparison shows that the results for age of commencement of the sexual violences show little variation. Ghate and Spencers findings fit within the spread from other studies and the difference between the Ghate and Spencer study and the mean from the other studies is less than 7%. Comparing the category of type of sexual violences experienced again shows a close fit, although not as close as for age. The Ghate and Spencer results fit within the spread from the other study and are less than 8% from the mean of the other studies. The sole category where the correlation is not strong is that of relationship between the victim and perpetrator. In this case only the category of a known non-relative is as close a match as the mean from previously discussed studies. It is possible in this case that it is Ghate and Spencers small sample size in their pre-pilot investigations which is responsible for this anomaly.

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Issue Variables

Results from studies previously Ghate and mentioned Spencer (1995) Spread of % Mean % Result Results

Age at commencement of sexual violence 10 years or 25%-52% 43% 36.4% younger 11 years or 48%-70% 57% 63.6% older Type of Sexual violence Non-contact 28%-55% 46.8% 50% Contact 32%-52% 40.3% 32.6% Intercourse 5%-25% 13% 17.4% Relationship between perpetrator and victim Relative 10%-17% 14.5% 4.3% Known 27%-46% 34% 34.8% Stranger 44%-56% 41.8% 60.9% Table 6: Comparison of results from Ghate and Spencer (1995) and other studies: Until a national prevalence survey is completed these issues cannot be settled. However the fact that there is some unrepresentativeness in the Ghate and Spencer sample is demonstrated by the fact that they recorded only one case of sexual violence by a woman and only 4 cases of repeated sexual violence (compared to one-off incidents). Cawson et al. (2000) on behalf of the NSPCC conducted a large-scale survey into the prevalence of child maltreatment in the United Kingdom; the team writes that this report gives the first results of a major national study undertaken to explore the childhood experience of young people in the UK, including their experience of abuse, (physical, sexual and emotional) and neglect, collectively described as maltreatment (p.1). It is the largest sample of any of the studies covered so far with a total sample of 2,869 (male and female) and a female sample size of 1,634. However at the moment, with the publication of just one report from the research, the figures presented do not answer the same sorts of questions that previous research has focussed on. In particular the Chapter focussing on sexual violence against children reveals relatively little information on the gender difference within the results. As discussed in Section 2.2 the lack of attention paid to the gender differences obfuscates some issues involved in childhood sexual violence. Certainly for the characteristics of childhood sexual violence only the type of sexual violence experienced and the perpetrator / victim relationship are differentiated by gender and the remaining characteristics are reported as a whole.

34

We can conclude, however, that childhood sexual violence affects a sizeable minority of female children, with estimates ranging from 12% (Baker and Duncan 1985) to 27% (Kelly et al. 1991) for contact sexual violence and increasing to 52% (Kelly et al. 1991) where non-contact sexual violence is included. The average age at the start of sexual violence appears to be around the ten year old mark with average ages varying from 8.5 years old (Ussher and Dewberry 1995) to 11.6 years old (Nash and West 1985). If we utilise the ten year old divider then find consistently across the studies around 30% of those who experienced childhood sexual violence are under the age of ten when it starts whilst around 60% are over the age of ten years old. Figures vary more widely for the type of sexual violences experienced. It appears that between 28% (Kelly et al. 1991) and 55% (Baker and Duncan 1985) of those who experience childhood sexual violence experience non-contact violence such as indecent exposure, exposure to pornography, or obscene telephone calls. Between 40% (Baker and Duncan 1985) and 47% (Kelly et al. 1991) experience contact sexual violence which does not include penetration, whilst between 5% (Baker and Duncan 1985) and 25% (Kelly et al. 1991) experienced sexual violence which included penetration. In terms of the relationship with the perpetrator between 10% (Kelly et al. 1991) and 18% (Nash and West 1985) experience sexual violences perpetrated by a relative, whilst between 30% (Baker and Duncan 1985) and 46% (Kelly et al. 1991) experience sexual violences perpetrated by someone they know who is not a relative, and between 11%( Kelly et al. 1998a) and 56% (Baker and Duncan 1985) experience sexual violence perpetrated by a stranger. This review of the current prevalence research gives an adequate background to an understanding of disclosure of childhood sexual violence when viewed within the context of the international figures offered in the first section. 2.4 After Effects and Perceptions of Childhood Sexual Violence What is clear from this study is that the nature of the experience on it's own does not determine the outcome and that other factors must be considered... The majority (54%) of subjects reported that the abuse had a damaging effect on their lives and only 4% reported that the experience had improved the quality of their lives. It is worth noting that, of those who reported an improvement (n=7), none were abused below the age of 10 years, neither were they abused by someone within the family. Of those abused within the family 67% reported the experience as damaging. Closer analysis reveals that of those reporting improvement, 5 (71%) were males and only 2 (29%) were female and in this case over half of the males were abused by women. (Baker and Duncan 1985, p.462) This section examines the perceived after-effects of childhood sexual violences and the way that women who have experienced childhood sexual violences are currently constructed in academic and 35

practitioner literature. In particular, this review examines the assumption of negative consequences of childhood sexual violences. I do not do this to deny or dismiss these effects, as others have been accused of doing, for example Rind and Tromovitch, co-authors of two articles that were the focus of controversy, have had this accusation levelled against them9. Instead I do this to explore how disclosure and the experience of disclosure fits within the wider context of long-term impacts of the experience. Long-Term Impacts of Childhood Sexual Violence Baker and Duncan (1985) found that when asking research subjects to rate their experiences from harmful at the time to improved life, only 2% (n=2) of the women who had experienced childhood sexual violence rated the experience as having improved their lives. 13% (n=16) said it had caused permanent damage to them and 57% (n=61) said it was harmful at the time. The remaining 34% reported it as having no effect. Contrary to previous assumptions, Baker and Duncans figures show no definite prequelae for a permanent damage response. No universal risk factors for permanent harm were forthcoming from the data including those factors previously assumed to increase the likelihood of a negative perception of the experience (age at the start of sexual violence, frequency of the sexual violence, and relationship with the abuser). Interestingly, however, those who rated the experience as having improved their lives did share specific characteristics. They were most likely to be male; more likely to have been abused after the age of 11; most likely to have only experienced a single incident of sexual violence; and most likely to have experienced sexual violence perpetrated by someone they knew, but who was not a family member (p.463). Kelly et al.'s (1998a) study found that of the women surveyed in their student sample only 10% responded that they did not think the sexual violence was victimising. In contrast 22% percent felt it was a little bit victimising, 21% felt it was quite victimising and 39% thought it was very victimising (p.21). When asked whether and how the sexual violence affected the respondent at the time of the interview 68% of women participants stated that it did: 26% specified sexual worries because of the sexual violence, 20% stated increased vigilance, 18% felt distressed, 14% thought they were insecure, 14% felt they had issues with trust, 13% felt they had issues with power and 12% felt they lacked confidence (p.21).
9

The Rind et al. study faced criticism after it was published including a House of Representatives vote condemning the study (the vote was carried 355 votes to nil). Part of the problem with the study is the over-universalisation of their findings, although many of their findings do challenge the perpetual victim discourses surrounding childhood sexual abuse. For discussion of the political response to the study see Rind, Tromovitch and Bauserman (1999), Oellerich (2000), Speigel (2000) and Tavris (2000). Within their article Rind et al. do make clear that lack of harmfulness does not imply lack of wrongfulness (1998, 47).

36

In an American study, Mullen et al. (1994) also found that 53.8% of their female respondents who had experienced childhood sexual violence reported long-term ill effects that they directly attributed to the sexual violence. Issues listed by these women included fear of men (22%), lack of trust (18.3%), sexual problems (19.7%), damage to self-esteem and self-confidence (4.9%), and mental health problems (4.9%) (p.42). When the severity of the sexual violence was taken into consideration, there was an increased likelihood of attributing long-term problems to the CSA with an increase in the severity of the sexual violence (p.42). Ussher and Dewberry (1995) asked respondents to indicate the effects of the sexual violence in six close-ended categories. That the sexual violence had made them feel angry (68% of respondents), made them feel anxious (51% of respondents), made them feel ashamed (66% of respondents), made them feel guilty (60% of respondents), made them fear sex (31% of respondents), and made them afraid of men (24% of respondents). Only 1.5% responded that the sexual violence had had no effect on their lives (p.183). What is apparent from both these studies is that a proportion (ranging from 68% in Kelly et al. and 46.2% in Mullen et al. to 1.5% in Ussher and Dewberrys study) reported no long-term negative effects directly attributable to the experience of childhood sexual violence. This finding is confirmed by Rind et al.'s meta-analysis which found varying rates of attribution for the long-term nature of the experience of childhood sexual violence: Study Positive Negative Brubaker, 1991 22 60 Brubaker, 1994 10 73 Finkelhor, 1979 7 66 Fromuth, 1984 28 60 Goldman and Goldman, 17 68 1988 Long and Jackson, 1993 4 28 69 O'Neill, 1991 10 6 84 Schultz and Jones, 1983 28 19 52 Table 7: Perceptions of abusive experiences. Studies giving results for men only have been excluded as have all studies not giving full results across the three categories. Adapted from Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman 1998, p.36 The fact that some respondents in studies report no long-term negative effects resulting from the sexual violence has often been conflated with disproving the idea that childhood sexual violence causes harm. Rind, Bauserman, and Tromovitch, based on their cross-national meta-analysis, 37 Females (%) Neutral 18 17 27 12 16

argue that CSA does not cause intense harm on a pervasive basis (Rind et al. 1998, 46). Other studies have found a greater propensity amongst women who have experienced childhood sexual violence to a variety of long-term problems such as depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem (see below for more detailed discussion). However in all of these studies (including the ones quoted by Rind et al.) the majority of respondents indicated that the experience was negative (average from these studies is 66%). Rind et al. argue (1998, 46) that overinclusive definitions of abuse that encompass both willing sexual experiences accompanied by positive reactions and coerced sexual experiences with negative reactions have produced results in study which have poor predictive validity for psychological outcomes for those who have experienced childhood sexual violence. Rind et al.s argument is that adolescents are able to consent to sexual relations because they are more likely to have sexual interests, to know whether they want a particular sexual encounter, and to resist an encounter they do not want (p.46). The argument that adolescents are more able to resist an abusive incident (or rather that adolescents will be able to respond more like adults than children when faced with an abusive incident) is not borne out by research. Kelly et al. (1998a) found that resistance made less difference in the outcome of assaults for women. Additionally Sang argues: The explicit assumption of these educational approaches is that the act of saying no will, in fact, avert the potentially harmful consequencesTo begin with, asking a strong, powerful, highly motivated adult to stop may not always work. Also there is often a subtle and gradual escalation of intimate contact by a perpetrator over time, which may make it difficult for a child to recognize what is happening in time to articulate a clear no. Even if children are explicitly invited to participate in inappropriate sexual activitythey may not have sufficient understanding of what they are being asked to do to refuse to participate. Finally, childrens capacities to resist pressure and coercion from those on whom they are dependent may be limited at best. (Sang 1994, p.603) Kelly et al. (1991) conclude that: The extensive use by children and young people of strategies to try and prevent / avoid / limit abuse implies that the simple no, go, tell messages of most prevention programmes may be teaching our grandchildren to suck eggs. Clearly greater sophistication is needed in personal safety education, which with children and adult women has neither recognised the extent to which they are already in use, nor the fact that they are less effective in relation to known individuals. (p.12) The issues of consent and harm appear to be intricately connected. Nelson and Oliver (1998) argued that the perception of consent on the part of the child or adolescent involved has a strong correlation to the perception of long-term effects. They found that "the subjective experience of consent was strongly patterned by gender and influenced the extent to which the event was experienced as harmful" (1998, 565). Briefly, Nelson and Oliver found that girls were more likely 38

to interpret their experiences as coerced and harmful (p.565). Baker and Duncan (1985, p.465) found that the younger victims of intrafamilial abuse were more likely to be female and this may partly account for the finding that the women in this study were more likely than men to perceive their experiences as harmful. The relationship between harm and certain characteristics of the experience of childhood sexual violence may explain why, on the whole, it is women who attribute negative consequences to their legacy of childhood sexual violence. Certainly psychological research has purported to find relationships between psychopathology and the experience of childhood sexual violence, but Beutler and Hill (1992) highlight the fact that there is more clinical theory than empirical research available (p.204). Reviews of the psychopathological sequelae of experiences of childhood sexual violences are available elsewhere10. For the purposes of this review it is enough to remark that the experience of childhood sexual violence has been linked to many after-effects. These include disturbed attitudes to sexuality ranging from fear of sexual contact to promiscuousness (Finkelhor 1979, Herman 1981, Gold 1986, Hotte and Rafman 1992); problems with relationships in later life (Mullen et al. 1994, Alexander 1992, Briere and Runtz 1988, Jehu 1989); problems with self-esteem (Romans et al. 1996, Briere 1984, Herman 1981, Bagley and Ramsey 1985); depression in later life (Peters 1984, Ussher and Dewberry 1995); and self-destructive behaviours including suicidal ideation and selfinjurious behaviours (Peters and Ranges 1996). Other research has argued that the negative effects attributed to experiences of childhood sexual violence are in fact being conflated with other factors that may produce life-long negative effects independent of the experience of sexual violence. Sexologist Alfred Kinsey took the position that it is: difficult to understand why a child, except for its cultural conditioning, should be disturbed at having its genitalia touched, or disturbed at seeing the genitalia of other persons, or disturbed at even more specific sexual contactsSome of the more experienced students of juvenile problems have come to believe that the emotional reactions of parents, police officers, and other adults who discover that the child has had such contact, may disturb the child more seriously than the sexual contacts themselves (Kinsey 1953, p.121 quoted in Olafson, Corwin, and Summit 1993, p.15). More recently, Oellerich (2000) quotes David Walters opinion that most psychological damage, if any, stems not from the sexual violence but from the interpretation of the sexual violence and the handling of the situation by parents, medical personnel, law enforcement and school officials, and social workers (Walters 1975, p.113 quoted in Oellerich 2000, p.67).
10

See for example Browne and Finkelhor (1986), Fromuth (1986), and Mullen et al. (1994).

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Some research has been conducted to explore the possible confounding effects upon the report of negative long-term effects of sexually violent childhood experiences. In particular the mediating effects of family support (Stroud 1999, Wyatt and Mickey 1987), family characteristics (Fromuth 1986), and reaction to disclosure (Lamb and Edgar-Smith 1994, Roesler 1994). Fromuth suggested that the psychopathological sequelae were wrong attributed to childhood sexual violence when they were, in fact, related to issues about family background (Fromuth 1986, p.9-10). Fromuth's study of female college students suggests that "there was little evidence that a history of sexual abuse made a unique contribution in predicting later psychological adjustment" (p.13). Rather, she argues "the relationship of sexual abuse with later adjustment is not due to the sexual abuse per se, but rather to the confounding of sexual abuse with family background" (p.13). She concludes "it is not the sexual abuse itself which is related to a later negative adjustment, but rather the lack of parental supportiveness which characterizes the home of the sexually abused" (Fromuth 1986, p.13). This final quote illustrates how psychological research creates a series of cultural narratives11 about childhood sexual violences and the women who have experienced them. Both clinical and statistical psychology have had much to say about childhood sexual violence. Both have represented women in similar ways and both have treated women who have experienced childhood sexual violences as a deviant group compared to other normal groups. In effect psychology has acted as agent of the social enforcement of normative standards not only of behaviour (as Szasz 1991 has previously explored) but also of experiences and life-histories. The psy-sciences are both ultimately and explicitly concerned with understanding how women who have experienced childhood sexual violence are different (therefore abnormal) from the remainder of the population. Thus psychological research is designed to find relationships between the experience of child sexual violences and the lasting effects on mental health but it does this by ignoring notions of agency, choice, and decision-making which women who have experienced childhood sexual violence may exercise. This type of research often validates its findings by comparing the psychological functioning of those who have experienced sexual violence with a control group of women who have not experienced childhood sexual violence. The pathologisation inherent in this process derives from the individualisation of sexual violences (as commented upon by Louise Armstrong 1991 and 1994) as a collection of post-event symptoms rather than as an event at all.
11

The descriptor cultural narrative does not necessarily imply that the narrative is untrue but rather than it is part of the way in which women who have experienced childhood sexual violence are talked about and understood. It is not, therefore, a challenge to Fromuths research but rather a challenge to researchers in general to think about the ways in which their work relates to the way women who have experienced childhood sexual abuse are treated.

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This process, inherent in much psychological research, constructs identities for women who have experienced child sexual violences. By dealing solely with broad comparative data but claiming objectivity and generalisability (scientific principles which are discussed elsewhere), psychological texts construct an identity for their subjects which appears to have scientific credibility, but which, in fact, has a number of flaws. 2.5 Constructing Women Who Have Experienced Childhood Sexual Violences

To further understand how women who have experienced childhood sexual violences are constructed I want to use one article as an illustrative example and explore how cultural narratives are deployed throughout. Mullen, Martin, Anderson, Romans and Herbisons12 (1994) The Effect of Child Sexual Abuse on Social, Interpersonal and Sexual Functioning in Adult Life reports on research carried out at the University of Otago, Canada. Its rationale was to examine in a random community sample of women the association between history of CSA [child sexual abuse] and social, interpersonal and sexual function in adult life (p.36). The study recruited 248 women as subjects and 492 women as controls via a postal survey to randomly selected women in the University town of Dunedin, Canada. Both groups were then interviewed for data relating to their family of origin (relationships and socio-economic class), their own socio-economic class, education, and current functioning. Women in the subject group were asked about their own perception of the long-term effects of the sexual violence. The study did not use standardised measures of functioning for their study, instead instituting a new set of questions designed to obtain biographical information on which to base conclusions. The article opens with an introductory discussion of previous research in this field. From the start there are some interesting linguistic anomalies. Child sexual abuse (CSA) evokes distress and disturbance at the time and is reported to produce long-term effects which in adult life may manifest in a range of problems and vulnerabilities (p.35). The subject of this distress (the child / woman who has experienced childhood sexual violence) is absent. Although common sense tells us that women who have experienced childhood sexual violences must be (invisibly) present they have been written out of the story. Additionally the emotional and the mental health consequences become divorced from their embodied context thus also fragmenting women who have experienced childhood sexual violences.

12

This article has been chosen as being indicative of an approach and representative of a variety of common (mis)representations that have occurred in professional and academic writings.

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This is a very similar process to that Tony Trew (1979) mapped in the news reporting of the massacre by the police of black protestors in Rhodesia. Trew explored how the police had been written out of news stories as agents of killing and those killed were blamed for their own deaths. Trew noted from the coverage that there isnt even a description of the victims, who are referred to only in terms of the effects of whatever process brought about their deaths all we learn about the dead is that they died (1979, p.101). I would argue that the same process is in evidence here although the effect is very different. The women who have experienced childhood sexual violence are linguistically invisible but they are also dehumanised in their invisibility. To return to Mullen et al., the long-term sequelae become the focus of the authors attention: The effect of CSA on mental health has been the most extensively studied outcome variable but CSAs correlations with later sexual problems and relationship difficulties have also been a focus of attention. It has been argued that the long-term sequelae are best understood when the CSA is placed within the context of the childs overall development. (Mullen et al. 1994, p.35) Here, however, as well as being explicitly absent, women who have experienced childhood sexual violences are infantilised. Long-term sequelae suggests a passing of time which would make the child-victim an adult yet it is argued that the sequelae should be understood in the context of the childs development. In effect this marks even the long-term sequelae as a childrens (rather than a womans) issue. This sort of infantilisation takes place elsewhere: for example the title of Beutler and Hills (1992) or Dolores Strouds (1999) articles both of which refer to adult victims of childhood sexual abuse. The child was / is a victim but the adult is the sum of that and many other experiences. However for women who have experienced childhood sexual violences they are understood only through the lens of this one experience. Even at this early stage in the article women who have experienced childhood sexual violence have become absented, only acknowledged in processes of infantilisation, pathologisation, and othering. In the second paragraph the authors declare that sexually abused children may show disturbed attitudes to sexuality (p.35). But this statement maintains the child / adult anomaly because, whilst children are sensual beings, to have an attitude towards sexuality implies some degree of mature reflection and an adult understanding of the nature of sexuality. The authors find no way of separating out the events of childhood from a womans adult life and therefore they constantly characterise her through the lens of those childhood events of interest. This infantilisation through the process of continually evaluating womens lives through the lens of the sexual violences can 42

only disempower women who have experienced child sexual violences. It is a way of enforcing the dominance of sexual violences in womens lives and of ensuring that upon disclosure the sexual violences become the dominant discourse around which a womans life is mediated. This infantilisation in academic discourse might remain of purely linguistic interest if it did not form part of the cultural narratives about childhood sexual violences. However, this same phenomenon was described by Ellie in her interview. Ellie It makes me quite angry and very frustrated at times that it feels like theres nothing I can do to actually change their minds because, because theyve got those views and because it affects that fact, that I feel like in some ways that they view me as a child. And so because theyve got the view that Im not as mature are they are anything I say to try and convince otherwise is going to be seen through those eyes and so they are going to be seen as invalid I suppose, almost because yeah I suppose because they feel like theyve got the perfect get out clause.

Returning to the article there then follows discussion of the perceived long and short-term sequelae of child sexual violence. These include: disturbed attitudes to sexuality (paragraph two); disrupted interpersonal and intimate relatedness (paragraph two); insecure and disorganised attachments (paragraph two); difficulties in academic performance and behaviour and a resultant decline in socio-economic status (paragraph three); and a tentative and ineffectual engagement with the problems and demands of adult life (paragraph three). These problems are still disembodied, unconnected with either the lived experience of women who have experienced child sexual violences or to any causal connection with sexual violences (although causality is implied). The article discusses research on the family backgrounds of women who have experienced child sexual violences, remarking that victims of CSA are reported to come more often from disrupted families where one or both of the parents are absent for long periods (p.36). There is, however, no mention of how disrupted is determined, nor what forms of child sexual violence are related to family disruption (for example intrafamilial, extrafamilial, peer abuse). This statement is thus based on a number of implicit assumptions. Firstly it suggests that all sexual violences, irrespective of age, perpetrator, and type of sexual violence are similar; secondly it suggests that a risk factor for sexual violence is one or both parents being absent for long periods. This assertion in itself seems unproblematic but it fails to mention the most consistent and significant risk factor, the presence of a perpetrator. However, the story about the disrupted families is complex. At the start of the next paragraph (paragraph six), these disrupted families are made synonymous with disadvantaged families. 43

This is an example of inherent classism in the researchers assumptions disrupted (whatever that may mean) does not necessary denote that the family is socio-economically disadvantaged. Most studies have found no link between social class and child sexual violence (see for example Nash and West 1985, p.73 and Baker and Duncan 1985, p.460). The description of families of women who have experienced child sexual violence as disrupted also makes a number of suggestions to the reader. Firstly, by focusing on parental absence as a risk factor in childhood sexual violence there is an implication of parental neglect. This implication is based on the cultural narrative that childhood sexual violence is avoidable if parents are vigilant enough or children are careful enough (remembering that children are told alternately to be both innocent and aware). In effect this compounds the victim-blaming and parent-blaming which takes place throughout many cultural narratives about childhood sexual violence. The second implicit suggestion, in the phrase absent for long periods, implies some normative hierarchy of prioritisation for calls on a parents time which was deviated from by the parents of any child who experiences child sexual violence. This reinforces the presumption of automatic parental failure where child sexual violence occurs and imposes a normative template of family life onto these families. By suggesting that a good (normal) parent would not leave their child for long periods implicitly suggests that a good (normal) parent is able to prioritise calls on their time, regardless of financial, familial, or social pressures, to place the child (or children) first at all times. This suggestion implies that any parent unable to do this, for whatever reason, is then not a good or normal parent. In avoiding discussion of social, economic, and familial reasons why a parent sometimes cannot avoid leaving their children, and by reinforcing a normative view of parenting without sensitivity to the problems some people experience, the authors continue to deflect interest from the sole guaranteed correlate: the presence of an abuser. But, furthermore, it suggests that childhood sexual violence can only occur when parents are neglectful and leave their child unsupervised. It ignores the fact that abusers are often relatives, friends, and figures of authority that would reasonably have unsupervised contact with a child. There is a risk discourse being alluded to here: that strangers commit sexual violence against children only when responsible adults fail to protect them. Additionally, alongside the invisible victim, the perpetrator(s) and act(s) of childhood sexual violence are also absented. The act of childhood sexual violence is seen as the defining feature of these womens lives and yet it is simultaneously invisible. However the perpetrator, unlike the victim, does not even appear as a common-sense shadow in the text. The perpetrator is entirely absent and, therefore, entirely ignored in the risk factors and contributions for child sexual violence 44

taking place. Just as with the police in Trews work, there is no perpetrator, merely risk factors for child sexual abuse occurring, and the majority of those imply some non-normative or failing parenting. Returning to the article, the discussion of the absent parent(s) shows no clarity about what constitutes the long period or who defines it as such (the researchers or the research subjects). If it is women who have experienced child sexual violence recollecting their feelings of being left, then there is no definite measure of a long period. However, if it is the researcher who has determined a long time, although we have some consistent measure of what constitutes long, we have no way of knowing how far the women who have experienced child sexual violence have contributed to judging their family circumstances. There is another possibility, which is researchers presuming that the presence of child sexual violences signifies that the parents must have been absent for long enough for the abusive episode(s) to have happened and this may constitute a long period. The next sentence reports CSA victims are more likely to perceive their parents as uncaring and emotionally distant (p.36). Again there is no discussion of why this might be and no examination of whether the experience of childhood sexual violence influences womens perceptions of this. Additionally, the focus on the victims perceptions of their parents fails to allow for any variation in family background; it is suggestive of research which assumes parents will be the caretakers of children and which automatically precludes any alternative (such as grandparents or other extended kinship and non-kinship networks). By making this assumption, the article does a number of things it introduces the framework of heterosexism to the explanation of parenting by assuming that it is the biological or caring father and mother who will raise the child. Linking this to the explanation that childhood sexual violence takes place when the parent(s) fail in their duty to protect the child, we can see that in place of the problem of perpetrators the article has substituted a framework of traditional, heterosexual nuclear family parenting, that fails. By this point in the article, and before any discussion of the actual findings of the particular piece of research undertaken by the authors, another phenomenon has occurred - an identity for women who have experienced child sexual violence has already been constructed. Victims are portrayed as coming from family backgrounds that are abnormal. It is suggested that they are financially disadvantaged and emotionally distant families. It is suggested that women who have experienced childhood sexual violence may be characterised by sexual problems, low socio-economic status, and an inability to form or organise relationships properly. The construction of an identity for women who have experienced child sexual violence is then completed by the researchers statement 45

that counselling and appropriate referral was offered to those who would accept it (p.36). This final assumption is that all women who have experienced child sexual violence will need constant professional supervision / support for the rest of their lives. The researchers felt it appropriate to offer counselling to all women who have experienced child sexual violence taking part in their study, on a basis of those who would accept it, rather than who wanted or needed it. The implication is that whether or not the women involved acknowledged that they needed referral, the counselling was appropriate for all women who had experienced childhood sexual violences. The next section of the article consists of the results of the study. This section consists largely of statistical information relating to the questions asked in the interviews with both subject and control groups. The constructed identity for women who have experienced child sexual violence is now confirmed by the results. The subject women are found to have lower socio-economic status (including lower than their parental socio-economic class); more likelihood of being divorced or separated; more likelihood of having cohabited earlier with a husband or partner13; less likely to be satisfied with their current relationship; more likely to have participated in underage consensual sex; and were uneasy about their own sexual attitudes and feelings. The lower socio-economic class identity is interesting in light of Baker and Duncans (1985) and Nash and Wests (1985) findings. Baker and Duncan (1985) found that there were no differences in either present socioeconomic class nor area of habitation between their respondents who had experienced childhood sexual violence, those who had not, and the general population. Their results are shown in Table 8: Area AB C1 C2 DE Urban Rural Mixed (%) (%) (%) (%) (%) (%) (%) General Population 16 22 33 29 57 16 27 Abused Group 13 27 34 26 57 19 24 Non-Abused Group 16 21 33 30 57 16 27 Table 8: Comparison of Respondents with General Population by socioeconomic class and description of type of area in which raised. Adapted from Baker and Duncan 1985, p.460 Mullens et al. move on to discuss the results gained from asking for the womens own opinions on how CSA had affected their lives (p.41). In summary, the authors say: Long-term ill effects were attributed directly to CSA by 53.8% of the victims. A range of problems in adult life were described which they believed reflected the continuing effects of CSA. The commonest attribution was a fear of men, reported by 49 (22%). A lack of trust which marred their close relationships, not only with men but in some cases with women, was described by 41 (18.3%). Damage to their self-esteem and self-confidence was associated to CSA by 11 (4.9%) women. Sexual problems were associated to CSA by 44
13

Class

It appears from the authors explanation that CSA cases were more likely to have begun cohabiting, whether or not actually married, before the age of 20 (p.38) that same sex relationships were not considered or counted in the relationship history and therefore it is likely that women who were having relationships with women were counted as single

46

(19.7%) women and six (1.7%) women believed they had been unduly promiscuous as adolescents as a consequence of abuse. A number of women reported continuing anger (1.7%) or active hatred (3.6%) directed at the abuser. Mental health problems in adult life were only attributed to CSA by 11 (4.9%) subjects, three (1.9%) of whom considered it has contributed to their developing of depressive disorders, two (0.9%) related it to their substance abuse and six (2.6%) related it to specific fears of contact with men at an intensity which qualified as a phobic state. (p.41-42) The authors fail, throughout this section and the following concluding section, to discuss the fact that of their 248 subjects who had experienced child sexual violence, around 115 (or 46.2%) attributed no long-term effects to child sexual violence whilst 133 (or 53.8%) did attribute longterm effects to child sexual violence. The difference is smaller than would be expected given the authors confidence in concluding that: this paper describes, for a sample of women, an association between giving a history of CSA and a range of social, interpersonal and sexual difficulties in adult life. The associations are understandable in part in terms of the matrix of family and social disadvantage which contribute to the risks of falling victim to CSA, but even when these factors are taken into account significant associations still remain between CSA and most adverse adult outcomes. (p.43) In this concluding discussion of the study, the authors begin to address some of the implicit assumptions from the article. They assert: Child sexual abuse was more frequent among those from disturbed and disrupted backgrounds. This increased vulnerability to CSA was not confined to intrafamilial abuse but included abuse outside the home. It seems likely that children starved of affection and bereft of protection will seek attention and concern outside the family, leaving them more vulnerable to approaches from those with paedophile intentions. Children from privileged and protected homes can still on occasion fall victim to molestation, but their risks were lower than for their less fortunate peers. (p.43) This paragraph does a number of things: it returns to the conflated categories of disturbed-anddisrupted backgrounds as opposed to privileged-and-protected homes. The conflation of categories which are markedly different belies an assumption by the authors that disrupted homes and privileged homes cannot appear together or rather there is an assumption that disruption must be synonymous with disadvantage and protected becomes synonymous with privileged. The authors are both othering women who have experienced childhood sexual violence and also privileging their own status as researchers. The othering is implicit in the suggestions that children who experience childhood sexual violence are those from families which deprive them of attention, families where the parents are emotionally distant or absent for long periods of time (however defined). At the same time the authors continue to infantilise the women who took part in their study and, even in the concluding sections, conflate their childhood circumstances with their 47

adulthood existence. However this paragraph also introduces a new factor to the characterisation by suggesting that children from these disrupted and disadvantaged backgrounds may seek attention and concern outside the family, leaving them more vulnerable to approaches from those with paedophile intentions. (p.43). Here, while no perpetrator or acknowledgement of a perpetrator has yet occurred, the authors characterise children starved of affection and bereft of protection (p.43) actively seeking out attention from others which may then become an abusive situation. Suddenly the child has become complicit with its (failing) parents in the creation of child sexual violence. Further when the perpetrator is, tangentially, mentioned as those with paedophile intentions (p.43) the scientific discourse of sexual perversion is automatically used to minimise the agency of the perpetrator. This close reading of Mullens et al. has shown how academic and practitioner literature redeploys cultural narratives and creates an identity for women who have experienced childhood sexual violences. These characterisations conflate adult characteristics and biographical childhood information in ways that create an infantilised, fragmented identity, which precludes the possibility of agency for the women who have experienced childhood sexual violences. It obfuscates any notion of the womens own interpretations, decisions and changes over their life-course and portrays the women who participated as being solely and consistently characterised by the single set of events in their childhood. 2.6 Disclosure of Childhood Sexual Violence the Literature

Cultural narratives, however, form more than a passive background to individual disclosures; they are part of the disclosure event in a very active sense (as discussed in Chapter Four). Disclosure, as an event, is both controlled and informed by the cultural narratives, amongst other influences. Disclosure is an important issue, particularly as reaction to disclosure may facilitate subsequent disclosures and affirm the woman disclosing. This importance seems at odds with the scarcity of research on the topic of disclosure to date. The literature on disclosure is extremely limited, as Lamb and Edgar-Smith note: In the field of sexual abuse, the work on disclosure has focused on descriptive data of childhood disclosures and attempts to understand the effects of responses to disclosure on children's functioning...most of the research on disclosing child sexual abuse has examined childhood disclosure or nondisclosure as a way to end the abuse. (Lamb and Edgar-Smith 1994, p.310-311) Disclosure is portrayed as a taken for granted and largely invisible process in many studies on social support. Indeed Wyatt and Mickey (1987) do not mention disclosure once in their article despite 48

their research focusing on largely familial support of women who have experienced childhood sexual violence. The practitioner work that has been done has tended to focus on child disclosures (see for example Bradley and Wood 1996, Bray 1989, Wolkind 1989, and Kenward 1987). In terms of empirical studies, although Lamb and Edgar-Smith purport to examine adult disclosures, the framework of their study treated adulthood and childhood disclosures identically (see Lamb and Edgar-Smith 1994). In clinical research, disclosure has also received scant attention, although Herman and Schaztow explore controlled disclosure as a method of testing familial support. In total, disclosure is covered in very little detail by any of the literature and yet its importance as a process underpins much of the same research. Kelly et al. (1991, p.iii) noted that about one half of those who had experienced abuse told someone about the abuse at the time. The person they told was most likely to be a female friend or relativethe major reason for not telling anyone was fear of being disbelieved. Lamb and EdgarSmith (1994) examined disclosure (including both childhood disclosures and adulthood disclosures) and in particular the effects of repeated disclosures throughout ones lifetime (p.311). They found that on average the women in their sample had disclosed 26 times (range 3-105) with the first disclosure being made at a mean age of 18.02 years (SD=1.26) (p.315-316). Reasons for disclosure were examined and Lamb and Edgar-Smith found that in the case of both childhood and adulthood disclosures women tended to disclose in order to get support or because of an evocative experience (p.319). They examined particularly reasons for first disclosures and found the following results:
First Disclosures All Disclosures Childhood Adulthood To get support 21.1 31.4 35.3 Evocative experience 5.3 45.7 29.7 To gain intimacy 0.0 0.0 10.9 Someone asked / encouraged 10.5 5.7 9.2 To directly stop abuse 47.4 5.6 5.0 It was found out 5.3 5.7 4.0 Other 5.3 2.9 3.3. Dont Know 5.3 2.9 2.3 Table 9: Reasons for First Disclosure of Abuse Including A Comparison With Reasons Given For All Disclosures In The Sample. Ranked in order of frequency for All Disclosures. Taken from Lamb and Edgar-Smith 1994, p.319

Lamb and Edgar-Smith found that children were more likely to disclose to a family member: 50.8% of the sample disclosed to a family member as a child, of which 34.5% were disclosures to a parent. Adult women were most likely to disclose to friends (41.2%) followed by disclosure to helping professionals (26.1%) (p.317).

49

More interestingly, Lamb and Edgar-Smith found that adulthood first disclosures were generally remembered as being more helpful than childhood first disclosures (p.316). They also conclude that although disclosure and discussion of abuse have been seen as valued parts of the healing processthe present study does not support the value of repeated disclosure, nor does it show response to disclosure as an important mediator of outcome (p.320). However they go on to note that a large number of disclosures in childhood were made intentionally to stop the abuse, which is as direct a disclosure as possible. Yet a foreboding finding is that the more directly the child disclosed his / her abuse, the less helpful the reaction was (p.322). Ussher and Dewberry (1995) focus particularly on childhood disclosure. They found that 79% of their sample indicated that the abuser tried to prevent disclosure using a variety of tactics. These included saying that nothing was wrong (selected by 31.9% of respondents); using threats and / or violence (selected by 28.5% of respondents); saying it would 'split up the family' (selected by 25.4% of respondents); saying it 'was the victims fault' (selected by 20.5% of respondents); using bribery or blackmail (selected by 3.9% of respondents); saying that it is our secret (selected by 3.7% of respondents); saying no-one would believe me (selected by 2.8% of respondents); saying I would be put in a home" (selected by 2.7% of respondents); and saying it was a game or teaching sex (selected by 2.3% of respondents). A significant minority (46.1%) of Ussher and Dewberrys sample said that they had never told anyone. Of those who had disclosed 75.2% indicated that they disclosed and were believed; 72.5% indicated that they had disclosed and the person told did nothing; 27% indicated that they disclosed and the abuser was confronted; 17.6% indicated that they disclosed and the authorities were informed. However it is the responses to disclosure which are most interesting. These reactions to first disclosures of abuse are overall weighted towards negative reactions, with 418 unequivocally negative responses being reported (such as not being believed or saying it was a lie / fantasy) compared to just 138 unequivocally positive responses (such as the offer of support or helping the respondent to avoid the abuser). Percentage of those disclosing 69.4 50.4 30.7 22.1 13.4 9.7 50 Number of respondents 285 207 126 91 55 40

Believed Person told did nothing Not believed Abuser confronted Authorities Informed Told it was too late

Offered Support 9.7 40 I was dismissed / ignored 6.3 26 I made them do nothing 5.4 22 Said it was a lie / fantasy 4.6 19 They arranged counselling 4.1 17 Said he / she was also 3.6 15 abused Got someone else to 3.6 15 confront abuser Helped me avoid abuser 2.7 11 Table 10: Responses to disclosure. Adapted from text of Ussher and Dewberry 1995, p.183 Reactions to first disclosure have often been studied in association with the long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse, particularly looking at whether there is a relationship between the two. Studies on disclosure as a possible mediator of the long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse have tended not to find an overall association between the characteristics of abuse and the reaction received (Roesler 1994, p.620). Previous work seems to have suggested a relationship between the reaction received to disclosure [and] the severity of the effect of force on current symptoms but only for those who disclosed as children. Roesler found that a positive reaction was associated with lower levels of symptoms amongst the respondents disclosing as children, but that reaction to disclosure was not associated with symptomatology amongst those women who disclosed as adults (Roesler 1994, p.622). However Roesler also found that the age a person told did correlate with reaction to disclosure, with earlier disclosure associated with a more negative reaction to telling of the abuse (p.620). Strouds (1999) work on the nature of familial support has highlighted the fact that even if the family believes they are providing ample support, the victims perception of family alliances may be quite different (Stroud 1999, p.160). Stroud found that there was an association between lower levels of familial support and a closer relationship between the victim and abuser. Where the victim and abuser came from the same biological family the support scores were lowest, compared to a highest rating when the abuser was not related in any way. More specifically, as regards reactions to disclosure, the desire to punish the abuser, the desire for the abuse to remain a secret, denial of the abusive event, and treating the victim differently were all associated with closer familial bonds between the victim and abuser. (Stroud 1999, p.169). Concluding Stroud comments that victims who were related to their abusers (either biologically or socially) reported being less satisfied in general with their families than victims who were not related to their abusers (p.171).

51

Wyatt and Mickey (1987) examine the effects of support on the attitudes towards men held by women who had experienced childhood sexual violence. They report that there is an overall association between severity of abuse and attitudes towards menthis is accounted for by the relationship between severity of abuse and level of support and the association between level of support and attitude toward men (p.409). Their results showed that of those women who had received positive support from parents and others only 24% held moderate or severe negative attitudes towards men whilst of those who received no support 80% held moderate or severe negative attitudes towards men (p.410). There was a constant association between support and attitudes towards men as Table 11 shows the chance that the woman who experienced sexual abuse in childhood would develop that attitude if she received the support level indicated by the row of the table. For example, [Table 11] indicates that 55% of abused women who received positive family support had no negative lasting effect on their attitudes towards men, 21% had minimal effects, 12% had modest effects, and 12% had severed effects. (Wyatt and Mickey 1987, p.409) Attitudes Toward Men Support None Minimal Moderate Severe N Categories Positive .55 .21 .12 .12 24 Not Tell .33 .24 .29 .14 21 Mixed .17 .17 .33 .33 6 Nonsupport .10 .10 .40 .40 10 Table 11: The relationship between severity of abuse and (negative) attitudes towards men in relation to level of support received. Conditional distribution (i.e. fraction of row total) of Attitudes towards men given Support by parents and others. Taken from Wyatt and Mickey 1987, p.410 To draw these very disparate studies together we can understand that disclosure underpins much of the current research regarding women who have experienced childhood sexual violence and yet the concept of disclosure is rarely discussed within this work. Much of the work regarding disclosure itself only examines the first disclosure made, such as Ussher and Dewberry (1995) and Roesler (1994). Both of these studies include important results in understanding the nature of first disclosures of abuse. A positive reaction to a child disclosing sexual violence is associated with lower levels of symptomatology in adulthood and at the same time disclosing the sexual violence as a child is associated with a tendency to not receive a positive reaction (Roesler 1994, p.622). Research that looks at the life-long pattern of disclosures of sexual violence, such as Lamb and Edgar-Smith (1994), has not created a separate framework to understanding the differences between first and subsequent disclosures of sexual violence. A single framework does not seem to encompass even the obvious differences between a child disclosing to try and stop the sexual violence and other disclosures once the sexual violence has stopped. 52

Furthermore, none of these studies has attempted to qualitatively understand the nature and meaning of disclosure, particularly from the viewpoint of women who have experienced childhood sexual violences. Studies on social support are implicitly reliant on some notion of disclosure of the abuse and yet they rarely mention disclosure as a significant issue in their research. Stroud (1999) does highlight that even if the family believes that they are providing ample support, the victims perception of family alliances may be quite different. This may be the result of miscommunication between family members, misinformation about what truly constitutes support, or false memories of abuse. (p.160) Yet nowhere does Stroud comment on the specificities of the disclosure of abuse including the perceptions of the actors involved in the disclosure as important to the understanding of perceptions of social support by women who have experienced childhood sexual violence. 2.7 Conclusions The State of the Literature

This Chapter has sought to explore some of the literature relating to childhood sexual violence. In particular it has focussed on three major issues: the prevalence of childhood sexual violence, the construction of women who have experienced childhood sexual violence and, finally, an exploration of the literature relating to disclosure itself. The deployment of cultural narratives and constructions of women who have experienced childhood sexual violence are fundamental to understanding the context of disclosures. The limited previous literature has almost exclusively focussed on why women who have experienced childhood sexual violence disclose rather than examining the experience of disclosure. Finally this Chapter has explored the limitations of current research on childhood sexual violences and, in particular, disclosure. So little attention has been paid to disclosure that it is an invisible presence in discussions of childhood sexual violences. Those studies that do examine the correlation between childhood sexual violences and other events or problems in later life have not looked at disclosure. Yet disclosure events are obviously the site where the past experience of childhood sexual violence becomes ambiguously confused with the current experiences of womens lives and the future experiences of relationships which can be affected by disclosures of childhood sexual violence. As such, disclosure should no longer be seen as operating in the assumed simple manner which has been suggested by research into the relationship between disclosure and psychological functioning. The next Chapter moves on to look at alternative constructions of disclosure as a linguistic event and how they can be used to extend our understandings of disclosures of childhood sexual violence.

53

Table 12 - Methodological and Findings Comparison across the major five studies Key to Notes in Table This not available for female respondents alone as this data is not presented in the report. This finding is not included in the report. These figures relate to the findings recalculated to exclude incidents which took place after the age of 16 to take into the United Kingdoms legal definition of a child. Studies using the United Nations age of majority which is 18 have included incidents which take place after the United Kingdom age of consent. This figure represents both male and female children as the gender breakdown of results is not given. This category refers solely to the Mrazek, Lynch, and Bentovim (1983) study where of the cases seen, 72.5% related to female children, 11.5% related to male children, and 16% did not specify the gender. This item was not part of the rationale for the study. Study Year Sample Size Methodology Main Findings

Studies Looking at Prevalence Rates and / or Characteristics of Violence Baker and Duncan 1985 2019 = 1050 969 Nationally representative survey carried out by MORI. Respondents were presented with a definition and asked if they had ever experienced such an event before the age of 16. Surveys were conducted in the respondents homes by female interviewers. All those interviewed were aged 15 years or over. Two samples were recruited one from a GP's list of registered patients (223) and one was a student sample in Higher Education (148). The GP sample was 54 Prevalence Rate = 12% Age at Start = (mean) 10.74 years Relationship to abuser = 14% abused by a relative, 30% by someone known but who was not related and 56% by a stranger Frequency of abuse = 66% experienced a single incident, 22% experienced repeated experiences by the same abuser, and 16% multiple abusers Prevalence rate = 45.7% (GP sample 42.1%, student sample 54.3%) Age at Start = 50% aged ten years or younger, 50% aged 11 years or older.

Nash and West

1985

565

contacted by letter and the student sample via their colleges. The women were invited to complete an anonymous self administered questionnaire and asked if they would take part in an interview. The questionnaire asked about demographic information, childhood and sexual knowledge and sexual violence.

Kelly, Regan and Burton

1991

1244 = 784 460

Ghate and Spencer

1995

127 = 69 58

Non-clinical sample of Further Education Students. Survey was by questionnaire distributed and collected within class time. Questionnaire asked about sexual experiences as a child. 90% of sample were aged between 16-21 years. This study was a pre-pilot feasibility study for a national prevalence survey. All respondents were aged between 18 and 60 years. Interviews were conducted with known survivors of sexual violence and the general public. Phases three and four of the pre-pilot were conducted using a pre-selected random sample of 55

(both samples had identical results) Relationship to abuser = 17.5% experienced abuse perpetrated by a relative, 24.5% experienced abuse by someone they knew who was not a relative, and 58% experienced abuse perpetrated by a stranger. (GP: 18% relative, 33% known, 49% stranger; Student sample: 17% relative, 16% known, and 67% stranger) Frequency of abuse = 46.5% reported a single event whilst 53.5% reported repeated events (GP sample: 51.9% reported a single event, 48.1% reported repeated events. Student sample: 37% reported a single event, 63.0% repeated events) Other results relate to perceptions of the abuse and long-term effects Prevalence rate = 59% Age at Start = Relationship to abuser = 10% abused by a relative, 46% by someone known but who was not related and 44% by a stranger Frequency of abuse = Prevalence rate = 28.3% Mean Age at Start = 34.8% under 10 years, 60.9% 11 years or older, 4.3% did not specify. Relationship to abuser = 4.3% of respondents reported abuse by a relative, 34.8% reported abuse by someone who was known to them but not a relative,

Ussher and Dewberry

1995

775

addresses in six different parts of the country. Non-clinical self-volunteer sample who responded to a questionnaire in a British national women's magazine. All respondents were female. The questionnaire contained demographic questions and questions about the experience of abusive sexual experiences whilst under the age of 16.

Kelly, Burton, and Regan

1998

353 = 238 115

Non-clinical sample of University students. Screening questionnaires distributed and completed in class time. Questionnaire dealt with aspects of childhood sexual experience and unwanted sexual contacts in childhood and adulthood. The participants could then volunteer for further stages of the study including interviews (38 ) and a coping strategy questionnaire (66). 56

and 60.9% reported abuse by a stranger. Frequency of abuse = Prevalence = Mean Age at Start = 8.5 years. 91.1% were under the age of 10 at the start of the abuse, 8.9 were under the age of 17 at the start of the abuse Relationship to abuser = 80% of respondents reported abuse by a family member, 20% reported abuse by someone who was known to them but not a relative Frequency of abuse = 12.7% reported abuse which took place less than 5 times, 15.4% reported between 5 and 10 occurrences, 15.9% reported between 10 and 20 occurrences, 19.6% reported between 20 and 50 occurrences, and 36.4% reported over 50 occurrences. The mean duration of the abuse was 5.2 years Other findings related to reasons why the abuse stopped, disclosure and use of coercion and effects of the abuse Prevalence rate = 57% Mean Age at Start = 51% under 10 years, 49% 11 years or older Relationship to abuser = Frequency of abuse = 42% single event, 25% "several times", 32% "often". Other findings related to the long-term perception of the abuse and the views of the respondents regarding certain theories and terms

Study Cawson, Wattam, Brooker, and Kelly

Year 2000

Sample Size 2869 = 1235 1634

Methodology

Main Findings

Mrazek, Lynch, Bentovim

Cold Call interviews in respondents' Prevalence Rate = 21% homes with young adults aged 18-24 Relationship to abuser = 5% relative, years. Sample generated by random 14% other known people, and 7% probability sampling taking Postcodes as strangers or someone recently met. the sampling frame. The survey was a large-scale survey of childhood experiences of maltreatment as well as attitudes to child rearing. Studies Looking at Incidence Rates and / or Characteristics of Sexual Violence and 1983 1599 Questionnaires circulated to family Incidence Rate = 23% of the doctors (504), police surgeons (563), respondents had seen cases involving paediatricians (282), and child child sexual violence. A total of 1,072 psychiatrists (250). The questionnaires cases were reported focussed on the frequency of sexually Type of Sexual Violence = Type I abused children seen during the year abuse 4%, Type II abuse 69%, Type III 1977-1978 and details of the most abuse 16%. 11% did not specify the type recently identified cases. Three types of of abuse sexual violence were defined: Relationship to abuser = 43% were Type I: battered children whose injuries relatives, 31% were known to the child are primarily in the genital area. but not a relative, and 16% were Type II: Child who has experienced strangers attempted or actual intercourse or other inappropriate genital contact with an adult. Type III: Child who has been inappropriately involved with an adult in sexual activities not covered by I and II.

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Chapter Three - Narrative Approaches to Disclosure 3.1 Structure of this Chapter This Chapter focuses on how we can construct understandings of disclosure of childhood sexual violences. Because disclosure is an invisible presence in most social science work on childhood sexual violence it has been necessary to look towards other traditions. Narrative and storytelling has traditionally considered the domain of language and literature studies yet storytelling is one of the fundamental ways in which human life is structured and transmitted. Narrative and storytelling, therefore, are key elements in social research and in this research. This Chapter explores how storytelling, narrative, and disclosure can be understood, drawing on existing work within narrative studies. The first section explores general issues related to narrative and storytelling, including what we mean by a story. The second section looks at narrative work within social research and outlines the troubled relationship between the two. The third section explores womens stories within narrative and social research. These three sections form the backdrop to the later sections which deal with the classification of disclosure as narrative (3.5) and within different narratological genres including autobiography (3.6), testimony (3.7), and confession (3.8), before a discussion of how disclosure may be understood within these genres (3.9). Finally the Chapter concludes with an examination of some of the problems with narrative research (3.10) and particularly explores some of the pertinent problems to this research. 3.2 Narrative and Storytelling

This section looks at how we understand narrative in everyday life and within the research process. Narrative is essentially the structuring of (oral) storytelling. As such it is a mode of storytelling that embodies human actions and human understandings in speech events. Narration involves the oral transmission of stories, understandings, events, and contexts from one social actor to another, the listener, who has their own understandings and contexts. Narration takes place retrospectively, we tell others what happened in a given situation only after that situation has ended. The transmission of meanings via narrative has a very contradictory nature. It is the transmission of both past and present meanings to a listener in the present. As Martin has highlighted, this characteristic requires that "someone describes the personal significance of past experiences from the perspective of the present" (Martin 1986, p.75). In so doing we constantly re-make our pasts and the meanings we find in them. We retrospectively assign meanings to events and that meaning is inconstant and permanently open to reconsideration. The instability of narrative understandings has been a key issue concerning the use of narrative research within the social sciences that the 58

nature of truths could be so unstable immediately highlights the fact that these truths are socially constructed rather than universal. In search of universal (social) truths, research has tended to either eschew narrative research or to see narratives as largely linguistic issues which may offer universal truths about how we talk about things rather than of what we are talking about. In so doing the social sciences have almost always avoided the fact that our understandings, as both individuals and as researchers, are socially constructed. Through accepting that social truths are not stable, nor universal, we can begin to understand narratives as more than just texts. We can see them as telling us something about the social relations within which they are produced. Furthermore they can tell both the narrators14 and the listeners about those particular social events which have led to the stories being told. However this illustrates an inherent problem with using stories as the basis for social research. If we see the nature of narrative texts as a story related by an agent to a listener we are conceptualising it as a static flow of information. However, narrations are reliant on the interactions between the narrating agent and the listener through both verbal and non-verbal cues. Narrative is, therefore, coconstructed. This conceptualisation of narrative is developed further in Chapter Four; at this point it is enough to note that narrative situations are not events constructed by one (the speaker) for another (the listener). Coates defines a story as having two characteristics: firstthere has to be a sequence of narrative clauses (clauses containing a verb in the simple past tense or, sometimes, the historic present tense) whose order matches the real time order of events described in those clauses. These clauses constitute the heart of the story, the narrative core as I shall call it. The second is that, to count as a narrative, a story must have a point; it must have tellability. The worst thing that can happen to a narrator is that their story is seen as pointless; narrators need to avoid the So what? challenge. (Coates 2000, p.3). Given these characteristics both disclosures of childhood sexual violence and the narratives collected for this research can be understood as form of storytelling. Although they do not always obey the first convention: they do contain a narrative core and have tellability for the narrator if not the listener (more about this later). Thus these accounts are narrative texts and they tell stories. They involve an agent, the woman, narrating the disclosure; what happened when they told someone that they experienced childhood sexual violences.
14

I say the narrators also because it encapsulates some reflexivity inherent in storytelling and in particular that by telling stories about ourselves we may not only tell others about ourselves but also tell ourselves about what has happened to us.

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However the opportunity for a text to be a narrative and yet not a story opens up the discussion of narratives of disclosure in new ways. One of the resistances to working with womens narratives has been that on some levels the term story is equivalent to narrative Although the term story can carry the connotation of an unreal or imagined realm generated from pretending and fantasizing (Polkinghorne 1988, p.13). The move to see narrations as stories necessarily implies some degree of construction and fictionalisation. Narratives are, by their nature, both social and linguistic constructions. They are social constructs because they are speech events set within a context of social relations and created by embodied actors who participate in those social relations and they are linguistic events because they are speech events that obey the language constraints and constructions within the storytelling genre. The notion of fictionalisation is one inherent in the activity of storytelling. Fictionalisation allows the speaker distance from the event under narration. This is true of both fictionalisation in terms of embellishment of a story and fictionalisation in terms of obeying the conventions of storytelling in general. However although these two processes are distinct, the notion of fictionalisation is often understood as meaning the former characteristic rather than the latter. Understanding narratives as stories has, because of the understanding of fictionalisation, had connotations for the perception of the veracity of these narratives. Particularly the use of the word story as a term for womens narratives of often personal and emotive events can be seen as undermining the importance of the events under narration. This meaning of story as an account of imaginary or past event; a narrative, tale or anecdote (Oxford English Dictionary) relates to an understanding of the split between reality and fantasy. As Plummer has said: to talk of stories is to sense an invented world of fantasy: of fiction, of fabrication, of making up. As children we come to see stories as an escapist world of make-believe. Thus, when social scientists of all persuasions come to use the term they implicitly suggest that the world of storytelling is not quite the world of truth. At their worst, they even seem to suggest that all we have are storiesSuch arguments are dangerous and have the most serious consequences for any analysis. For instance, the sense that people who have been raped, or people with Aids are simply telling stories may well be taken to imply something less than serious: that they too, like children, are making up tales. (1995, p.167) By describing narratives as stories I hope to be able to utilise the ambiguity in the definition. Firstly, I hope to make clear that these narratives are subjective, they are told by one person involved in the event and therefore can make no claim to the notion of objectivity. Secondly, calling them stories makes explicit that these narratives were produced for a purpose, therefore they are specific verbal interactions with a designated purpose. We tell stories to provoke a 60

response, although that response cannot be controlled and varies according to the story being told, the listener, and other variables in the narrative and setting. Thirdly the use of the word story makes explicit the fact that the stories are produced within conventions about storytelling relating to internal coherence and narrative structures. The element of fictionalisation inherent in storytelling and the presumed accusation of fantasy cannot be overlooked. Arguing that the narratives of women who have experienced childhood sexual violences are stories can be interpreted as viewing them as fictional. However, I would argue that we can view them as fictionalised within the conventions of storytelling. In narration, story-tellers necessarily fictionalise events because the telling of any story involves fictionalisation. Fictionalisation in this sense means only they contain elements which, whilst demanded by storytelling itself, do not directly progress the story. For example, convention demands the contextualisation of the actors in the story to make the narrative understandable, but this contextualisation does not further the narrative. Thus we can understand fictionalisation as the inclusion of those conventions that are demanded by conventional storytelling to make a narrative understandable as a story. Storytelling is the main method of relating events to others who were not present at the time. As McAdams has highlighted: We are all tellers of tales. We each seek to provide our scattered and often confused experiences with a sense of coherence by arranging the episodes of our lives into stories through our personal myths [stories], each of us discovers what is true and what is meaningful in life. (McAdams 1993, p.11) Stories are, then, the way that many of us come to understand the social world around us. Narrative, therefore, may be a way of working which both reflects the truths of womens everyday lives, and gathers those truths via a method common to every day life. Dorothy Smith has argued that: The knower as subject is always situated in the actualities of her experiencing. Therefore inquiry into the social organization of knowledge is prior to and including the moment of transition into the textually grounded world. There is an actual subject prior to the subject constituted in the text. (Smith 1990, p.5) Smiths argument is akin to Ken Plummers argument that narratives are socially produced in social contexts by embodied concrete people experiencing the thoughts and feelings of everyday lifeIf they are texts then they are text embodied by breathing, passionate people in the full stream of social life (emphasis original, Plummer 1995, p.16). Narratives are both textual and real. 61

If we accept Smiths and Plummers arguments that the subject exists outside of the text as well as within, then we can see a complex relationship within the narration of experience. Smith continues saying experience returns us always to the subject active in remembering, in finding out how to speak from the actualities of her life, bringing forward what was into a speaking for which she is the only authority (Smith 1990, p.5). However, these same arguments are also used to denigrate narrative because it is textual, exploratory, and a way of expressing partial thoughts still being clarified. These are the aspects of narrative that offer new vistas in childhood sexual violence research. They allows us to see the partial and changing relationships of women to events in their lives and they enables researchers access to aspects of womens lives not often otherwise contemplated. They give us access to narratives about the reception of stories of childhood sexual violences (disclosure), and the ways that constructions about childhood sexual violences impact on womens everyday lives. Yet if storytelling is at once everyday but fictionalised, and if narrations are not necessarily stories but do obey the conventions of storytelling, then these speech events must occupy a theoretical space somewhere between fiction and truth. The negotiation of this space between fiction and truth accepts that the narration of the event of disclosing will necessarily have fictional elements. In an acceptance of this, some commentators have claimed that all memories are confabulations15, a mixture of what we remember, what we have been told, and what we think might have happened16. If, however, we accept this thesis, these narratives will contain elements which have been filled in by the narrator. This does not necessarily de-legitimise the narrative itself. However it means the narratives provided by women for this study are a mixture of actual memory and emotional remembrance of the event. They represent both what the narrator can remember and what they feel they remember both of which hold vital information for the understanding of disclosure of childhood sexual violences. Not only are the chronological facts related, what was said and when, but also the emotional responses that have the power to colour the recollection of the chronological facts. As The Personal Narratives Group concludes on this issue: When talking about lives, people lie sometimes, forget a lot, exaggerate, become confused and get things wrong. Yet they are revealing truths. These truths don't reveal the past as it actually was, aspiring to a standard of objectivity. They give us instead the truths of our experiences. (Personal Narratives Group 1989, p.261) However, just because the stories being recounted are not objective truths this does not diminish the fact that they are subjective truths containing information about events from that perspective. Martin argues that "many of life's incidents lack clearly identifiable causes, and mania for
15 16

See for example Pendergrast (1997) and Ofshe and Watters (1995) Researchers working in the field of memory do not universally agree this.

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understanding leads us to make up explanations where none are in fact possible" (Martin 1986, p.60). Narrative provides a way to understand past events but this understanding will necessarily be coloured by what has happened since, as Martin says, "the earliest events recounted take on their meaning and act as causes only because of the later ones" (Martin 1986, p.74). I think Martin over generalises here, but if narratives are being used to structure a framework of understanding for an event, occurrence, or life then the temptation to use retroduction17 is apparent. Evans highlights that central to those social needs [to narrate] is the compelling wish of many people to experience life as an organised and coherent process, in which rational choices were made (Evans 1999, p.1). The co-existence of a memory of a disclosure event and its emotional remembrance means that as researchers we are accessing an understanding of the effect of responses to a disclosure of childhood sexual violences. This is the strength of seeking answers from the speaker in the disclosure setting rather than the listener18 because re-evaluation can be useful and informative in itself. "The significance of the events may change when they are viewed in retrospect, and the self that describes the events may have changed since they were first experienced" (Martin 1986, p.76). These changes, when viewed reflexively, aid the understanding of an incident, rather than allocating a retrospective cause to what has happened since. Thus misremembering and re-evaluation are methods of colouring the objective memory with the subjective experience and therefore tell us more about the experience of what is remembered than an objective account ever can. By explicitly acknowledging the problems of recollection and also seeing the strengths in misrememberances, we open up the theoretical space of being able to talk about both the actual and perception of reactions to the disclosure. In effect it opens up the discussion of whether accepted supportive reactions are in fact seen as supportive by the women who receive them, and of what is actually supportive19. Disclosure, itself, is the relation of a fragment of a story, a story that the general public is familiar with from the media. As Douglas says every spoken sentence rests on unspoken knowledge for some of its meaning (1975, p.173). Disclosure acts by alluding to an event that the listener is already familiar with. It appeals to a discourse already present in the public mind as a form of shorthand for relating the information the speaker wishes to impart. As Atmore has said, there is a present and unprecedented plethora of popular cultural references to child sexual abuse (Atmore
17

Martin (1986) argues that "Whereas most sciences involve prediction, narrative involves retroduction. It is the end of the temporal senses - how things eventually turned out - that determines which event began it: we know it was a beginning because of the end." (p.74) 18 As Foucault (1976) argues in a different context it is not just the notion of talking about a topic which is important, "as if the fact of speaking [about sex] were more important than the forms of imperatives that were imposed on it by speaking about" and indeed who is speaking. 19 By this I am referring to the responses to disclosure which are suggested by many professionals - phrases such as "It is never the child's fault" and "You shouldn't feel guilty or blame yourself".

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1998, p.124). Populist stories frame childhood sexual violences in ways that lead to an element of culturally understood scripting. As cultural consumers, we come to expect certain modes of representation in stories about childhood sexual violences. This scripting, which I refer to elsewhere as cultural narratives, leads to non-standard stories becoming problematic, in that they challenge the dominant representations that we, as social actors, understand. This scripting is part of how society transmits meanings, but it also serves to inhibit other sorts of stories about sexual violence that become seen as transgressive. Some transgressive stories become, in time, part of the scripted understandings, for example survivor stories have become familiar to us via books and television shows, whereas they were once unusual. But this notion of scripting offers us some ways of understanding the reactions provoked by disclosures of childhood sexual violence. Narrative and storytelling, therefore, open up new ways of looking at disclosures of childhood sexual violences. As earlier sections show, previous literature focused attention on the narrative and reactions of the listener (assuming that the listener is a mental health professional, a social worker, or a medical professional). In contrast, this study examines the narrative and reactions of the speaker and as such offers new commentaries on both disclosures within and outside professional relationships. 3.3 The Use of Narrative in Social Research Our encounter with reality produces a meaningful and understandable flow of experience. What we experience is a consequence of the action of our organizing schemes on the components of our involvement with the world. Narrative is the judgmental scheme for linking individual actions and events into interrelated aspects of an understandable composite. (Polkinghorne 1988, p.13) We are constantly writing the story of the world around us: its period and places, its purposes and programmes, its people and plots. We invent identities for ourselves and others and locate ourselves in these imagined maps. We create communities of concern and arenas of activity where we can make our religions, tend to our families, practise our politics, get on with our work. We experience our bodies and our feelings, as well as our behaviours and talk. And everywhere we go, we are charged with telling stories and making meanings giving sense to ourselves and the world around us. (Plummer 1995, p.20) Narrative and the uses of narrative have not received much explicit attention within sociological work, although narrative forms the basis of much qualitative work. Recently there has been a reinvigoration of the field of social narrative research which has led some to remark that what started as a revolution is in danger of being co-opted by the dominant paradigm of mainstream sociology, which transforms emotional experience into models of rational action (Ellis and Flaherty 1992, p.2). 64

Narrative, however, has become a staple of feminist scholarship (Cosslett et al. 2000, Foreword). For feminist work narrative is a method that allows understandings of womens lives from their own perspectives. Narrative is a key component in consciousness raising which, Mackinnon argues: socializes womens knowing. It produces an analysis of womens world which is not objective in the positivistic sense of being a perfect reflection of reality conceived as abstract object it embodies shared feelings, comprehensions, and experiences of women as products of their conditions, through being critical of their condition together. (MacKinnon 1989, p.101) To tell stories about our own lives to others and to share information, MacKinnon suggests here, creates a new sense of truth, which challenges the status quo. Church makes a similar point about critical autobiography saying there is a challenge here to (male-dominant) conventions concerning what can be discussed (Church 1995, p.3). The narrative turn in malestream social theory and the dominance of narrative within feminist theory, I would argue, has occurred precisely because of the expansion of perspectives possible within narrative work outlined above. As Polkinghorne argues: Experience is meaningful and human behaviour is generated from and informed by this meaningfulness. Thus, the study of human behaviour needs to include an exploration of the meaning systems that form human experience narrative [is] the primary form by which human experience is made meaningful. Narrative meaning is a cognitive process that organizes human experiences into temporally meaningful episodes. (1988, p.1) Narrative as a form of theoretical exploration, however, is contentious. It has been critiqued in methodological discussions because there is no notion of objectivity, no analysis inherent in the collation of narrative, and no analytical comparability between sets of narratives20. Meanwhile malestream research has traditionally dismissed womens narratives as having little relevance because womens perspectives are limited. However the use of narrative as a way of understanding social interactions, social truths, or simply how we communicate has become a popular method. Martin argued that narrative "is not just an impressionistic substitute for reliable statistics but a method of understanding the past" (Martin 1986, p.7).

20

In the sense of generalisability, however, this study is not concerned with the representativeness nor with the comparability of the participants. This study draws on the tradition of research where the applicability rather than the generalisability is the key concern. The questions asked during this research are whether the experiences of the participants can teach us anything rather than the more traditional questions of whether they represent a wide trend. Although this means creating a subjective knowledge, dependent upon whom one uses to gain a sample, it also allows the differences and uniqueness of each story to come forward and allows for an exploration of the role of context and contradiction within disclosure of abuse.

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Within work on violences against women and children the use of narrative has a very limited past. Asking professionals is accepted as a method of data collection that is to say psychologists, General Practitioners, Social Workers, and Paediatricians. It is only with feminist work on violence against women, and in particular childhood sexual violences, that subjective narrations and interpretations have been sought and used without the enforcement of previously established frameworks of understanding. For example, within prevalence research it was only Kelly et al.s (1998a) work in the UK that asked women who had experienced childhood sexual violences about the nature of their reactions to the experience rather than enforcing interpretations upon the data about experiences. Some research has used narrative as a method for understanding and getting at social and linguistic truths. Coates points out that: the study of narrative does not fit neatly within the boundaries of any scholarly field (Riessman, 1993:1): oral narrative is studied by ethnographers, by folklorists, by sociologists, by social historians, by social psychologists. This narrative turn arises from a growing understanding of the importance of narrative in our lives. It has even been suggested that the ability to think in a narrative way is an innate capability of the human species and highly functional for our survivaldifferent disciplines with their different concerns have developed a variety of models [for narrative]. For example, many disciplines (for example oral history, social psychology) focus on stories elicited in interviews, whereas sociolinguists and discourse analysts are primarily concerned with stories arising spontaneously as part of everyday interaction. (Coates 2000, p.1) Previous engagements with narrative in the field of research about experiences of childhood sexual violence have been limited to its use as interview data. Yet narrative accounts of aspects of childhood sexual violence offer more than just a way of collecting data. Although in the traditional fields of prevalence, characteristics, and long-term effects research, narrative would offer limited benefits (notwithstanding Kelly et al.s 1991 and 1998a works), within feminist work on sexual violence it offers certain attractions precisely because, as Plummer has said: the ceaseless nature of storytelling in all its forms in all societies has come to be increasingly recognised. We are, it seems, homo narrans: humankind the narrators and storytellers. Society itself may be seen as a textured but seamless web of stories emerging everywhere through interaction: holding people together, pulling people apart, making societies work. (Plummer 1995, p.5) However in terms of new approaches and subject areas, like woman-centred work on the disclosure of childhood sexual violence, narrative offers new impetus to research. In particular it allows for understandings of how sexual violence plays a role in womens lives, and how previously experienced childhood sexual violences can continue to play an important role in womens lives through the event of disclosure. 66

3.4

Womens Relationship to Narrative

This section examines new perspectives on understanding women's narratives and in particular Joanna Phoenix' argument that women relate themselves within narrative in different ways to men. In particular its main theme poses challenges to our understandings of women's narratives and our ways of reading them. Joanna Phoenix, in her work on prostitute women, has argued that: when examining the interviewees life histories it can be seen that the women narrators are not the centre, heart of essence of their texts. They are somewhere else. They are located within a set of personal experiences created by something or someone else. The centre is situated in the oppositional relationship between, for example, self and very specific others. hence the centre of the texts is found in the relationships. (Phoenix 1999, p.13) Phoenix uses this narratorial abandonment of the central position to examine the relationships as the central element in the narrative. Phoenixs method is, briefly, to accept the interviewee's abandonment of the narratorial position and to focus on what seems to be central in the narratives. Phoenix argues that: traditional analyses of life historical interviews (which themselves are effectively autobiographical texts) assume (1) a (near) one-to-one correlation between the texts that are produced and the life-as-lived, and (2) that the texts are indeed authored by stable and unitary authors. (Phoenix 1999, p.11) View of autobiographical texts as representations of real life are reliant on these assumptions. Phoenixs work, however, treated the autobiographical narratives as texts which can be "opened, deconstructed and analysed in ways that bring into focus the accommodation of contradiction" (Phoenix 1999, p.11). For Phoenix new understandings are opened up when autobiographical texts are not seen as representational but where "words and texts only exist in transformations, traces and spaces, and meaning is created not from the centre, but at the margins" (Phoenix 1999, p.13). The move away from understanding autobiographical narratives as reflective of the events and towards seeing them solely as texts is, however, not the only strategy for understanding the contradictions inherent in everyday life. Phoenix concludes her introduction by saying that "the contradictions of engagement in prostitution are accommodated (and thus plausibility is achieved) via the construction of a distinct identity (that is, a prostitute identity)" (Phoenix 1999, p.13). For Phoenix the cognitive reaction to contradictory experiences (or dissonance) is to create a separate identity. However this seems contradictory when compared to her argument that the women she 67

interviewed abandoned narratorial centrality. Someone who has multiple identities and therefore multiple voices with which to talk would surely be able to construct a contradictory narrative speaking from different positions, rather than abandon the centrality to relationships and others. Phoenix's arguments are persuasive and the key to the problem may lie in the understanding of autobiographical narrative, because of the challenge implicit in creating an autobiographical (and therefore presumed to be unitary and reflective) narrative (in which one speaks for oneself). If this is true and those with conflicting or contradictory identities abandon narratorial centrality to express these contradictions then we would expect to see similar narratorial abandonment in the narratives of women who have experienced childhood sexual violences. In many respects this is the case, as the example below by Alice shows. Alice described a situation where her teenage son was approached by a man in the town centre and offered money for a sexual act. Alice I had a wonderful experience last year with [my son]. He was coming home from a friend's house through town and it was like five o'clock in the afternoon, fine weather. Walking through town, where the public loos are, he walked diagonally straight across where the public loos are behind Boots [the Chemist], just in town, right in the shopping centre, right in the middle, a really busy part of town. A man approached him and offered him a fiver to masturbate him. [My son], thank god, came straight home and told me. [] He came straight in and told me and I said We need to phone the police and he's like I don't want to tell them and I said That is how this works. If you feel bad and can't tell the Police they've won really 'cos they've made you feel like you've done something wrong and you haven't and that's what these people do. Oh right then he said, you know, he understood that and so we got the Police round. And we were so lucky because this guy was wonderful, he said I'm really impressed that you've told somebody. [] So dear [son] was, was great. So I thought maybe I'm not, not that mad. If they feel they that they can come and say then I haven't made it a taboo subject, you know, erm, particularly for a boy being approached by another man." What Alice is actually commenting on here is not the situation that occurred, although it is important, but rather her parenting abilities and the openness she has tried to create with her children in contrast to her own childhood. She does this by making her son the centre of the narrative. Only in the final sentence does her actual concern become apparent. Namely that she had made it impossible for her children to talk to her because of her madness. In light of Phoenixs work, Alice seems to be working with a contradictory event. When the section starts Alice talks about what happened as being a "wonderful experience" and yet this is an 68

encounter where her son is propositioned for sex. What she is alluding to is the contradictory nature of the experience whereby the worrying initial incident led to good results. By telling, her son allowed her to invoke the necessary legal steps to protect others, but also reassured her about her own parenting skills. In this excerpt the narratorial centrality is given to Alice's son firstly and then, briefly, to both the perpetrator and the police officer. She only takes back narratorial centrality to highlight the underlying concern from the previous statements. This brief analysis suggests that Phoenix is right in that women do abandon the central character in their narratives, but I feel she overstates the case. This narrative abandonment of the central position does pose an interesting challenge to researchers working with womens narratives. If the interviewee abandons the central role then these narratives would not be about the women themselves but about the other people that women participants substitute into the central roles. The issue is a difficult one as the challenge of re-making the women participants central is clear. There is also a second challenge; if women talk more often of other people then researchers might know more about others than about the women they set out to research. The challenge that Phoenix's strategy presents to our understanding of narrative is therefore important. However even when the narrator has abandoned narratorial centrality it does not mean that the narrative is not about the narrator. The above example from Alice shows that even when the narrators explicitly place others centrally, the hidden but omnipresent focus of the narrative is an understanding of the narrator herself. Put more simply, it takes us back to McAdams assertion that if you want to know me, then you must know my story, for my story defines who I am. And if I want to know myself, to gain insight into the meaning of my own life, then I, too, must come to know my own story (McAdams 1993, p.11). 3.5 Disclosure as narrative and narratives of disclosure

This section moves the discussion from the general to the specific and thinks about disclosure of childhood sexual violences as narrative. Any narrative attempt to understand disclosure must acknowledge two separate but linked narratives. The immediate (direct) narrative is gathered at interview and concerns the story of the disclosure of childhood sexual violences by the respondent to listeners over the life-course. The second narrative is an indirect and partial narrative about the disclosure of sexual violences itself, particularly how women who have experienced childhood sexual violences disclose this to others.

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From a narratological point of view the study could limit itself to examining how women talk about disclosing childhood sexual violence by looking at the interview narrative. However this does not examine what happens when adult women disclose childhood sexual violences; instead it would only offer an understanding of disclosures denuded of the context of social relationships and firmly rooted in a linguistic tradition of analysis. This would tell us little about the social contexts of disclosures, the nature of agency and change within the disclosure process. The dual-narrative notion poses questions about the position of these narratives within narrative genres. These narratives are located at the intersection between genres of narrative and specifically of interest in this context are the genres of autobiography, testimony, and confession. The interrelation and interplay of different narrative forms is often overshadowed by a view of narrative forms as discrete rather than as being overlapping and interweaving. The narratives collected for this study cannot be conceived of in terms of any single narrative genre. It should be recognised, however, that these narrative forms are directly concerned with the notion of power, especially the hierarchy of power we allot to different narratives21. Foucauldian analysis, particularly, highlights the relationship between knowledge and power. Carol Smart discusses these relationships saying that: Central to Foucault's analysis is the relationship between power and knowledge. This is not the old (even if valid) idea that knowledge is power, but the converse that power is productive of knowledge which necessarily enhances given modes of power. This in turn gives rise to his argument that the deployment of power is facilitated when the knowledge produced can also make a claim to truth. In other words, it is a feature of modernism that knowledge which can claim to be true (rather than belief superstition, opinion, and so on) occupies a place high up in the hierarchy of knowledges. The claim to truth is therefore a claim to deploy power. (Smart 1995, p.72) Thus we could argue that those narratives which claim truth are seen as more important than those which cannot claim truth. Thus testimony is, in many fields, more highly prized than autobiography (which explicitly admits its subjectivity). Smart's analysis of modernism raises the problem that if it is power that creates knowledge, what is the position of the knowledge of the disempowered? Can the victim use their experience to create knowledge? Historically the academy has been unwilling to utilise the knowledge of women who have experienced childhood sexual violences as a basis for understandings of childhood sexual violence. Burt and Oaksford argued against this trend within academia:
21

This is true if we consider the power allotted to true and fictional narratives too. A true narrative is more powerful precisely because we see it as reflecting another persons life, whilst the notion of a fictional account places an emotional space between us as reader and the character / actor as narrator. That emotional space comes with the knowledge that the narrative is not true.

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what is the best advice that can be given to someone attempting to cope with the experience of child sexual abuse? Traditionally, the only advice that could be given about how to generate hypotheses would be to read the literature and sit in your armchair and hope that something sensible comes to mind. Perhaps a better procedure is actually to talk to people who are suffering from the effects of child sexual abuse. By allowing them to speak freely about their experiences, and their ways of coping, factors might be suggested that simply do not appear in textbooks. (Burt and Oaksford 1999, p.333) Burt and Oaksford are suggesting that women who have experienced childhood sexual violence should have their wisdom validated, but appropriated, by those in a position to make knowledge. In a certain analytical framework women who have experienced childhood sexual violences are disempowered by an inability to have their knowledge validated. This assertion overstates the case, however. It is true that victims rarely have access to the structures that allow them to make formalised knowledges, such as the legislature or the academy. However there is ongoing work to empower women who have experienced childhood sexual violence to take part in knowledge making projects. This may involve an appropriation of these knowledges in some situations (such as the academic) but also involves an acknowledgement and validation of these knowledges. The major difference between formal knowledge and experiential knowledge is the claims made for its objectivity and / or validity. For experiential knowledge, objectivity is not an issue, because this is knowledge based on experience and therefore on the subjective; in fact its claims to validity rely on this very characteristic. As Teresa De Larentis argues: experience is the process by which, for all social beings, subjectivity is constructed. Through that process one places oneself or is placed in social reality and so perceives and comprehends as subjective (referring to, originating in oneself) those relations - material, economic and interpersonal - which are in fact social, and, in a larger perspective historical. (de Laurentis quoted in Scott 1988, p.61) Smart and Foucault both reject this notion of the power / knowledge relationship. Both argue that knowledges produced outside the formalised knowledge producing institutions have existed and have merely been silenced by these same institutions. However Hill Collins too puts forward a notion of experiential knowledge which she has conceptualised as "wisdom" (Hill Collins 1991, p.208). Foucault acknowledges knowledges based outside the formalised structures and argues that these other knowledges are subjugated: those blocs of historical knowledge which were present but disguised, a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: nave knowledges located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity. (Foucault 1980, p.82) Patricia Hill Collins, however, critiques Foucault's notion of these knowledges being nave. Hill Collins argues that "black feminist thought is not a nave knowledge but has been made to appear 71

so by those controlling knowledge validation procedures" (Hill Collins 1991, p.18). These knowledges are only seen as second-class because those with access to formalised structures for creating knowledge conceive them as such. To dismiss any knowledge as nave implicitly suggests that it is unfounded or untested or rather the denigration of these experiential knowledges comes precisely from the notion of objectivity on which formalised structures of knowledge rely. Within and outwith the specific context of this study, I think that knowledges based on experience are not intrinsically lesser forms of knowledge than those knowledges which Foucault claims meet the required level of cognition or scientificity. In any research where the object of study is a subjective experience the notion of objectivity must be questioned. If our understanding of knowledge includes those knowledges based on experience (or in Hill Collin's terms, includes wisdom), this allows us to understand the subjective experience whilst also exploring discrete events. However, expanding our understanding of knowledges also involves an exploration of the narrative forms of testimony, autobiography, and confession, in terms of exploring how these narrative forms relate to the experiential narratives given by the women-participants. The interrelation and interplay of these three narrative forms is important in creating an understanding of the narratives contained in this study and in determining how we can re-evaluate and revalue power in relation to these narratives. 3.6 Disclosure and Autobiography autobiography: writing of one's own history; the story of one's life written by himself [sic]. (Oxford English Dictionary) autobiography makes trouble: it is difficult to define as a distinct genre, on the borderline between fact and fiction, the personal and the social, the popular and the academic, the everyday and the literary. (Cosslett et al. 2000, p.1) Erving Goffman once said, I only put in all that self stuff because people like to read about it (Goffman quoted in Lofland 1984, p.21). Bjorkland goes on to comment, Goffman was joking, but he was right, of course, that most of us find the topic of self to be fascinating. As human beings we are self-reflective creatures (Bjorkland 1998, p.1). Autobiography is seen as the ultimate expression of selfhood - the narration of a single life from the point of view of the narrator. Bjorkland says autobiographies can help us make sense of our lives and give voice to thoughts and feelings that we also may have had (Bjorkland 1998, p.ix). This is 72

self-reflexivity on the part of the narrator that implies soul-searching and a re-experiencing of the emotions connected with the event22. Whilst this soul-searching may be seen as an empowering activity, it can also provoke wide-ranging and emotionally upsetting reactions. It also suggests that the reader / listener can come to know the narrator through the narration. Benstock says, "it is a theory of selfhood that is always under examination in (analyses of) autobiographical writings" (Benstock 1988, p.1). However, as Evans comments the ways in which the genres of autobiography and biography cannot represent what they claim to represent, namely the whole life of a person. Furthermore, this whole person is in any case a fiction, a belief created by the very form of autobiography itself (Evans 1999, p.1). Although autobiography is seen as the narration of a single life Susan Stanford Friedman has argued, following Rowbotham, that a woman cannot experience herself as an entirely unique entity because she is always aware of how she is being defined as woman, that is, as a member of a group whose identity has been defined by the dominant male culture (Stanford Friedman 1988, p.38). In womens autobiographies it is relationships that become the focus of the narrations23. This is not to suggest that women only define themselves within these relationships with others. However there are situations where at least partial self-definition is drawn from relationships (for example being a sister, daughter or friend). In this context relationships can demonstrate the negotiations between self-defined identity, assumed identity, and relationships. In the content of this study, how the narrator relates to other narrated actors is important precisely because it is reactions to and feelings about the other people that are of interest. What is also under exploration in autobiographical narration is the connection of the self to social structures. As Cosslett et al. highlight there has always been a strong feminist interest in the autobiographical, beginning with the attempt to connect the personal with the political, and the concomitant emphasis on women's experience as a vital resource in the creation of women's knowledge (Cosslett et al. 2000, p.2). The personal-political connection makes contextualisation of narratives within explicitly understood structures of everyday life an important part of narrating one's own story. The relationships
22

Psychological theory uses this facet of autobiographical experience as the basis of abreaction therapy. The patient narrates an experience to relive it. "Freud coined the term abreaction to describe what he considered an emotional reliving of forgotten trauma, and for a while he believed he had found the key to his patients problems in life" (Pendergrast 1997, p.11). The benefit of abreaction therapy is hotly contested. Pendergrast himself is sceptical and argues that the process allows therapists to control clients, that abreaction can be addictive for patients, and ultimately it serves no therapeutic benefit. 23 For example the Personal Narratives Group (1989) argues, "the interpersonal context revealed in women's personal narratives suggest how women's lives are shaped through and evolve within relationships with others" (p.20).

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between the self-as-lived, modes of representation, and control within society are an explicit focus for feminist understandings of autobiography. That is, in narrative we can make clear those factors beyond our control as well as those over which we do have control. Autobiography can, therefore, be seen as the opportunity "by which women have asserted their place as active subjects challenging the oppressive representation and actions of powerful hierarchies, not only in regard to their individual situation but in terms of a social group" (Brodzki and Schenck 1988, p.xi). By characterising the narratives in this study as autobiography we can utilise notions of autobiography as empowering, embodying the ability and opportunity to write a part of ones own life. Autobiography can challenge dominant ideas, representations, and conceptions of women who have experienced sexual violences as children and also rewrite the ways in which listeners represent and conceptualise the woman. However this does not reflect the experience of the disclosure event (one instance of autobiographical narration) as disclosure often involves definition by others. Autobiography therefore can only allow women to write-in their experience of an event but does not change the event-as-lived. However autobiography does not fully encapsulate the nature of the disclosure narratives in this study. Autobiography implies a sense of closure, something constructed with hindsight and reflection. The narratives collected for this study are reflexive but are written from a point of continuance rather than closure. Disclosure of childhood sexual violences is a life-long process and none of the narratives are suggestive of a position of I have now finished disclosing24. The nature of autobiography is that it writes a story of the author's life up to a certain point. In this study the effects upon a relationship of disclosing childhood sexual violences may carry on throughout that relationship and beyond the point of interview. Stanton, however, challenges this view of autobiography, claiming "autobiography, then, was necessarily un-ended, incomplete, fragmentary, whatever form of rhetorical closure it might contain" (Stanton 1987, p.8). In Stanton's opinion autobiography can never be finished because it must be written before the author's death therefore the autobiography remains fractured and incomplete. With this understanding of autobiography, womens narratives of childhood sexual violences can be understood as part of the autobiographical tradition.

24

This is a feeling gained from the autobiographical accounts of being an abuse survivor written. For example passages in Wisechild (1988), Armstrong (1979) or Farthing and Marce' (1987) are suggestive of this. However even in these cases the process of disclosing is not finished irrespective of the note of finality.

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Swindells asserts that "autobiography invariably has a political dimension to it" (Swindells 1995, p.205). The political dimensions of women talking about childhood sexual violences have, recently, been overshadowed by psychotherapeutic dimensions of talking about abuse25. Before feminism revalued political (that is, when political was synonymous with the public world and apolitical with the private world), women's autobiographies were considered household documents of little interest or significance. Once feminism challenged the barriers between the public and the private spheres, between the personal and the political, then women's narratives allowed their experiences to be seen as having a political nature. When feminism first rediscovered the topic of childhood sexual violences in the early 1970's, speakouts focussed thoughts on the political aspects of childhood sexual violences. Prior to this period it had been assumed that sexual violences against women were relatively rare and against children even rarer. Speakouts and consciousness-raising led to a realisation that these events were not unusual. The political nature of the debates that arose at this time was based firmly in the notions of the personal as political and also in the rights of women and children to live a life free from sexual violences. These political demands, backed up by testimonial narratives from women, led to a re-evaluation of how childhood sexual violence was seen both in terms of personal lives and in terms of policy and politics. The basis of speakouts are invariably autobiographical, lived testimonies by women who had experienced sexual violences, designed to encourage other women to come forward. The collected writings of survivors (for example Farthing and Marce 1988, Armstrong 1979) serve a similar purpose. Autobiography is a necessary part of investigation and exploration of childhood sexual violences. As Smith says: however problematic its strategies, autobiographical writing has played and continues to play a role a in emancipatory politics. Autobiographical practices become occasions for restaging subjectivity, and autobiographical strategies become occasions for the staging of resistance. (Smith 1993, p.156) To limit our conception of narratives of childhood sexual violences to being autobiographical limits their usefulness. The understanding that autobiography is largely about the self and no other isolates each account of sexual violences and prevents a wider understanding of the issues. The power that collections of autobiographies have is that they attest to a common phenomenon, breaching the boundary between autobiographical and testimony.
25

Writers such as Armstrong would correct the use of the word recently. Armstrong has argued that from the point of rediscovery of sexual abuse, the psychotherapeutic agenda obscured and eclipsed the political agenda (personal correspondence). Armstrong's writings, however, amongst the writings of others, served earlier to emphasise the political agenda of feminist consciousness raising around the topic of child sexual abuse.

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3.7

Disclosure and Testimony testimony: personal or documentary evidence or attestation in support of a fact or statement; hence any form of proof. (Oxford English Dictionary) testimony has become an increasingly important category of autobiographical practice it is not clearly separable from a distinctly defined autobiography - it is another way of conceiving of the same material. (Cosslett et al. 2000, p.9)

Cosslett et al. trace the history of testimony arguing that: The concept of testimony comes partly from a legal framework - the testimony of witnesses in court. In this sense, it connects first-person narration to truth-telling. The aim of the court is to arrive as near as possible to the facts of the case, relying on the testimony of eyewitnesses. But, of course, from the legal point of view the unreliability and partiality of memory is a problem - the court cannot assume that witnesses' accounts are accurate, or unbiased. (Cosslett et al. 2000, p.9) This legal use of testimony refers to a tightly regulated process of bearing witness in which scientificity and validity are components. Cosslett et al. also highlight a second important derivation a religious one: testifiers bear witness to their conversions or beliefsIn both these senses [the legal and the religious], the term has important resonances for feminism, which begins with women speaking out about their hitherto unheard experiences, and also testifying to their feminist beliefs. (Cosslett et al. 2000, p.9) However this legal and religious derivation is not unproblematic. In both senses testimony is perceived as being mediated by professionals, and implicit in their presence is an element of judgement, in that a witness can be judged wrong or misled within a legal setting or sinful or heretical within a religious one. This notion of speaking and judgement in some ways can strengthen feminism's relationship with testimonial practice. However to valorise a practice that judges and measures narrations against dominant understandings accepts the creation of a victim mentality in which those bearing witness are seen as wronged, victimised, and powerless. Radstone argues that testimony is perceived as "the story of the victim, totally innocent and passive, who narrates what has been done to her and is denied the possibility of revising her relation to the past" (Cosslett et al. 2000, p.11). Felman characterises testimony as: composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference. What testimony does not offer is, however, a completed statement, a totalizable account of those events. In the testimony, language is in process and in trial, it does not possess itself as a conclusion, as the constatation of a verdict or the self-transparency of knowledge. 76

Testimony is, in other words, a discursive practice, as opposed to a pure theory. To testify to vow to tell, to promise and produce ones own speech as material evidence for truth is to accomplish a speech act, rather than to simply formulate a statement. As a performative speech act, testimony in effect addresses what in history is action that exceeds any substantialized significance, and what in happenings is impact that dynamically explodes any conceptual reification and any constative deliminations. (Felman in Felman and Laub 1992, p.5) Testimony involves bearing witness not just to an event but also against the society or groups that allow the event to happen. Testimonies from Holocaust survivors bear witness both to the atrocities committed but also to the international situation that allowed them to be committed26. I am not perpetuating the sometimes hyperbolic comparisons of the Holocaust atrocities and childhood sexual violences, however, there are parallels between the testimonial power of writings by people who have experienced these events. One function of testimony is to educate, not necessarily in terms of a didactic process, but rather seeking to educate the reader / audience about what happened when the event took place and therefore allowing the reader / audience to then draw their own lessons from the presented narrative. This power is not necessarily immediately evident in writings as "the testimonial I does not invite us to identify with it" (Sommer 1988, p.108). However this can be overcome where the reader identifies with experience. Many women have said this about collections of accounts of childhood sexual violence. This imposition of the individual, in both autobiography and testimony, is inherent in the social and cultural development of both genres. Testimony has aetiology intimately connected with the restrictions placed upon who could and could not give evidence in a court. Dating back to the ancient Greeks, women were not allowed to testify, because they were not citizens. Instead they were seen as chattels of their male protector (be that father, husband, brother, uncle, and so on); as such they were deemed by the Courts to answer only to their protector / owner rather than to the public body that a Court represented. In this sense both autobiography and testimony are genres from which women have been excluded by virtue of their exclusion from the social body as a whole. The move into these genres has been political in which women have begun to "move beyond silence to speech" (Bre 1988, p.ix). Despite the radical nature of the move into new literary and theoretical spaces women's testimonies, like their autobiographies, are constrained within the rules of the genre. The demands of legal witnessing are that witnesses may only speak of what they directly know and that testimony should
26

See for example Felman and Laub's (1992) collection on witnessing history for a more detailed discussion of this.

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be fair and as far as possible a neutral reflection of the events. Written / spoken both to conform to the genre's rules and yet also to explore new ground, testimonies lie at the intersection between public and private speech. Testimony, however, differs from autobiography in that the autobiographer chooses to write their life whilst those writing / speaking testimonies do not necessarily have the same choice. As Elie Wiesel, a witness to the Holocaust, says If someone else could have written my stories I would not have written them. I have written them in order to testify. And this is the origin of the loneliness that can be glimpsed in each of my sentences, in each of my silences (Wiesel 1984 quoted in Felman and Laub 1992, p.3). Testimonies are created through necessity. As Felman and Laub go on to say: since the testimony cannot be simply relayed, repeated or reported by another without thereby losing its function as a testimony, the burden of the witness - in spite of his or her alignment with other witnesses - is a radically unique, non-interchangeable and solitary burden. (Felman and Laub 1992, p.3) Testimony also lies at an intersection of individual and collective. As Paul Celan says: To bear witness is to bear the solitude of a responsibility, and to bear the responsibility, precisely, of that solitude. And yet, the appointment to bear witness is, paradoxically enough, an appointment to transgress the confines of that isolated stance, to speak for others and to others. (Celan quoted in Felman and Laub 1992, p.2) Using testimony is at both an isolating and a connecting practice. It places the narrator both within the structures of a collective pronouncement on general events and at the same time outside both accepted society and accepted speech. It thereby isolates the narrator by the individuality of each persons experience. Again, "what testimony does not offer, however, is a completed statement, a totalizable account of those events" (Felman and Laub 1992, p.5). As Felman and Laub go on to explain: To testify - to vow to tell, to promise and produce one's own speech as material evidence for truth - is to accomplish a speech act, rather than to simply formulate a statement (Felman and Laub 1992, p.5). Both the collected narratives and the interview transcriptions for this study can be seen as testimonies; they are the narrative productions of witnesses to an event. They are both public and private, individual and collective. They lie at the intersection between how one understands life experiences and how one relates this to another person. The narratives collected for this research are inherently concerned with this contention between understanding and relating. 3.8 Disclosure and Confession 78

The act of declaring or disclosing (something which one has kept or allowed to remain secret as being prejudicial or inconvenient to oneself); to acknowledge, own or admit (a crime, charge, fault weakness, or the like). (Oxford English Dictionary) Hymer (1988) argues the desire to reveal ourselves to others is a distinctly human characteristic (p.1) and confession is one example of this. Hepworth and Turner (1982) characterise confessions as (1) taking part in routinised settings; (2) being validated by the listener; (3) occuring within a structured setting, and (4) as a private act with public consequences (Hepworth and Turner, p.6). They go on to say that: confessions to be officially validated as proper confessions have to be made to persons in authorityto confess is to speak fully of ones sins to a person with authority to hear. (Hepworth and Turner 1982, p.6) The authority figure has the ability to validate or process the information in a way designed to make a change for the speaker. The setting and routine in the confession process facilitates the process of change for religious confession the setting (the confessional) is at once isolating from general life and connecting to the priest hearing the confession. Felski argues that confession is a type of autobiographical writing which signals its intention to foreground the most personal and intimate details of the authors life (Felski 1998, p.83). Hart has argued that confession is personal history that seeks to communicate or express the essential nature, the truth of the self (Hart 1970, p.491). Radstone (1999) talks about the narrative mode of confession as an act which makes possible "an ethical relation to our past" (Cosslett et al. 2000, p.11). Here Radstone implies that confession involves reflexivity. Inherent in notions of confession is reflection on deeds done and their effect. Thus confession as a construction of an ethical relation to our past is observable. The relationship between confession, morality, and subjectivity is complex. However confession relates to more than the narration of intimate detail. Foucault describes confession as the "general standard governing the production of the true discourse on sex" (Foucault 1979, p.63). Foucault suggests that all discussions of sex are constrained within the ritual of confession. He maps ways that confession dominates sex-talk through regulation and control. Foucault describes confession as: a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated; and finally a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation. (Foucault 1976, p.61)

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That the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement is integral to the notion of talking about sexual violence. Foucault's ritualised relationship is perhaps most recognisable to the modern, secular reader through its pointed similarities with the psychotherapeutic disclosure (Foucault 1976, p.63). Giddens (1992) traces the history of the sex / confession relationship: sex becomes in fact the focal point of a modern confessional As part of the CounterReformation, the Church became more insistent on regular confession, and the whole process was intensified. Not only acts, but thoughts, reveries and all details concerning sex were to be brought to view and scrutinised. The flesh to which we are heir in Christian doctrine, which comes to include soul and body combined, was the proximate origin of that characteristic modern sexual preoccupation: sexual desire. Somewhere in the late eighteenth century, confession as penitence became confession as interrogation. It was channelled into diverse discourses from the casehistory and scientific treatise to scandalous tracts such as the anonymous My Secret Life. Sex is a secret created by texts which abjure as well as those which celebrate it. Access to this secret is believed to disclose truth: sexuality is fundamental to the regime of truth characteristic of modernity. Confession in its modern sense is all those procedures by which the subject is incited to produce a discourse of truth about his sexuality which is capable of having effects on the subject himself. (Giddens 1992, p.20 quoting (at the end) Foucault 1980) Disclosure in therapy is ritualised; the ritualisation encompasses many different aspects of the therapeutic relationship. Hymer identifies the special form of therapeutic disclosure (1988, p.5) that can be seen as confession. She argues that certain characteristics mark interactions as confessional: Exclusivity (or near-exclusivity). The confession has not been shared with anyone else save the analyst or has been divulged to only one or two intimate others Affective Quality. The patients confession is generally accompanied by greater affect than other disclosures Changes in self-esteem. The cognitive and affective intensity of confessions heralds oscillations in the patients level of self-esteem Risk. Patients frequently attribute a greater element of risk to confession than to other disclosures owing to self-recrimination as well as fantasized recriminations from the analyst and other internalized objects on the basis of prior confessional experiences Identity. Patients see a greater piece of their identity bound up in confessions than in other communications. To confess is to acknowledge ones identity Specialness. Confessions enhance the patients sense of uniqueness Discontinuity. Confessions often introduce a rupture in the sometimes routinized continuity of therapyPhenomenology. The patients self-labelling is a crucial component of the conscious secret. (Hymer 1988, p.5-7) These elements focus on confession as a specific speech event in specialised settings. They highlight confession as involving a special relationship between the confessor and the listener. Confession in the field of sexual violence obeys the same conventions. Ritualisation has occurred in the symptoms of sexual violence, with certain signs (eating disorders, self-injurious behaviours, et cetera) which prove sexual violence has happened. The language surrounding women talking about sexual violence is also ritualised. The difficulty that women have when they 80

talk about sexual violence and what the therapist considers to be oblique references to sexual violence are seen as corroborating evidence that sexual violence took place. The obstacles and resistances to be surmounted are part of the ritual of confession. Within the therapeutic notion of disclosure there is also a power relationship between therapist and client. The therapist acts as an authority figure as highlighted by Hepworth and Taylor above. The therapist portrayed in practitioner literature is one who has the ability to discern through the ritualised symptoms and signs whether a disclosure of sexual violence is true or false. The therapist is an authority figure holding power of dis / belief, consolation, and support. Confession is also a forum whereby women who have experienced childhood sexual violence are seen as coming to terms with their experience and heal. Foucault says of confession "it unburdens him [sic] of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation" (Foucault 1979, p.61). The close congruence of Foucault's description of confession and the therapeutic model of disclosure shows that the notion of confession is still contemporary, the tradition of confession can be seen within the realm of therapy and therapist. There are other interpretations of confession. Felski argues that feminist confession: exemplifies the intersection between the autobiographical imperative to communicate the truth of unique individuality, and the feminist concern with the representative and intersubjective elements of women's experience. In other words, the shift toward a conception of a communal identity which has emerged with new social movements such as feminism brings with it modification of the notion of individualism as it is exemplified in the male bourgeois autobiography. (Felski 1988, p.84) Whereas Foucault sees confession as heavily controlled and regulated, Felski presents confession where the narrator is in control. For Foucault the meaning of the confession is determined by the listener27, for Felski confession's meaning is given both by the confessor and the framework in which the confession is given. For Felski, confession breaches the categorical boundaries between individuality and collectively, representitiveness and uniqueness. Felski uses confession "simply to specify a type of autobiographical writing which signals its intention to foreground the most personal and intimate details of the author's life" (Felski 1988, p.83). Felski, therefore, redefines confession, relating it to social and autobiographical objectives of talking about one's life as individuals.

27

Foucault presents the notion that there is a partner in confession who acts as an authority, giving meaning to the confession. This is best exemplified by religious confessions and, as mentioned above, by the psychotherapeutic relationship.

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This redefinition of confession divorces it from religious and legal contexts allowing confession to be used as a term for wider discussions of experience. However confession is not easily freed from it's religious and legal associations that imply a notion of admitting some wrongdoing. In the context of talking about experiencing childhood sexual violences this implication raises disquieting questions about the appropriateness of the term. The relationship between confession and sin is a simple, linear one - confession is the step which allows an individual to admit wrongdoing and then be judged. Disclosing sexual violence is a verbalisation of subjective experience to another person or people, but the intention and the end result differs. Disclosure of sexual violence, unlike confession, is not seeking absolution. Whereas confession in the traditional sense implies some expectation of judgement, disclosure does not, and whereas confession implies some sense of guilt, disclosure also does not. Earlier in the section, the similarities between Foucault's description of confession and therapeutic disclosure were raised. Disclosures made in the therapeutic context tend to operate differently to disclosures within social or relational contexts. Therapeutic disclosure, perhaps, lies between disclosure and confession. The client, in this situation, does confess sexual violence because in the psychotherapeutic setting the sexual violence is seen as causing some or all of the symptoms which the client presents. The confession of sexual violence provides the client and the therapist with the admittance of the problems. The place of judgement, however, is taken by the notion of continuing treatment; unlike religious confession the admittance of the event in the past is not synonymous with accepting the event and the psychotherapeutic relationship tends to develop through an exploration of how the sexual violence has affected the client. It also replaces notions of sin and guilt with over-arching concerns about what is wrong in the clients life. The concern of confession with wrong-doing becomes altered to a concern about why the client is unhappy. This subtle change does not alter the listener's position, in this case the therapists position, as validator of the experiences. 3.9 The nature of disclosure as autobiography, confession and testimony disclosure: the action of opening up, opening up to one's own knowledge. (Oxford English Dictionary) The three modes of storytelling outlined above offer overlapping understandings of the role and nature of disclosure. However none of them completely encapsulate the nature of disclosure. This section looks at the understandings and limitations offered by these different modes of storytelling.

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Autobiography offers understandings of disclosure as an expression of selfhood, as one way of making sense of or reflecting on experiences by the teller. Disclosure of childhood sexual violences at its simplest can be seen as fulfilling the human desire to share parts of themselves with others. Benstocks (1988) assertion that it is always a theory of selfhood that is under interrogation is important, as disclosure is both a way of testing selfhood and understandings of relationships and self-identity. Swindells (1995) argument that autobiography is necessarily never finished challenges the current focus on first disclosures to the exclusion of all others, and the concurrent implication that once a woman discloses for the first time (irrespective of outcome) then the disclosure process is finished. Instead Swindells argument emphasises disclosure as a life-long process where women who have experienced childhood sexual violence repeatedly disclose to different people throughout their lives and receive varied reactions. Autobiography, however, does not fully reflect the nature of disclosure. In many ways disclosure is a public process that demands a hearing in a way autobiography does not. To disclose childhood sexual violences is also to make public that it happens, although this is not the primary intention of disclosure. Testimony is by necessity autobiographical and relies on the power of the speaker talking about their individual experience and knowledge. This powerful I is both attractive and alienating. The power of I stories is that they cannot be challenged by the question how do you know that? because the knowledge comes from direct, lived experience. However at the same time the I, as Sommer (1988) says, does not encourage the audience (listener or reader) to identify with the narrator. In fact the I reinforces testimony as a solitary and isolating act. To testify is to relate a story to society that marks one out as being different from others, just as testimony in Courts of Law gives a position to the speaker that which is clearly identifiable. In a Court there are a number of set roles, which actors must take on and by speaking they become cast as the victim, perpetrator, judge, witness, or barrister. In many ways these same roles pervade non-legal testimonies in that they are replicated amongst our social relations. It is clear in many cases that the victim narrator tells their story to someone else who chooses their role as judge, barrister, or perpetrator depending on the relationship with the narrator. Indeed the legal metaphor also allows a deeper understanding of the issue of reluctant witnessing. The narrator in disclosing may be doing so for reasons that place them in a position of powerlessness over whether or not to disclose. Lucy (in her written piece) describes such a situation from her adolescence when a disclosure to a trusted adult resulted in two more disclosures over which she had no control.

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Lucy

The first time I told someone it was a teacher I had been very close to. [] I sat down and all I managed to say was When I was younger there was this man who lived next door, and he, he, he I couldn't say any more. The teacher finished the sentence with Abused you and then put his head in his hands. There was silence for minutes and then he said Leave it with me and walked outThe next time I saw him, in a corridor, he said to me I can't deal with it, I've told your Head of Year, you have to go to see her now. And he walked awayI went to my Head of Year and said that I wanted her to arrange a counsellor or something so I could sort myself out to tell my parents. Instead the she locked the office door and rung my Mother. I was locked in until my Mum arrived and then sat there as the Head of Year said Now tell her what you told me. So I had to tell her.

This role as an unwilling narrator arises from disclosure being at the intersection of the individual and the collective. Testimony and disclosure are both at once private and public acts. This intersection is also a feature of confession. Confession can be seen as a private act with public consequences. Testimony, on the other hand, could be described as a public act with private consequences. However, the public / private divide is not so clear in practice. It may be that it is private reasons that lead to the public act of testifying, which may have public consequences, but which invariably has private consequences for those disclosing. This complex web of effects and reasons reinforces the position of testimony, and hence disclosure, at the intersection of the public and private. In terms of the public-private divide and childhood sexual violences feminist theory has led to the transition from a private (read hidden) phenomenon to public. However childhood sexual violences remain a private issue for many and disclosure of them is a difficult and intensely private journey. With this in mind the link with confession becomes more visible. Although disclosure of childhood sexual violence does not necessarily fit comfortably within Hepworth and Turners (1982) four characteristics of confessional activity (routinised setting, validation by listener, structured setting, and private act / public consequence) it does have resonances with the nature of confession. It has a mixture of individuality and inter-subjectivity and there are similarities of process in the nature and perceived effects of disclosure. However confession implies some degree of wrongdoing on the part of the person confessing. Indeed this is an important and yet obscured part of the nature of sexual confessions, the idea that sex is worthy of needing confession confers some degree of status upon sexual thoughts and actions, which are not necessarily conferred on other parts of an individuals life. Some literature makes the connection between confession and the modern psychological industry, including Foucault. But the implication that having experienced childhood sexual violence is worthy of confession confuses notions of the status of the victim within notions of wrongdoing. 84

It implies something worthy of judgement or atonement in that the goal of confession is to clear the soul or to deal with issues. Therefore the implication is that the experience of childhood sexual violence is one which needs atoning for or punishing. Feminist writers have argued that this, in fact, is not the case. They have pointed out the historical trends of victim blaming in childhood sexual violence. However the fact that therapeutic or religious confession is a direction often suggested to women who have experienced childhood sexual violence shows the pervasiveness of this feeling. Thus disclosure does not necessarily fit neatly into one genre of narrative but understandings can draw on many genres of narrative. 3.10 The Problems of Using Narrative Stories

The use of narratives as a basis for research is not unproblematic. Polkinghorne identifies five key issues in using narratives in research. He says, meanings are continuously being reconstituted as the rudimentary perceptions of consciousness change (1988, p.6). This constant shifting of meaning is part of the process of narration as the speaker constitutes and reconstitutes the meaning and message of the story under narration. Additionally, because narration is not an activity undertaken alone but requires the presence of another, the shifts in meaning may come about because of reactions of the listener as the receiver of these stories. These shifts in meaning are important in the second key problem identified by Polkinghorne, that each of us has direct access to only one realm of meaning: our own (1988, p.6). We have access to only our own realms of meaning and certainly in the construction of narratives we only have access to our own version of events as opposed to the understanding of events of other social actors involved. However this does not mean that we do not have access to other realms of meanings, both in terms of other discourses and in terms of empathic understandings of other peoples meanings. Cameron argues that the notion that people speaking from widely divergent standpoints can find a common language is predicated on a language that is more or less the kind Orwell championed: a plain transparent language that gets to the essence of things without passing judgement upon it and thereby predetermining the outcome of the exchange or reducing it to an uncivil shouting match (Cameron 1994, p.30). It is easy to see that this sort of language does not exist; our own uses of language come with individual hallmarks of our own judgements and viewpoints implicit in them. However even with personalised and varying uses and meanings of language we are still able to access other peoples realms of meaning. We do this through negotiation and trying to understand the meanings of language used by others. Essentially this still 85

involves the use of our own judgements but taking the decision to subjugate our own meanings to a co-constructed view of the meaning of others. However Polkinghorne overestimates the individuality of personal narratives in that our own narratives, even of deeply personal events, are also influenced by narratives created by others which can either be micro-narratives (narratives explaining a single event) or macro-narratives (narratives explaining things on a bigger scale). As Bjorkland highlights: as part of our socialization, we learn vocabularies of self to think about and assess our experiences and behaviour. We use these vocabularies to describe ourselves and explain our actions to others Such vocabularies are not strictly personal; we enter into an ongoing conversation. [These include] shared understandings about selfhood. (Bjorkland 1988, p.7) Our own modes of understandings and our own narrations are influenced by our understanding of narrations made to us by others. The argument could be made that if we take these understandings on in any meaningful way we assimilate them into our own understandings. However, it is also possible to be aware of others understandings and at the same time see our own in contrast to them. Moreover, most narratives occur with a listener and in these speech events the speaker and listener construct the story together. Therefore both speaker and listener are engaged in constructing joint meanings or, failing that, understandings of the same words as meaningful to themselves. Therefore the narrator is not solely accessing their own realms of meaning but is constantly interweaving their own narrative through both social macro-narratives (discourses) and the micronarratives of other social actors. These points are implicated in the third and fourth problems identified by Polkinghorne. That the study of the realm of meaning requires the use of linguistic data and that analysis of linguistic data is hermeneutic (1988, p.7). The translation of narratives through both the listeners and speakers own realms of meaning requires that in the speech event undertaken each person involved draws upon their own repertoire of understandings. However, there are some elements of these repertoires which may be shared. For example, if a narrative event is to be meaningful, the narrator and the listener must, at a minimum, share a common language in which to speak and, hopefully, a common understanding of most of the words being used. The hermeneutic nature of narrative data cannot be avoided, and neither can the translation of meanings, necessitated in narrative research by the nature of the data collected. Josselson and Lieblich argue that the ultimate aim of the narrative investigation of human life is the interpretation of experience (1995, p.ix). This interpretation is always open to abuse within the research process. More widely, though, this hermeneutic factor is 86

in play on all occasions where a narrative is relayed. When one person relates a story to another the listening party will always have some task of translation to make the narrative understandable to themselves. This in part relates back to Polkinghornes second problem and the same provisos apply. We share common cultural repertoires of understanding and meaning and these help us when interpreting what we are told. Polkinghornes fifth problem could, alternatively, be seen as a summation of the nature of narratives. He says, the realm of meaning is an integrated ensemble of connections among images and ideas that appear in various modes of presentation (p.8). Narratives are not singly produced stories told by one person to another (or others) which the others either cannot understand (if we were limited to our own realm of meaning alone) or understand completely (if we shared total linguistic and cultural information). Instead a narrative is a discursively produced social speech act which brings together two (or more) peoples understandings in the relation of an event. 3.11 Conclusions

This Chapter has brought together some wide-ranging understandings of narrative and storytelling in relation to disclosures of childhood sexual violence. In particular it has explored some of the ways in which narrative genres can be read through disclosures of childhood sexual violence. In many ways these discussions form a background to the Chapters 6-8, not because the considerations which have gone before are inconsequential but because our understandings of speech acts and genres forms a background to our speech constructions more generally. That said, the understandings of disclosures as narratives is key in understanding the methodological issues which are raised in Chapter Five and in particular the ways in which Smiths concept of womens everyday lives can be understood through research. Storytelling is at once an everyday activity and a very specialised one and disclosures themselves are specific stories about ones life, which are told in specific and constrained ways. This theme is explored in more detail in the next Chapter.

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Chapter Four - Towards a New Theorising of Disclosure 4.1 Structure of the Chapter

This Chapter begins to develop a theoretical framework for understanding the disclosure of childhood sexual violence. As explored in Chapter Two the current knowledge base is weak in terms of prior work on childhood sexual violence thus making the creation of a theoretical framework difficult. This Chapter explores some of the contextual factors that affect disclosures of childhood sexual violence. In particular this Chapter draws together some of the important findings from the previous two Chapters and focuses attention on the methodological implications of the statements made therein. The first section of this Chapter (4.2) explores how disclosure of childhood sexual violence has previously been understood in the academic literature and in social relationships. The second section focuses on the issue of cultural narratives and the role they play in the experience of disclosure of childhood sexual violences (4.3). The third section explores some of the issues around the professionalisation of the discourse of childhood sexual violence and how this has contributed to cultural narratives and the construction of an image of women who have experienced childhood sexual violence which does not appear to match the reality (4.4). In part this section fulfils its aim by exploring Schzatow and Hermans (1989) article which discussed therapeutic disclosures of childhood sexual violence. Additionally in this section there is a brief exploration of the professionalisation of this field as autopeoisis, a self-referential system which impacts on others but draws influence only from itself. The Chapter closes with some ideas about the way that feminist work can help us think about stories of disclosure of childhood sexual violences from the perspective of the woman who has experienced them. 4.2 Previous Understandings of Disclosure of Childhood Sexual Violence

Disclosure has been taken for granted within discussions of childhood sexual violences although its presence is implicit in many of these discussions. In the majority of work on long-term effects of childhood sexual violences there is no explicit discussion of disclosure, despite the fact that in the majority of cases that is how childhood sexual violence comes to light. The importance of disclosure is multifaceted. It is not only the way in which childhood sexual violences come to light but it is also a life-long process that can keep alive a womans identity as someone who has

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experienced sexual violences. Disclosure can also help reinforce and challenge traditional understandings of childhood sexual violences. First disclosures have been the topic of the majority of discussions of disclosure to date. Whilst first disclosures are important in the formation of an idea of how disclosure and sexual violence are seen and dealt with by others, first disclosure is not the endpoint of the process. Academic approaches highlighting first disclosures as most important implicitly draw on ideas of the confessional genre, conceiving of adequate responses to first disclosures as somehow preventing the need for other disclosures over the life course. This confessional bent presents disclosure as a way of asking for help that precludes any other motivation for disclosure and in doing so creates clearly defined roles for the speaker and listener. The speaker automatically becomes characterized as having some deficit that the listener is supposed to fill. This characterization of the speaker as deficient is based on an infantilisation of women who have experienced childhood sexual violences. This infantilisation is based on an understanding of sexual violences that cannot conceive of anyone moving beyond the immediate or damaging effects of the sexual violence. All of the participants related an ongoing process of disclosure. Therefore in some ways experiences of disclosure can be seen as historical barometers by which we can gauge changes in how sexual violences are talked about and responded to. But there is no evidence of a simple chronology of cultural change. Disclosure also has a life-course for each woman: their attitudes to and willingness to disclose also change over time. In addition disclosure is an active process as well as one which passively reflects social changes. Disclosure is a process of interacting with others that brings to the fore crimes and marks of social stigmatisation. It challenges the listener as well as the speaker. This interactivity within disclosure has been overlooked and it is an issue of both textuality and society. Disclosure has rarely been considered as a spontaneous activity initiated by women who have experienced childhood sexual violences. In fact, studies focussing explicitly on disclosure have emphasized consideration of why women who have experienced childhood sexual violences might decide to disclose, as if storytelling about our own lives were an unusual thing to do. Yet narrating (as shown in Chapter Three) is an everyday activity. This portrayal of disclosure as extraordinary has impacted on popular conceptions of disclosure of childhood sexual violences. On the one hand there are exhortations to disclose, particularly in childhood, and at the same time the argument is made that disclosures are unusual and difficult to comprehend. This dichotomy reinforces childhood sexual violences as unusual and rare, even though prevalence research (as explored in 89

Chapter Two) shows between 16% (Cawson et al. 2000) and 27% (Kelly et al. 1991) of women experience contact childhood sexual violences. By characterizing childhood sexual violences as unusual acts, far removed from everyday life, it is possible for society to acknowledge their presence by denying their potential impact. For if disclosure of childhood sexual violence, let alone sexual violence itself, were to be accepted as an everyday occurrence then the cultural problems that allow childhood sexual violence to exist as such a widespread phenomenon would have to be examined. This argument is not novel; feminists have made similar arguments for decades yet it still carries force. Considering disclosure of childhood sexual violence this argument is even more powerful in that there is a visibility about the treatment of disclosure. The portrayal of women who have experienced childhood sexual violences in cultural scripts or narratives are in the main concealed within the way that women who have experienced childhood sexual violences are treated. However disclosures are at the boundary of speech and silence, fact and fiction, public and private, and allow these representations to become explicit. Where disclosure is seen only as a request for support, women who have experienced childhood sexual violences are being implicitly characterized as damaged. As such, disclosure of childhood sexual violence constantly forces a certain cultural identity on women disclosing childhood sexual violences. But it also enforces a certain interpretation of disclosure. By characterizing women disclosing childhood sexual violences as damaged and needing help, cultural narratives have helped enforce a professionalised discourse on disclosure of childhood sexual violences. If disclosures are solely requests for help they can only be appropriately made to someone with the ability to help, that is, to a professional. However, participants in this study discussed multiple motivations for disclosures, of which the majority were not requests for help. 4.3 Cultural Narratives and Childhood Sexual Violence

Disclosure has rarely been considered within the complexity of relationships and networks relating to both motivations for, and responses to, disclosure. Instead disclosures have been seen as onedimensional acts: someone telling information to another. Yet all speech acts involve interactive verbal and non-verbal processes. This traditional view of disclosure influences perceptions of how the listener receives the information. The assumed passivity of the listener, seeing them as a receiver for the story rather than as a co-constructor, means an additional personal burden for the women disclosing sexual violences, as it is portrayed as a passing of her burden to another.

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Disclosure (as in telling the story of childhood sexual violences) is both private and public, specific and general. It is both the telling of a private story and the reproduction of a cultural narrative, a public story. Within the act the cultural narrative both constrains and shapes the personal one, creating a tension between the three facets of the disclosure process. In this model (set out in Figure 1) the cultural narrative influences both the personal story of the speaker and the understandings of the listener. The speaker then reinforces the cultural narrative (or transgresses it) and speaker and the listener must choose how they want to co-construct the speakers story whether through acceptance, rejection, or ambivalence. Including cultural narratives within disclosure situations allows us to implement Bell's assertion that "the silence of women survivors, moreover, should be placed within the context of the ways in which incest has been spoken about and analysed in relation to them" (Bell 1993, p.80). Expanding Bell's argument, however, it also allows us to place the speech of women survivors within the same context and therefore to understand the ways that speech and silence are discursively rather than dichotomously constructed.

Speaker

Listener

Cultural Narratives Relationship in the immediate situation of disclosure Relationship prior to the immediate situation of disclosure

Figure 1 The relationship of effects within the disclosure situation. Within disclosures, women who have experienced childhood sexual violences are engaged in actively assessing cultural narratives and creating (or recreating) their own story in relation to them. Croghan and Miell (1998) argue that any: act of resistance was itself deeply enmeshed in existing cultural representations, and engagement with these representations [is] an integral part of creating an alternative view. Refuting a negative version of events involved the account maker in an implicit appeal for sanction to an audience which, together with the authors of these accounts, was immersed in common cultural values while at the same time struggling to establish alternative version of events. (Croghan and Miell 1998, p.54) 91

The act of resisting cultural representations involves both the speaker and the listener engaging with the cultural representations. To establish a different representation or understanding the speaker and the listener must be working co-operatively in the co-construction of understandings of the story. But this process is more tenuous for the speaker than the listener because ultimately the listener has control of the process of understanding. It is easier for the listener to impose their reinterpretation upon the speaker than for the speaker to impose their reinterpretation upon the listener. The importance of cultural narratives in the construction of individual disclosures is a contentious one. We are familiar with contemporary ongoing cultural narratives about adult women who have experienced childhood sexual violences. These narratives are deployed, produced, and reproduced in many common fora in which sexual violences are discussed on the news, in magazine articles, books, documentaries, and chat shows. Additionally, for stories to have a purpose they must comply with what we as listeners expect from that story. Coates (2000) argues these expectations are that there will be narrative clauses whose order matches the real time order of events described and that there will be tellability or a point to the story. A woman who has experienced childhood sexual violences and whose story does not match these predetermined story archetypes runs the risk of both confusing and challenging either the cultural narratives themselves or the tellability of their story. Ellie gave an example of this in her written piece. She told me about her attempt to prevent the childhood sexual violences she experienced transferring to her sister when she left home. Ellie had already approached the NSPCC and her local Social Services department. Ellie The day of my last exam I saw my GP [General Practitioner] again and she called Social Services. Two weeks later I hadn't heard anything so I went to my local Social Services department. Eventually I saw my key worker and she said she'd just sent a letter to my home address asking me to get in touch with them (my Mum usually reads all my post before I can get to it). She then decided to interview me there and then (something I wasn't prepared for). The moment I said that my Mum sexually abused me but my father only physically abused us all she seemed to lose all respect for me and treated me like a child. I think she thought that I was messing her around or at best telling lies to cover up for my Dad sexually abusing me.

Here we see that the confusing of a cultural narrative leads to Ellies story being dismissed. But moreover Ellie herself is dismissed from attention because the story is seen as inconceivable. In this example, as in many other cases throughout the stories, the participants of this study told me that the story and the person become inseparable and mutually inclusive. That is to say that the women become seen as no more than the story they are telling and the story becomes seen as no 92

more than this particular woman (individualisation). Both of these effects are related, I would argue, to the ways in which professionalisation of discussions of childhood sexual violences has taken place, and in particular the medicalisation of the discourse of childhood sexual violence. 4.4 Professionalisation

Previous work on disclosure has focussed on the use of disclosure as a therapeutic tool in psychological practice. Disclosure has been characterised as one person planning the giving of information to another person in an environment mediated by the counselling / psychotherapeutic professional process. In this context the portrayal of disclosure is an alliance of approaches to psychological theory and testimonial narratives. The role of disclosure in these situations is akin to testifying to experiences of childhood sexual violences to another person involved that is unaware of the event(s). Schatzow and Herman (1989) exemplify this approach to disclosure. In Breaking Secrecy: Adult Survivors Disclose to their Families they discuss disclosure as an important step in the process of recovery (p.337) and subject to certain parameters that determine successful disclosure (p.337). Disclosure for Schatzow and Herman is the opportunity for the adult patient to speak the truth that as a child she was obliged to conceal... Unburdening is a powerful step toward giving up the shame, guilt and sense of responsibility for the abuse that so many survivors feel (Schatzow and Herman 1989, p.338). Even at the start of this section it is the adult patient disclosing rather than an adult woman. This shows a reliance on seeing women who have experienced childhood sexual violences as being damaged by the experience and in need of medical attention (although the medical attention here is psychological). The use of the term patient also serves other functions. It strips the women of their individuality, they are medicalised in their interactions and depersonified as their pathologies become of more interest than their personhood. It also pre-empts challenges against the synonymy of woman and patient in psycho-medicinal approaches. Had the patients been acknowledged as women, challenges could arise as to the appropriateness of the medicalised setting and language applied to women involved in this study. The characterisation of disclosure, here, is as an essentially selfish act, by which women / patients attempt to rid themselves of burdens such as guilt. Disclosure, to Schatzow and Herman, is for the patient to speak the truth as she knows it, without need for confirmation from others and without fear of the consequences (Schatzow and Herman 1989, p.339). The selfishness of the act is further 93

emphasised by Schatzow and Hermans assertion that how the family reacts to this information is not the patients responsibility. This selfish portrayal of disclosure also implies that women who have experienced childhood sexual violence will have either not previously disclosed or not received the reactions they wanted prior to seeking therapeutic help. This also implies, and is confirmed in the article, that by not disclosing or not receiving the reaction they wanted women who have experienced childhood sexual violences are somehow trapped in repetitive relationships with family members. This infantilizes women by suggesting they cannot move beyond patterns of family relations laid down in childhood yet there is no evidence in the article to support this assertion. Schatzow and Herman say that: often the adult survivor continues to relate to her family in much the same way as she did as a child, perceiving the wishes of her parents and other family members as compulsory rules that must be observed. Disclosure represents a voluntary departure from perceived family rules. (Schatzow and Herman 1989, p.338) During their discussion of the rationale for disclosure Schatzow and Herman do acknowledge that it may help communication within the family; they say, disclosure may be a step toward renegotiating relationships within the family from the position of an adult with choice and power (Schatzow and Herman 1989, p.338). However rather than respond to this opportunity positively, Schatzow and Herman argue that disclosure should be a rigorously controlled process in which the psychologist plays a determining role. patients often attempt a disclosure prior to entering treatment or very early in the course of treatment. This premature disclosure is almost invariably a disappointment to the patient, who rarely has a clear understanding of her own motivations and proceeds on the basis of impulsive anger or unrealistic expectations. (Schatzow and Herman 1989 p.339) Disclosure has thus become a process in which the patient must be guided to make a mature disclosure as opposed to prior spontaneous and premature disclosures. The characterization of spontaneous and unregulated disclosures as immature undermines the character of the patient implying impulsiveness-as-weakness and continuing infantilisation of women who have experienced childhood sexual violences. Schatzow and Herman move on to the process they characterize as mature disclosures. the work of disclosure properly belongs in the later stages of treatment and recovery. Prior to contemplating a family disclosure, the patient should be clear in her own mind that the responsibility for the abuse lies with the perpetrator. She should have some understanding of the psychological harm caused by the abuse, and should have had the opportunity in treatment to mourn the losses of her childhood. She should feel compassionate toward her child / victim self, and should have some experience of the power of righteous anger as opposed to the destructiveness of helpless rage. In short, she should 94

have achieved a degree of self-knowledge and self-integration that will be able to withstand active denial, blaming, and rejection that may be provoked by confrontation with the family. (Schatzow and Herman 1989, p.340) The arguments made here by Schatzow and Herman rely on understandings of the therapeutic process as establishing the adult within survivorhood of childhood sexual violences. Schatzow and Herman are arguing that the patient should come to terms with the events of her childhood before she chooses to (maturely) disclose them to family members. But this view is predicated on understandings of familial relationships as being characterized by denial, and of the perpetrator as a family member. The assumption of incestuous abuse denies the possibility of a supportive family reaction to disclosure of abuse, which might otherwise be the case, particularly if the perpetrator is not a family member.28 This characterization is reliant on understandings of disclosure in a testimonial sense, as an opportunity to testify to what happened without concern about the effect of that testimony. Whereas disclosure to the therapist is seen as confessional, disclosures to the family of origin are seen as testimonial, and in some ways juridical. The disclosure is controlled in ways similar to giving evidence in court where the witness is allowed to speak without interruption. The ubiquity of psychological approaches to childhood sexual violences lies in the medicalisation of abuse and its effects29. This medicalisation has not only been in the psycho-medicinal sense but also is a professional problem. Psychologists can characterize themselves as experts who know how to guide women through the after-effects of childhood sexual violences because they have training. This approach is inherent in the professionalisation of abuse treatment and the medicalisation of its after effects. This diagrammatic demonstration of the professionalisation cycle highlights the processes that allow professionalisation to take place. One of the most important processes is that which isolates the topic from others and therefore demands specialist attention. To isolate the topic in this way psychology has created a verbal discourse about childhood sexual violences which involve a
28

The survivor may hope that the perpetrator will accept responsibility for the abuse, apologize for the hurt and pain he inflicted, and do something to make amends. She hopes that the non-offending parent (or parents) will believe her story and apologize for failing to protect her. The patient also initially fears (and, of course, also wishes) that the disclosure will have a catastrophic effect on the family. She may fantasize that her father will have a heart attack or stroke during the session, that her mother will have a nervous breakdown, that her parents will divorce following the disclosure, or, if the offender was not part of the immediate family, that both her parents will become enraged and kill him. (Schaztow and Herman 1989, p.340). This is the sole reference to the perpetrator not being part of the family group. The ten examples used in the article all refer to incestuous abuse. 29 Indeed the presumption of long-term effects has focussed on psychological problems rather than physical problems despite links between, as one example, early intercourse experiences and cervical cancer.

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number of psychological processes which women who have experienced violences must go through before they are seen as coping30. This verbal discourse begins to isolate the topic from the general public and from women who have experienced childhood sexual violences. The psychological processes also isolate women who have experienced childhood sexual violences from those who have not. Figure 2 Professionalisation of Childhood Sexual Abuse
Identification as a problem - the visibility of the topic is raised by others such as survivors.

Salience of topic lowers for the experts this threatens their dominance and they develop new strategies for maintaining the profile of the issue such as subdivision of the topic that restarts the whole process.

Take-over of topic change in verbal references including calls upon the rhetoric and language of science and the discourse of treatment and medicalisation.

The job of campaigners, advocates and survivors becomes harder as salience, lack of interest and professionalisation combine to reject the Professionalisation accompanied by uninitiated. a decline in salience as non-professionals begin to accept that the topic is specialist requiring expert information.

To professionalise the topic women who have experienced childhood sexual violences have to be
Salience diminished - professionalisation appears to remove the topic from the reach and understanding Situation of dominance - psychology is seen of to lay-people. declines. "own" theInterest subject. Other voices are excluded and marginalized or critiqued by psychology.

disempowered as experts. Expert status is only reconferred upon women who have experienced childhood sexual abuse if they have participated in the psychological processes of therapeutic intervention. This removal of the capacity to be expert undermines the character of those women who refuse or resist the psychological take-over by immediately characterising them as needing intervention but being resistant to it. This portrays women who have not had psychotherapeutic interventions as somehow unable, by dint of their experiences, to comment on those `experiences in any valid sense. This approach is additionally supported by the work of both clinical and

30

Unlike other medical interventions the outcome for therapy particularly in relation to childhood sexual abuse is not a cure but to be able to cope with it. In itself it rejects and ignores the fact that many women cope without psychotherapeutic intervention and / or before they decide to seek therapeutic intervention.

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normative psychological research that aims to synthesise the experiences of many women into their theories of useful interventions or normal psychology. Through this process of professionalisation the topic becomes accepted as being the concern of psychology alone. This in turn leads to a reduction in the salience for the general public. Put simply, logic states that there was an issue, but psychological approaches now have it under control, and therefore the rest of us need not worry. To maintain the salience of the issue psychology then sub-divides the issue into different subtopics, creating what are ultimately minor divisions and arguments in return for continued public and political salience. For example the false memory debate can be seen in this way and both sides are ultimately predicated on the same basis: that therapeutic intervention is the only valid response to childhood sexual abuse. Internally the system of professionalisation of childhood sexual violences are strikingly similar to Gunther Teubners argument about law as an autopoietic system. Teubner defines autopoeisis as: systems seek fixed points of their mode of operation in themselves as best they can. To put it more precisely, they look for these points in a self-description which functions as a programme of internal regulation, organizing the system in such a way that it corresponds to this self-description Self-referential closure occurs when complex processes revert back to the production of their original conditions in a hypercyclical fashion. In doing so they become independent of their environment. Self-referentiality and organizational closure thus mean one and the same thing: the closed form of organization of the recursive, selfreproducing processes of a system. (Teubner 1993, p.15) Teubner here maps a process in which the system (psychological intervention) seeks points of selfdescription which function as internal regulation (mapping of the field). Secondly, the system becomes self-descriptive (creating dominance), and self-referential closure occurs when the process creates the original conditions in a cyclical fashion, thus becoming independent of their environment (remapping into smaller parts). Self-production is seen in the self-perpetuating cycle of organisation, which ensures the continuance of the system. The self-maintenance of the system, as Teubner puts it "the preservation of the identity of the system, the maintenance of a boundary" is clearly shown in the locking out of other interest groups. Self-referencing is both the cycle and also the way in which the psychology no longer draws on external sources to recreate the salience of the topic. However, Teubner makes the point that self-production does not imply that all causes are located within the system; neither does it imply that the more important of these or even most causes have their origins within the systema self-producing [legal] system is strongly influenced by social, economic and political factors (Teubner 1993, p.21). The same holds true for the psychological 97

cycle. The environment both facilitated its creation as the dominant system (through the raising of the issue of childhood sexual violence) but also ensures that it continues to exert an influence on the system now, and perhaps the false memory syndrome arguments can be seen as an example of this process. 4.5 Feminist work towards a new theory of disclosure of childhood sexual violence. In the move from the emphasis on the prohibition to the emphasis on the practice, theory does not somehow get left behind This inevitability means placing some form of theoretical framework around them. (Bell 1993, p.2) Feminist work has not only challenged the sociological faith in the incest prohibition by contributing to the airing of the issue and showing the extent of the problem in terms of numbers. More than this, it presents, if in the margins of feminist texts and discussions, a profound theoretical shift in the way incest is conceived in the sociological imagination. As opposed to placing incest on the side of the abnormal, feminist contributions suggest that, on the contrary, given the power dynamics of male-dominated society and the understandings of sexuality that we live out, incestuous abuse is in a sense unsurprising. In feminist analysis, incest signals not the chaos it did (and does) for sociological functionalism, but an order, the familiar and familial order of patriarchy, in both its strict and feminist sense. Incest reveals the gendered power dynamics of the society in which we exist. (Bell 1993, p.3) The professionalisation of childhood sexual violences has become a focussing point for feminist campaigns about childhood sexual abuse. Feminist commentators such as Louise Armstrong and Liz Kelly have both highlighted and argued against the psychological take-over of childhood sexual abuse. Armstrong (1991) argues that the professionalisation, through the creation of "battalions of newly minted mental health professionals" (p.29), has created a medicalisation of the phenomenon of incest31. Armstrong argues that the movement towards survivors speaking of incest as an "illness from which they must heal and speaking out about journeys to empowerment in itself, constitutes a political act" (p.31). This, she says has depoliticised the feminist movement, and is moving towards a pseudo-biological understanding of childhood sexual violences rather than political ones. As Armstrong goes on to argue "medicalisation, personalisation of the issue of incest, has otherwise served to provide diversion" (p.31) from the real issues related to such violences. The attraction of this medical model, dubbed "incest-as-illness" is, in Armstrong's opinion, that it "offered survivors support - an item noticeable in short supply in the feminist movement in recent
31

Armstrong's argument refers solely to incest but I feel is applicable to extrafamilial abuse as well as intrafamilial abuse. Armstrong's comments relating to the transformation of issues such as "male violence and deliberate socially accepted violation" into "family dysfunction" (p.30) are still relevant, as often even in cases of extrafamilial abuse families structures have been interrogated and blamed for allowing the abuse to take place.

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years" (p.31). Armstrong traces the development of feminist interest into sexual violences and notes that: by the time incest arose as an issue, the women's movement had already become a loose collection of the single-issue identified: the battered women's contingent, the antipornography contingent, reproductive rights It had already begun to splinter into a zillion often-antagonistic identity groups: socialist, communalist, spiritualist, vegetarian Individuals were deriving their identities from these identifications. Survivor became a ticket, a passport, a membership card. (Armstrong 1991, p.32) This fragmentation of the feminist movement32 (particularly in the United States but also in the UK) into identity based politics meant that the medical model offered something that feminism no longer offered - the supportive, explanatory, and coherent framework within which women could place their experiences and which offered solutions. As Armstrong contends: the goals served by the illness model are deeply opposed to feminist goals. To fight on behalf of feminist goals is to focus attention on child-rape as a crime and on men and male power as the problem. The goal of most therapies is forgiveness of offenders This is a beautiful way of containing the anger of an oppressed population by fostering an unholy delusion; that your power to forgive is any kind of power at all. (Armstrong 1991 p.32) Given this assertion, the role of controlling disclosure becomes necessary as disclosure offers the opportunity to conceive of abuse in different ways to the medical model. It offers the chance to forge links between women, to discuss the limitations of the restricted model, and to share interests in ending the perpetration of abuse rather than focussing on the forgiveness that much therapy demands. Disclosure thus becomes a contested site of different interests. From a feminist understanding, disclosure can offer the possibility of breaking the silence about abuse. However as Armstrong argues "medicalisation of the issues for survivors[has changed] the context of speaking out, of telling personal stories" (p.30-31). It has reinforced certain types of cultural stories about sexual violences and women who have experienced it, and also created an abnormal category for those women who have experienced childhood sexual violences and speak out in different, conflicting ways to the medical model. The psycho-medical model offers an explanation that those who demand a political understanding of abuse are failing to deal with family dysfunction in their family of origin or failing to deal with their rage. Women who comply to the medical model and accept the individual path to healing can disassociate themselves from the political-feminist response. Feminist responses to the issues of disclosure have been limited and frequently focus on disclosure as both autobiographical and testimonial, and place the emphasis on both issues of speaking and
32

See also Brownmiller 2000.

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issues of silencing. However the emphasis on silence and speech are problematic. As DeVault and Ingraham have argued, silencing works not just [by] quieting, but also [by] censorship, suppression, marginalization, trivialization, exclusion, ghettoization and other forms of discounting (DeVault with Ingraham 1999, p.177). The centrality of issues of speech and their interpretation are problematic. Kelly and Radford argue (1996) that feminism has made a unique contribution in terms of understandings of silencing and speech. They argue that: silencing is, however, a complex process. In order to be able to speak about something, one must first be able to name and define it One of the most significant aspects of feminist theory and practice has been to find / create / redefine words that reflect and record women's experiences. Concepts which are now commonplace simply did not exist before the present wave of feminist activism. (Kelly and Radford 1996, p.20) Whereas Armstrong (1994) argues that The personal is political was the aphorism that described the use of shared stories to extrapolate commonalities that fuelled analysis, which in turn would lead to activism for social change (Armstrong 1994, p.11), in Kelly and Radford's view the achievements of feminism have been to create or reclaim language that allows for the expression of stories about male violences, whereas Armstrong argues that the issues of speech are to promote activism and empowerment. The processes overlap but have different aims. Increasingly, however, feminist claims to language met with a counter reclamation by the psycho-medical model. The term survivor is one example, primarily coined within the feminist model in opposition to the notion of victim but it increasingly refers to someone who has experienced childhood sexual abuse but who also embraces the psychological model of journeying towards survivorship. Within feminist writing there has been a movement away from explicit theory-building in the area of violence research, in favour of empirical based research examining the what and how rather than the how can we explain. I would argue that the difference lies in approaches to theory building between traditional and feminist approaches. As Bell has said: feminist analyses of incestuous abuse do not seek to set themselves up as the guardians of access to Truth and objectivity. Although feminist analyses are empirical in the sense that they are based in the main upon womens oral evidence, they are not empiricist in the sense that they regard the social world as simply there to be accurately described. (Bell 1993, p.90) Theoretically speaking, the move towards empirical understandings allows for the retention of ideas of difference and non-conformity as complementary rather than challenging to any work on disclosure (this issue is discussed later with reference to adaptations of Grounded Theory). Additionally the relationship between womens oral (or written) evidence and the process of theory building is one that emphasizes the importance of the experience as the basis for understandings of 100

the phenomenon. Whereas Schatzow and Hermans work was based on clinical observation, the voices of the women involved, even in the examples, were not clear, and the writers hinted that this was more their recollections and interpretations of the events rather than their patients. Although the history of the feminist movement and its response to childhood sexual violence has been sometimes problematic, as highlighted by Armstrong and Brownmiller, feminist methods of research are the only way in which women who have experienced childhood sexual violences can take part in the construction of knowledge. The literature on a feminist methodology (see next Chapter) has been developing over the past decades. Feminist methodology offers the only way of working which can encompass womens own perceptions and understandings about the disclosure of childhood sexual violences, and can challenge the current professionalised cultural narratives.

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Chapter Five - Methods and Methodology 5.1 Structure of this Chapter This Chapter brings together the work in previous Chapters and discusses the methodology and methods employed in this study. It begins by discussing the feminist aspects of the study and in particular how feminist methods have shaped this work (5.2). The Chapter then moves on to examine the synthesis of elements of Grounded Theory Methodology and feminist research methods which have served as the guiding methodological principals in this work (5.3). This section discusses the incongruences as well as the congruences between the two traditions. The next section then discusses the methods used in this study and particular examines the recruitment of a sample (5.4), the participation methods (5.5), interviews (5.6), and analysis of data (5.7). 5.2 What constitutes feminist research? For example, what is the best advice that can be given to someone attempting to cope with the experience of child sexual abuse? There is a huge number and variety of possible factors and different coping strategies involved. Traditionally, the only advice that could be given about how to generate hypotheses would be to read the literature and sit in your armchair and hope that something sensible comes to mind. Perhaps a better procedure is actually to talk to people who are suffering from the effects of child sexual abuse. By allowing them to speak freely about their experiences, and their ways of coping, factors may be suggested that simply do not appear in textbooks or would not occur to the researcher. (Burt and Oaksford 1999, p.333) As for survivor-based knowledge only the self-help skills of survivors are widely recognised. They are seen as people who need therapy, but are too damaged or unreliable to be routinely and respectfully consulted as sources of information. (Nelson 1997, p.24) Harding (1987) has argued that there is no feminist method; rather there are distinct methodological features with epistemological implications that characterise feminist thought. Kelly, Burton, and Regan (1998b) argue that feminism is both theory and practice and that as such it is "the theoretical backdrop to our work, and methods as tools through which we explore research questions" (1998b, p.605). Without a definitive or distinctive feminist method some degree of hybridisation is inherent in feminist research. At its most basic feminist research methods are the marrying of political goals with research methodologies to provide understandings of a phenomenon, which are not reliant on traditional, masculinist / patriarchal precepts in terms of either methodology or epistemology. A different paradigm must be used to understand feminist research. Harding (1987), in discussing what is new about feminist research, argues that "while studying women is not new, studying them from the perspective of their own experiences so women can

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understand themselves and the world can claim virtually no history at all" (p.8). She goes on to say that: we need to avoid the objectivist stance that attempts to make the researchers cultural beliefs and practices invisible while simultaneously skewering the research objects beliefs and practices to the display board. Only in this way can we hope to produce understandings and explanations which are free (or, at least, more free) of distortion from the unexamined beliefs and behaviors of social scientists themselves. (p.9) Thus Harding argues the distinctiveness of feminist research lies in the epistemological approach of the researcher, in a rejection of the notion of objectivity and as a dedication to understanding women's experiences. This rejection of the notion of objectivity has not come solely from feminist writers; Barnes (1996) also makes the point that the danger with qualitative methods that do not make culture explicit is that culture can become transparent, lost in the pages of observations, interviews and analyses of social processes. This danger may exist for all qualitative studies (p.430). More radically, Catherine MacKinnon (1987) has argued that objectivity as: the nonsituated, universal standpoint, whether claimed or aspired to - is a denial of the existence or potency of sex inequality that tacitly participates in constructing reality from the dominant point of view. Objectivity, as the epistemological stance of which objectification is the social process, creates the reality it apprehends by defining as knowledge the reality it creates through its way of apprehending it. (p.136) MacKinnon goes on to argue that "although feminism emerges from women's particular experience, it is not subjective or partial, for no interior ground and few, if any, aspects of life are free from male power" (1987, p.136). MacKinnon's argument breaks out of the subjective / objective matrix by challenging both categories, just as grounded theory does. MacKinnon argues that feminist knowledge "claims no external ground, orsphere of generalization or abstraction, nor transcendence of the specificity" (p.136). MacKinnon's argument is that a grounded and specific representation of women's lives needs to appeal to neither objectivity nor subjectivity to be valid. Although her argument may be somewhat anti-scientific (in terms of not justifying the grounds for validity of research) it breaks the dichotomous stranglehold that positivist / subjective (and hence quantitative / qualitative) debates have held. Kelly, Burton, and Regan (1994) characterise feminist research as "enabling us to better discover and understand what is happening in women's lives, and how we might change it" (p.32). Questioning commonly held notions that feminist research is "research on and with women" (p.33), that it "uses qualitative methods" (p.34), that it should be "empowering for participants" (p.37), and that it is "directed towards social change" (p.40), Kelly, Burton, and Regan argue that these precepts should not circumscribe what can (and cannot) be seen as feminist research. Cameron et al. 103

however argue that research on, for and with a certain population can be understood as empowering (1992, p.22). Cameron et al. argue that "one of the things we take the additional with to imply is the use of interactive or dialogic research methods" (p.22) and that it is the centrality of interaction with the researched that enables research to be empowering in our sense; though we understand this as a necessary rather than a sufficient condition (Cameron 1992, p.22). Dorothy Smith (1987) argues that feminist research relies on an appreciation of the standpoint of women. A sociology for women preserves the presence of subjects as knowers and as actors. It does not transform subjects into the objects of study or make use of conceptual devices for eliminating the active presence of subjects. Its methods of thinking and its analytical procedures must preserve the presences of the active and experiencing subject. (p.105) For Smith the importance of feminist research is that women do not disappear as social actors and their relations to the forms of organisation that govern society are not obfuscated. All these writers express parts of what feminist research is. Harding differentiates feminist research from traditional scientific research in its rejection of notions of objectivity and in its attempts to make culture explicit. Harding also argues that the rejection of objectivity allows understandings of multiple subjectivities to better capture the nature of the social world. Smiths writings further this, arguing that feminist research should focus on understanding womens subjectivities from their own perspective. Smith's view derives from what Harding (1991) has called standpoint feminism: for a position to count as a standpoint, rather than as a claim equally valuable but for different reasons for the importance of listening to women tell us about their lives and experiences, we must insist on an objective location womens lives as the place from which feminist research should begin. (1991, p.123) Smith (1987) argues, however, that: A sociology for women should not be mistaken for an ideological position that represents womens oppression as having a determinate character and takes up the analysis of social forms with a view to discovering in them the lineaments of what the ideologist already supposed that she knows. The standpoint of women therefore, as I am deploying it here, cannot be equated with perspective or worldview. It does not universalise a particular experience. It is rather a method that, at the outset of inquiry, creates the space for an absent subject, and an absent experience that is to be filled with the presence and spoken experience of actual women speaking of and in the actualities of their everyday worlds. (p.106) Whereas Harding argues feminist research should reject objectivism and explicitly acknowledge the researchers cultural position, Smith intimates that it is also important to acknowledge and capture the lived experience. Kelly et al.'s argument relates to examining which research methods 104

fit the issue, whilst Cameron et al. argues that feminist research is not just about doing something differently but also about understanding those things differently. All these issues, the rejection of objectivism, the importance of women's lived experience, and the argument that the research methods should fit the research topic are apparent in this study. This work could be characterised as on, with, and for women. It is research on a certain group of women (adult women who experienced childhood sexual violences); using qualitative methods which aim to be empowering for the participants (within certain limitations, about which more later); and is directed towards social change. However these facets are pragmatically chosen parts of the methodology determined by the research question and the aims of the study. Choosing to only research the experiences of adult women who have experienced childhood sexual violences derives from feminist approaches and wanting to understand the phenomenon from the perspective of the women involved (following Smith) and because women have tended to be more open about the occurrence of abuse in their lives. Qualitative methods were chosen to prevent the fracturing of stories inherent in quantitative studies. The desire to empower research participants, particularly within the research process, was a key issue: as a researcher I did not want to collect testimonies from women and then conceptualise them in a way which removed the participant's rights to authorise their own world. Additionally it was influenced by ideas of feminist methodology, which critiqued the exploitative nature of research in terms of removing both choices and the power to explain from participants. Finally the desire for social change is informed both by feminist thinking and by multiple discussions with women who have experienced childhood sexual violences for whom talking about the abuse with others was problematic and who made clear that social change must ultimately be the goal of any research on the issue. 5.3 Grounded Theory Methodology and Feminist Methodology

Methodologically this study drew on both Grounded Theory33 Methodology and Smith's work on a feminist sociology (1987 and 1991). To date reviews of the possibilities of Grounded Theory Methodology for feminist research have been somewhat superficial, focussing on the congruencies between the two approaches.

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By Grounded Theory in this context I am referring to Grounded Theory as characterised by Glaser and Strauss in various publications. see for example Glaser and Strauss (1967), Strauss (1987) and Strauss and Corbin (1990). I am not unaware that there are tensions within these publications and that Strauss and Glaser parted theoretical company in places, however there seems to be an underlying understanding of Grounded Theory across these publications which is more similar than different. For a discussion of the difference between Glaser and Strauss see, for example, Rennie (1998a, 1998b), and Corbin (1998).

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Both Wuest (1995) and Keddy, Sims, and Stern (1996) attempted to analyse the fit between feminist research and Grounded Theory. These two reviews take very different theoretical approaches to both Grounded Theory and feminist research. Wuest makes explicit her post-modern feminist epistemology which recognises "multiple explanations of reality" (p.127). Keddy et al. (1996) imply that they are coming from a standpoint feminist approach, focussing on the idea that "knowledge is supposed to be based on experience" (p.184). Wuest (1995) from the outset sets the question as "whether feminist inquiry can be purposefully integrated with the grounded theory approach without violating the underlying intellectual traditions of either" (p.126). The article argues that "there are some common epistemological underpinnings of feminist theory that are consistent with grounded theory" (p.128). These are identified as being: 1. "[that] women can be knowers and that their experience is a legitimate source of knowledge" 2. "that knowledge is a contextual and relational process within social structures 3. that dichotomies such as the personal versus the political or theory versus practice are artificial 4. "[that] research bias influenced research questions and analysis" (p.128) Keddy et al., however, take a revisionist approach to the notion of Grounded Theory as proposed by both Glaser and Strauss (1967) and Strauss and Corbin (1990). Critiquing what they see as the linearity of explanations in both The Discovery of Grounded Theory and Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques they argue that undermines the circularity of the conception of theory building that Grounded Theory purports to utilise. Keddy et al. argue that "the re-definition of grounded theory is ours for the doing" (1996, p.450). They identify the strengths of grounded theory for feminist research as being that it: 1. "allows for the voices of the participants to be heard as they tell their stories" (p.450) 2. "was designed to avoid the spurious objectivity and biases of positivistic research" (p.451) 3. "can make a major impact on our knowledge of the life of women in society" (p.452) However, Wuests question of "whether feminist inquiry can be purposefully integrated with the grounded theory approach without violating the underlying intellectual traditions of either" (p.126) does not encapsulate the tensions between feminist research and Grounded Theory Methodology. Strictly, in Grounded Theory all information is treated equally as data, including previous theories. As such it demands that even in feminist work theory can only be treated as data rather than as a framework. Thus the question is not whether the two can be integrated, given the deep difference between the two, but whether Grounded Theory can suitably be used as a methodology in feminist research. The tensions and opportunities are both epistemological and methodological. 106

Epistemological Issues Feminist research and Grounded Theory both explicitly reject notions of deductive positivism and "spurious objectivity" (Keddy et al. 1996, p.451). As Westkott discussed, the problem of "invisibility or distortion of women as objects of knowledge" (1979, p.423) has occurred because science is subject to "institutionalized practices that produce and enforce gender bias across societies" (Henwood and Pidgeon 1995, p.8). Cameron et al. (1992) argue that "social science is not and never has been a neutral enquiry into human behaviour and institutions. It is strongly implicated in the project of social control" (p.2). Masculinist research practice has relied upon deductive positivist logic in which the researcher sets a question and hypotheses, then carries out research and finds answers. It is assumed that their own beliefs will not affect the results because good researchers employ objectivity. Founded in both inductivism and interpretation, Grounded Theory accepts the role of researcher in creating an interactive theory building process. Self-reflexivity and an interpretative understanding of data cannot be consistent with a belief in the objective researcher. The rejection of objectivity leads to a much more explicit acceptance of the need to interpret texts from our own understandings. Barnes argues that: grounded theory authors have stated that the qualitative researcher, while conducting data analysis, should assume that what the researcher thinks or feels about a word or concept found in the data is also what the respondent thinks (Glaser, 1978, Strauss and Corbin, 1990). As a result, what may happen during analysis is a set of procedures designed to regard words on conceptually familiar ways where the task of assigning meanings is rarely made explicit. (1996, p.430) The interpretative process is intimately and explicitly connected with researchers own subjectivities. For feminist research accepting the researchers interpretative powers suggests a denial of the ability to agree meaning with the subjects of the research. In this situation the results of interpretation become a single voice rather than expressing the multiple voices in research. It is reliant on an image of the researcher-as-god34, where the researchers' interpretation is seen as being more valid than the interpretations of the research participants. It is an image of the researcher that necessarily relies on creating differences between the researcher and the researched. It is also a traditionally positivistic conception of a researcher who is unaffected by social influences. But as Cameron et al. have said:
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This is related to what Haraway (1991) has described in relation to positivist research as the God-Trick and which Henwood and Pidgeon (1995) explore in relation to all research. My use here of the term expands the conception not just to include positivism's tendencies to try and view "everything from nowhere" (Henwood and Pidgeon 1995, 14) but to include both the researcher as all-seeing but also as omniscient.

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researchers cannot help being socially located persons. We inevitably bring out biographies and our subjectivities to every stage of the research process, and that influences the questions we ask and the ways in which we try to find answers. Our view is that the subjectivity of the observer should not be seen as a regrettable disturbance but as one element in the human interactions that comprise our object of study. Similarly research subjects themselves are active and reflexive beings who have insights into their situations and experiences. They cannot be observed as if they were asteroids, inanimate lumps of matter: they have to be interacted with. (1992, p.5) The rejection of deductive positivist logic in Grounded Theory is therefore not complete. Indeed much of the literature suggests that Grounded Theory can and should later be tested using deductivist methods. This appeal to deductivist methods appears to place Grounded Theory as a prequel to deductivist methods, rather than as a challenge. Later writers such as Barnes have opposed the nature of positivist knowledge as being the only type of research possible. Barnes argues that qualitative research results do not provide any absolute truth about the world, but they can provide a view of reality as experienced by some subjects who know some things about the phenomena (1996, p.439). This view of qualitative research, as providing partial truths or knowledges about a topic, fits more with an understanding of feminist research as situated knowledges (see Haraway, 1991) rather than as producing meta-narratives or grand theories. However Glaser and Strauss both contend that Grounded Theory should be used to develop a single theory (albeit containing acceptance of variance) to fit the data. The epistemological differences and congruencies between feminist research and Grounded Theory create a situation of active and useful tensions which can be harnessed within the research process to create new ways of understanding the creation of theory. However, the differences are noticeable. Grounded theory is very much based on traditional scientific notions of research, with much in common with positivist research epistemologies: the search for a grand theory; the researchers as the final arbiter of truth; and a final appeal to deductive testing of the Grounded Theories produced. However there are points of congruence too: a rejection of objectivity and an understanding of the importance of reflexivity. Epistemologically Grounded Theory and feminist research are uncomfortable partners and this discomfort is only partly eased by Strauss's insistence that Grounded Theory "is not really a specific method or technique. Rather it is a style of doing qualitative analysis that includes a number of distinct features" (1987, p.5). Strauss's remarks imply that Grounded Theory is more about a commitment to the essence of his work, rather than a 108

commitment to specific details. But his use of specific methodological examples undermines this point and reinforces the importance of following the specific precepts in research. Methodological Issues The methodological overlap is much simpler and stronger. Both Grounded Theory and some feminist research explicitly argue for the grounding of results in empirical data. Thus both Grounded Theory and feminist research see experiential data as central to understanding a phenomenon. However Grounded Theory treats experience purely as scientific data, to be analysed and interpreted. For feminist research, however, experience is the core of any phenomenon. Both feminist research and Grounded Theory share a methodological interest in producing valid research results without appealing to deductivist models of research. Strauss and Corbin (1990) list four criteria for judging grounded theory results to ensure that the results of the research are applicable (and therefore valid) in terms of the phenomenon studied. Strauss and Corbin's criteria are "fit, understanding, generality, and control" (p.23). They go on to argue: If theory is faithful to the everyday reality of the substantive area and carefully induced from diverse data, then it should fit that substantive area. Because it represents that reality it should also be comprehensible and make sense both to the persons who were studied and to those practising in that area. If the data upon which it is based are comprehensive and the interpretations conceptual and broad, then the theory should be abstract enough and include sufficient variation to make it applicable to a variety of contexts related to that phenomena. Finally, the theory should provide control with regard to action toward the phenomenon. This is because the hypotheses proposing relationships among concepts - which later may be used to guide action - are systematically derived from actual data related to that (and only that) phenomenon. Furthermore, the conditions to which it applies should be clearly spelled out. Therefore, the conditions should apply specifically to a given situation. (p.23) These four criteria seem to fit well with the goals of feminist research: that the theory should be faithful to the data; comprehensible both to participants in the study and to others in the field; and abstract enough to be both relevant to different situations and conceptual enough to shed light on the phenomenon. Finally the theory should be able to guide future action whilst acknowledging its limitations. However in an exchange between Baxter and Eyles (1999), and Bailey, White, and Pain (1999a and 1999b), these criteria were brought into contention. Bailey et al. suggest that "the researcher needs to limit their conclusions, rather than making grand claims about their universal applicability" (p.174). Baxter and Eyles (1999) focus on this assertion and argue that: This is why most qualitative researchers caution against generalizing the findings beyond particular case(s) studies. We agree, but also wonder if this does justice to the way most of 109

us really feel about the transferability of our findings to other settings not yet empirically investigated. If qualitative research is to be used to initiate policy or improve the human condition, then its findings - as stories - must resonate with others in the wider society. Qualitative research has great potential for providing rich-textured stories to inform on the human condition. (p.180) There seems to be an inherent tension here between being true to participants' experiences, creating a theory which fits their experiences (albeit understanding variations), and providing usable knowledge to inform social practice. Bailey et al. in their reply (1999b) argue that they "are aware of the sociological debate concerning bringing together substantive grounded theories (developed for an empirical area of sociological enquiry) to form formal or conceptual theory" (p.183). They go on to argue that "qualitative findings can be extended beyond particular cases and act as agents of change, as long as they are systematically validated" (p.183) by which Bailey et al. refer to the development of specific criteria to test the validity of a study before the research commences. Bailey et al. argue for the creation of test measures for the results before the data is collected. They argue that the researcher can apply these test measures to the conclusions. This is an explicit rejection of the inductivist principles explored by Strauss and Corbin in favour of hybridization of inductive / deductive logic. Baxter and Eyles explain: most claims for transferability still revolve around achieving sample sizes that are unmanageable for qualitative researchers. The central goal, however, is not sample size but representativeness. We suspect that there is a closer connection between the credibility / validity of findings (something qualitative researchers usually achieve) and their transferability to other settings and this is not directly related to sample size. For example, a single articulate person may describe phenomena that are meaningful to hundreds (i.e. the phenomena are representative) but might otherwise be overlooked, despite actually talking to those hundreds. Thus, finding articulate persons is important (a sampling issue), but so too is credibly constructing meaningful theory from conversations with those articulate research participants. (p.181) Despite the validity of their point, Baxter and Eyles are advocating an elitist selection of participants which may lead to skewed findings. However this does not resolve the applicability issue, leaving as it does questions of validity. Neither Baxter and Eyles nor Bailey et al. come a firm conclusion, Baxter and Eyles arguing that Since we must not be too quick to diminish the transferability of our findings if those findings are to be taken seriously, discussion of this issue must remain open (Baxter and Eyles 1999, p.181). Moreover, David Rennie (1998) locates the problematic nature of Grounded Theory's generalisability within debates about how Grounded Theories explain. In his article tracing the links between Grounded Theory and other philosophical schools in scientific research, Rennie argues that the problem lies in the fact that "perspectivism is inevitable in the development of knowledge. Problems have many facets. Moreover, individuals will approach the same problem from different vantage points" (p.107). Therefore, Rennie implies, 110

the problem lies not in how we can understand the validity of qualitative, grounded research, when the benchmark is set by quantitative research, but rather why we cannot accept that the nature of knowledge is not as scientific discourses would have us believe. Therefore the applicability and generalisability of an approach cannot be discussed in terms of its fit with preconceptions (sample size, standardised questioning and so forth), but only in terms of its own logic of justification and the scrutiny of others. All these debates about generalisability refer to the issue of what use researchers make of their findings in terms of social or professional change. Keddy et al. (1996) have argued that: Where grounded theorists have failed more explicitly in the past had been in failing to take the research to its final end of using the results to inform social reform this would be easy to overcome as Grounded Theory Methodology yields rich data that allow for strong political voices to be heard and reckoned with. By connecting a substantive theory with other well developed social theories and discovering where it goes beyond the latter or refutes them, the research makes a contribution to knowledge that progresses beyond academic exercise to potential social action. (p.452) The aim of feminist research to inform social change is complimentary to Keddy et al.'s argument that Grounded Theory should be utilised more in informing social practices. However, there are still tensions. Strauss and Corbin (1990) argue that "some researchers believe that data should not be analyzed per se, but rather the researchers task is to gather the data and present them in such a manner that the informants speak for themselves" (emphasis original, p.21). Strauss and Corbin argue that the aim of researchers who attempt to let the informants speak for themselves is to: give an honest account with little or no interpretation of - interference with - those spoken words or of the observations made by the research. While this particular group of researchers hold that the informants' views of reality may not reflect the truth, nevertheless the subject's views are reported in the spontaneous and meaningful ways that they were actually expressed. The philosophical principle underlying this approach is that by presenting this faithful account, the researcher's biases and presence will not intrude upon the data. (p.21)35 This rejection of the informants understandings by Strauss and Corbin brings them into direct conflict with the ideas of Dorothy Smith (1987). She argues that feminist researchers are "constrained by our commitment to ensure that the women we spoke to speak again in what we write without our interpretation of what they had to say" (p.190). Smith's contention is that analysis both fractures and fragments women's experiences. Smith argues that "we must cede from the outset our discursive privilege to substitute our understandings for those whose stories instruct us in
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I have seen few studies which make these sorts of assertions about research. The sole example I am aware of is the Canadian work by Leslie McCartney (2000 unpublished) with elders of the Gwich'in tribe. In this work the rejection of analysis is based on the researchs purpose to create biographies using the Gwich'in elders memories to teach young Gwich'in tribe members about the history of their people.

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their experience of lived actualities" (p.127). Smith's position and that of Strauss and Corbin seem irreconcilable. However Cameron et al. (1992) discuss the same notion of analysis arguing that by advocating an analysis they may be seen as separated from: the many researchers who, sincerely and properly concerned about the imbalance of power between themselves and their subjects, follow the apparently very different practice of letting subjects speak for themselves. There is a convention in some contemporary research of reproducing subjects' own words on the page unmediated by authorial comment, in order to give the subject a voice of her own and validate her opinions. In assessing these two strategies, intervention versus giving a voice one might want to distinguish between what is empowering in the context of representing subjects and what is empowering in the context of interacting with them. In the former context we see that there may be value in non-intervention. But in the latter context we have out doubts whether subjects are most empowered by a principled refusal to intervene in their discourse. (p.25) Cameron's argument hinges on an understanding of discursive subjectivity, that is that participants in the interview setting may choose to represent themselves using various discursive practices and appealing to certain discourses as powerful metaphors for their situation. There is, therefore, little usefulness in not exploring these different discourses, their powers and how they are used. Therefore interpretation and analysis does not necessarily have to be forsaken, even if the researcher no longer considers herself as the final arbiter of the truth. By encouraging participants to begin an analysis and interpretation of the phenomenon it is, in my opinion, possible for the researcher to conduct analysis and interpretation guided by the participant's own interpretations, and therefore to create a theory which is both general and specific, abstract and definite. In doing so the researcher must be aware of her own subjectivities, within the interview setting, in a way that might allow her to prompt an analysis from the participant, but not guide the participant towards any particular analysis or interpretation. In terms of analysis, reinterpretation by the researcher is unavoidable. The researcher must shape and select research material to most clearly explain the concepts developed and their relatedness. Yet it is still possible to acknowledge participants interpretations especially at points where the participants' and the researchers' interpretations conflict (indeed this is part of the discussions in Section 8.4). By acknowledging the participants' own subjectivities and interpretations the researcher may gain richer insights into the phenomenon. Bernick (1991) has commented that social scientists: have sometimes failed to notice that the participants in their research, other human beings, even have a point of view. In other cases, when a scientist confronts a research participant with an account of some feature of social life that differs from the scientist's explanation of it in a significant way, the scientist has responded by discounting this other view of things as false, or incomplete, or subjective, or some combination of these. By discounting the

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participant's account, the researcher effectively obscures the presence of conflicting points of view - a case of not being able to see the thicket for the thorns. (p.118) Yet, as Bernick goes on to contend, it is precisely these insights which constitute knowledge missing about women's lives that feminist research has tried to put back (1991 p.119). As Bernick argues: it is too easy to forget that the first premise of the initial [feminist] critique was what women know about our own lives. Feminist writers had to claim epistemic authority for the facts excluded from canons of science because of inattention or bias. It probably would not have been sufficient merely to call attention to the gaps in the record; it was also necessary that feminists be able to make knowledge-claims about that which had been excluded. (1991, p.120) Henwood and Pidgeon (1995) emphasise "the knower and the known cannot be unambiguously separated" (p.9). This individualised stance is however less clear when we talk of groups of women and what they know both as individuals and as a collective. New knowledge is constituted not just by what feminist writers know about their own lives, but by what all women, and particularly participants in studies, know, and what is shared by stories from groups of women. The explicit acknowledgement of both the individual voice and the collective voice is crucial to this current work. Individually the stories told by participants tell us much about the experiences of disclosing childhood sexual violences. Collectively, however, they combine into a much more powerful narrative about how childhood sexual violences are view and responded to in contemporary society. The knower and the known are not divorced from each other here, or rather, the stories and their individual contexts are not separated, but the combination does add another dimension to the epistemological concerns of this work. Discussion of the methods used in this study are best broken down into three constituent elements: recruitment; the interview; and analysis of the results. These three issues shape the remainder of this Chapter. 5.4 Methods used for this Study - Recruitment

The research was based on a self-selected sample and participants were recruited in a variety of ways. The plurality of recruitment methods was an attempt to access a cross-section of experiences more than a controlled cross-section of the population or a convenient sample such as a survivors group. For all participants in the study (written piece and interview) recruitment methods (by number recruited) were:

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Table 13: Methods of Recruitment for the study Method of Recruitment Via Personal Contact Via Poster or Posting on Email Lists Via Recommendation Number Recruited 5 3 3

Posters were sent to a variety of Women's Centres and sexual abuse projects but the return from this method of recruitment was low. Whether this was because the project / centre managers did not display the posters, or for other reasons, the usefulness of attracting a sample this way cannot be ascertained. Personal contact recruitment ranged from chance conversations with women who spontaneously volunteered, to pre-existing personal contacts. The recommendation section includes both participants and non-participants passing on information about the study to others known to them who might be interested in participating. This category of recommendation was one I had hoped would yield more participants as a snowball sample. However there was a very low rate of recruitment via this method. The reasons for this are unclear, but I think may relate to similar possible reasons for low recruitment via posters and emails which relates to the factors of the unknown researcher and the confidence needed to volunteer in such a way. The unknown researcher factor relates to issues about researcher power and the difficulty for participants of judging whether they want to take part on the basis of a telephone call or email and a participants pack. The assumption of a hidden agenda, or fear of possible personality clashes, are not irrelevant when it comes to research on such topics as childhood sexual abuse. I found that where I made personal contact with women who then volunteered there was an element of them exploring my reasons for doing the research, my personality, and also the sorts of uses I wanted to make of the data. It is much harder to do this sort of exploration during a telephone call or via email. The second factor relates to the first quite closely but refers to the participants' own doubts about participation. Ultimately I found it a lot easier to recruit participants when I was involved in face-to-face discussions about my work or discussions about the topic than by indirect methods, such as advertising. Participation itself was organised around two complementary activities. First participants were invited to submit a written piece talking about their experiences of talking about childhood sexual violences. These written pieces served a number of functions; firstly, where participants decided they did not or could not participate in an interview it allowed for another mode of participation in the study. Secondly, the written pieces allowed for the participants to outline and circumscribe the issues of disclosure for themselves. By this I mean that the participants were able to write the 114

boundaries of what they wanted to discuss in relation to disclosure. Thirdly, the written pieces allowed me to have some prior knowledge of the participant before conducting an interview. Finally, the written pieces encouraged the participant to focus on the topic and to think about the issues involved before the interview took place. In total eleven women were recruited (as shown in Table 13), of whom nine chose to take part in both elements of the research process. Of the remaining two women, one declined to take part in an interview because of a lack of time and concerns about the disruption an interview might cause. The final participant was not interviewed solely because a convenient time could not be found to meet for a face-to-face interview, although several telephone conversations were held discussing aspects of her written piece in which she offered more clarification and detail about her stories. These instances have not been classified as interviews solely because we did not, during the conversations, cover all the questions asked of other participants, and because full transcripts were not returned to the participant for approval, although the excerpts from these conversations which have been used were approved by the participant. Ten womens stories have been included in the analysis. One participant failed to respond to the transcript which was sent for her to check and, despite follow-up, contact could not be established. It is not clear whether this participant intended to withdraw consent or whether other issues intervened which meant that contact was lost between her and myself. However, because agreement to the transcript was highlighted as a fundamental stage in consenting to inclusion in the study, both the written piece and the interview transcript were, in the end, excluded from analysis. Following a discussion by Reinharz (1992) of Robin Gregg's (1991 unpublished) decision to allow participants to select their own pseudonym this strategy was adopted. However, this seemingly simple strategy for further empowerment was not without ethical problems. Firstly, the use of pseudonyms in general, whilst protecting the identity of the participants, prevents them from speaking out for themselves. The lack of acknowledgement of their everyday identity means that, although their experiences and interpretations may be explicitly included in the study, these experiences and interpretations are unnamed. In some ways this can disempower women from the activism shown in their coming forward and sharing their stories. However, in opposition to this, is the concern that allowing the participants to select their own pseudonyms may make them more identifiable, because people will, in general, choose a name which means something to them. Although it has been accepted that anonymity is an important aspect of qualitative studies, the use of pseudonyms offers no guarantees of ensuring this. Choosing to use pseudonyms in some ways reinforces the nature of childhood sexual violences as stigmatising, through the implication that 115

women should not be named as having had these experiences. My choice was however based on a desire to include those women who might otherwise have chosen not to talk about their experiences because of their current situations. With this rationale, anonymity and the use of pseudonyms was necessary to ensure that the stories told, however personal or critical, were included. Some participants were critical of my choice to anonymise their words through pseudonyms and, although these situations were resolved by negotiation and discussion, their criticisms are valid. In other cases participation was agreed solely following a reconfirmation of the anonymous nature of the material, and in some of these cases this protection allowed participants greater freedom in discussing stories of disclosure than would otherwise have been the case. Throughout the text the pseudonyms have been italicised to acknowledge their position as a construction of the research process rather than as the actual identity of the women who took part. 5.5 Methods Used for this Study - Interviews

The second stage of research participation was a face-to-face interview held at a location and time selected by the participants. The interview was unstructured, with the participants' written piece and a short list of questions as the only prompts during the interview. Brannen (1988) argued that "a non-directive interviewing strategy gives considerable control to the respondent. Respondents can anticipate the researchers' concerns and so pre-empt the need for lots of questions" (p.556) and the process of interviewing in this research would appear to bear this out. However, the empowering nature of offering control to research participants should not be overstated. Whilst it does offer participants some control over the flow and topic of the interview, the whole interview situation arises out of the researchers need to gather information about a specific topic. This need to collected information is both what had brought the researcher and participant together and is also the driving dynamic of the interview. Therefore it would be too much to say that the participant, even in studies using non-directive interviewing strategies, controls the interview. Interviews varied in length between forty minutes and over two hours and the majority were carried out in the participants own homes at their request. Of the sample six women chose to be interviewed in their own homes, two chose to be interviewed in my own office at the University, and one was held in the office of a colleague at another University. The interviews began with a brief explanation of the research, its intentions, and information about the control that the participant had during the interview, including the right to stop the recording, the right to decline to answer questions, and the right to ask for parts of the transcript to be deleted. Although this information had also been included in the participation packs, I felt it was important 116

to remind the participants that ultimately they had control at every stage of the research process over the information that they provided. I then proceeded to pick up on a topic mentioned in the submitted written piece from that participant and asked for elaboration or asked them to tell me the story. Occasionally the participant wanted to talk about another related issue and where this was the case I allowed the participant to structure the interview as they wanted. Interviewing in feminist informed research has been extensively written about and a brief overview is useful. In most interview settings, both researcher and subject understand what an interview is supposed to be and tend to follow the rules (as they understand them) associated with their respective roles (De Vault 1987, p.33). Interviewees understand the research process in a number of ways but they construct their own role within the process based on their own conceptions of it. This is an important point to remember when conducting non-traditional interviews (the traditional interview being a highly structured interview carried out in a routine fashion by the interviewer). Interviews where the object is to get interviewees to talk more fully may be difficult where the participant's and the researcher's expectations are vastly different. The interview, Graham has argued, provide a way to counteract: the tendency of surveys to fracture women's experience. As we've seen, social surveys encourage respondents to reduce their experiences to fragments which can be captured in a question-and-answer format. Stories, by contrast, provide a vehicle through which individuals can build up and communication the complexity of their lives. (Graham 1984, p.199) The storytelling interview, Graham goes on to argue, allows for a format structured by the interviewee, counteracting the exploitative tendencies of social research where: the respondent becomes a repository of data, while interpretation and analysis remains the prerogative of the investigator. In stories, data and interpretation are fused, the story-line providing the interpretative framework through which the data are constructed The story, moreover, marks the boundary of what the individual is prepared to tell. The narrator can spell out from the start the terms on which information is to be exchanged: the interviewer, anxious to protect the integrity of her informants, can use the story to guide her questioning. (Graham 1984, p.120) Therefore, according to Graham, the storytelling interview is useful in both the structuring and analysis elements of social research. In terms of structuring the interviews, allowing participants more freedom over the stories they tell empowers them within the research process to raise issues and ideas that are important to them It allows participants to draw boundaries (supported by an explicit acknowledgement of their right to do so) around the issues and situations that they are willing to discuss. The questions for the interviews were based on the previously submitted written pieces and therefore the participants and I negotiated the telling of stories in ways that seem to be 117

unusual. Although I had prompt questions most interviewees spoke about what they considered salient issues. Many of the interviews proceeded in a in and out way where participants moved between intense or painful memories and more general issues as suited them. Fieldnotes from several interviews discussed this phenomenon; this example was written after the interview with Alice. I felt the interview was an interesting experience and I realised afterwards that rather than a linear progression ordered either by experience or chronology what we had constructed was an interview which moved between personal and intense experiences to more general points and back again. This is of interest because it reflects, for me, another non-linear method of interviewing which retains a sense of the whole without being directive, without placing a false sense of structure on the interview and because, I think, it reflects more of the complexity inherent in the issue than some falsely linearly constructed interview procedure might. Additionally the length of the interview [almost three hours] meant that the moving focus helped prolong and extend consideration of some issues. Particularly, I think, it helped in terms of encouraging Alice to share some of her analyses of situations and ideas with me. However, despite the negotiation aspects of the interviews, there were still issues of power differentiation inherent in the process of interviewing. Fowler, Hodge, Kress, and Trew give an alternative understanding: In typical interviews, there are marked differences between the speech of interviewers and interviewees. These differences express the socially ascribed status of the interviewer, and allow him or her to manipulate the behaviour of the interviewee. There are both practical and ritual (ultimately practical also) functions in these interactions. In practical terms, the interview is a mechanism of control of one individual by another; the ritual function is the reaffirmation of the interviewer's right to control the interviewee, and this ritual is part of the legitimation of the roles of more powerful and less powerful which society has ascribed to the participants. (Fowler, Hodge, Kress, and Trew 1979, p.2) Fowler et al. make an important point that despite the explicit attempts to empower participants within the research process, there is always some element of power play inherent within the situation of interviewing. One participant, Debbie, considered the research process from her perspective at the end of the interview. LL D LL D How do you feel about actually taking part in this research? Erm, I think it's really good. I think it, it's nice for someone to ask for how it felt when it was disclosed rather than what happened. 'Cos I don't think I've ever been asked that, but it's quite interesting, it's quite important really. Do you feel that telling people has been important, or is important? Yeah I think it's been important but everyone I've told have always focussed on what happened rather than sitting there thinking well how does she feel to disclose it.

Debbie highlights that both the focus of the interview, on disclosure rather than the abuse itself, and the method of collecting data ("I think it, it's nice for someone to ask for how it felt") made the 118

research different to previous research projects she had been involved with36. However, despite positive feedback from all participants, there will always be an element of a power relationship within the interview situation. The interviewer is there to collect data from participants about the experience under examination and one can never really get away from the conception of participants as "repository of data" (Graham 1984, p.120). Within this study the tendency for exploitation of that data was partially alleviated by the explicit construction and explanation of both the research process and the ways in which I intended to use the data. By explaining my commitment to woman-centred research, where the experiences of the participants were the most important form of data for the study, and also by explaining my intentions relating to the use of material, the exploitation inherent in using participant's stories is partly mitigated. The understanding of participants stories in the context of their progressing lives was also emphasised. Mishler argues that: The one-shot interview conducted by an interviewer without local knowledge of a respondents life situation and following a standard schedule that explicitly excludes attention to particular circumstances - in short, a meeting between strangers unfamiliar with each other's socially organized contexts of meaning - does not provide the necessary contextual basis for adequate interpretation. (Mishler 1986, p.24) The one-shot approach prevents any contacts before or after the interview event. In this study the interview was not the only contact between myself and the participants (as a minimum there was also negotiation of participation and agreement of the transcript; in other cases a friendship has developed). These other contacts have been useful in explaining and negotiating the stories told by participants. Indeed one participant, Lisa, was so moved by an event that she wrote to me afterwards about something that had happened. In this postscript to the interview material she tells of an experience which relates to both the interview participation itself and reactions to disclosure from others (see discussion below of unintentional effects of interviewing). Such continuing contact, aided by the recruitment pattern for the study where most participants came via personal contacts, allows for a much more complex negotiation of the interview setting and a renegotiation of the power differentials inherent in it. De Vault has argued that: Women interviewing women also bring to the interview a tradition of woman talk. They know how to help each other develop ideas, and are typically better prepared than men to use the interview as a search procedure, co-operating in the project of constructing meanings together. (DeVault 1987, p.33)

36

Two participants, Debbie and Lisa had participated in other projects about abuse during their time in mental health hospital wards.

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But implicit in this statement is an acceptance that women talk to each other differently than crossgender or male-male conversations. Finch has argued that although she has no special qualities in relation to interview technique "women whom I have interviewed often are surprised at the ease with which they do talk in the interview situation" (Finch 1984, p.73). Finch goes on to suggest that the specifics of woman talk means that women participants in studies are more likely to be exploited because of their willingness to open up and talk about personal issues. My own field notes contain frequent references to the surprise I felt about how much and in what detail participants in my own study talked to me. After the interview with Claudette I noted that: "I felt there was a tacit understanding of similar childhood experiences which was important in the interview context." Finch comments that "the ease with which one can get women to talk in the interview situation depends not so much upon one's skill as an interviewer, nor upon one's expertise as a sociology, but upon one's identity as a woman" (Finch 1984, p.78). Although this has been critiqued by other writers, I felt that a shared history of childhood sexual violences (more than identity as woman) created a foundation upon which the interview relationship was built. As Finch has also noted: Women mostly are more used than men to accepting intrusion through questioning into the more private parts of their lives, including during encounters in their own homes As subjects of research, therefore, women are less likely than men to find questions about their lives unusual and therefore inadmissible. (Finch 1984, p.74) Surprising to me, as the researcher, was the number of women who elected to be interviewed in their own homes. Of the total number of interviewed participants only three chose to be interviewed somewhere other than their homes and of those three all chose to the interviewed on a University campus. For participants the benefits of being interviewed within your own home are that it is a safe environment and offers a degree of comfort for the participant which is unavailable in more anonymous settings. Additionally being interviewed in a University office reinforces perceptions of authority and control. As a researcher, interviewing in other people's homes raises a number of issues about intrusion and privacy. Interviewing in the participant's homes means one cannot avoid some degree of connection with their lives, at least for the length of the interview, and it also means one must be aware of the possibilities for physical intrusiveness during an interview. Issues such as hospitality, use of facilities, and so forth are hard to avoid when interviewing as a guest in someone's home. However, Finch also points out, interviewing in the participant's homes allows for the interview to be: 120

conducted in an informal way.[where it] easily take on the character of an intimate conversation. The interviewee feels quite comfortable with this precisely because the interviewer is acting as a friendly guest, not an official inquisitor; and the model is, in effect, an easy, intimate relationship between two women. (Finch 1984, p.74) Finch identifies this issue as being one which allows for greater scope within the interviewing process, but also possibly leaves the participants at a disadvantage in terms of exploitation. Finch's argument is that participants need to be protected by an aware researcher when taking part in research. Ethically, the consideration of entry into someone's personal space (the home) and engaging them in personally detailed conversation (talking about abuse) can potentially be exploitative interactions. Only once in my research did a participant say that she had stated something she did not intend to: however the participants also had editorial control of the transcripts which, I would hope, allowed them the opportunity to edit out parts of the conversation they had not intended. Despite the offer of a second interview, all the participants chose not to have a second face-to-face meeting (although contact has been maintained with many of the participants in the form of letters, emails, and telephone calls). Brannen (1988) has noted from her research looking at marital problems that the one-off nature of her interviews may have had an influence on the revelatory nature of the interviews. She writes that: Respondents have no fear they would ever meet us again. Their very considerable desire for secrecy and anonymity was thereby fulfilled and the possibility of gossip minimised. This feature, together with the flexible design of the interview schedule and the conditions in which the interviews were undertaken, provided respondents with an opportunity to discharge their feelings. (Brannen 1988, 558) Although the choice of a second interview was not taken up, some of the participants chose to utilise the confirmation of the transcript as a further chance to discuss some of the issues, while others chose to write separately and inform me of new developments, and some have become friends. What I think this denotes is that it is possibly not the one-off nature of the interviewing, but the degree of control afforded to participants, which aided the interviewing process. Before the interview participants knew, via the research pack they had received, that they could opt for a second interview, that they had control of the transcripts and their participation in the study, and that continued contact with myself was a possibility. 5.6 Methods Used for this Study - Analysis

The nature of the analysis of the interviews and written pieces reflects an understanding that interviews, by their nature, represent two different ideas. Firstly they are a way of gaining data 121

about experiences which can then be understood by exploring "the relationship between happenings and objects in the material world and their subjective representation in human consciousness" (Wainwright 1997, p.2). This level of analysis is focussed on the experiences related by participants and how the participants have come to understand them. However, additionally Mishler has argued that: an interview is a form of discourse. Its particular features reflect the distinctive structure and aims of interviewing, namely, that it is discourse shaped and organized by asking and answering questions. An interview is a joint product of what interviewees and interviewers talk about together and how they talk with each other. The record of an interview that we researchers make and then use in our work of analysis and interpretation is a representation of that talk. (Mishler 1986, p.viii) This research had both a linguistic and experiential element to the analysis of both the written pieces and the interviews. The analysis of the experiences largely followed Strauss's (1987) coding precepts. The analysis started with open coding and memoing of the transcripts to raise detailed questions about the concepts and issues in the text. Next I proceeded to connect these codes together into axial groups where commonalities appeared, and finally I translated these results into theoretical concepts offering coherent and valid explanations of the data (this final process is called selective coding in Grounded Theory). This is a linear explanation of the coding process; the actual experience of coding is a much more circular process with transcripts being cross-referenced for consistency and codes being checked, reconsidered, and regrouped with consistency throughout the process. Preliminary analysis and open coding took place after each interview, rather than at the end of the interviewing process. Parritt and O'Callaghan (2000) discuss the coding process in more detail although they utilise a more linear process of coding than the present study. The narrative analysis added another dimension to the study, working from the basis that Mishler outlines in which he argues that it is usually assumed that: an interview is a behavioral rather than a linguistic event. The definitions refer to an interview not as speech or talk, or even communication, but as a verbal exchange, a pattern of verbal interaction, or a verbal report. In this way the definitions erase and remove from consideration the primary and distinctive characteristic of an interview as discourse, that is, as meaningful speech between interviewer and interviewee, as speakers of a shared language. (Mishler 1986, p.10) De Vault has also highlighted "sociolinguists and others who work with research interviews are becoming increasingly conscious of the obvious but mostly taken for granted fact that interviews consist of talk" (1987, p.33). Certainly, in talking about talk (which this study does), the linguistic element of speech is as important as an analysis of the general and specific trends within the experiences recounted. As Baxter and Eyles (1999) have highlighted, "stripping a qualitative 122

encounter (interview or observation) of its immediate circumstances in order to concentrate on the concept being measured also strips it of its meaning" (p.171), and an interview, as Mishler (above) reminds us, is both a linguistic and behavioural event. However, Mishler's assertions about the nature of interviews as a linguistic event must also be tempered by understandings that through the same process, interviews may be understood as nonlinguistic events. Brannen argues that "even if a problem is familiar or within respondents' own personal experience, they may lack a ready vocabulary to express themselves on the subject" (1988, p.553). This statement implies more than simply examining "non-verbal communications such as pauses and silence" (Brannen 1988, 554) or examining "difficulties of expression - those fascinating moments when respondents got stuck" (De Vault 1987, p.33). We also need to understand that not all experiences can be articulated and that the non-articulation of some experiences, whether an explicit choice by the participant, or because of a lack of ability or language to discuss the problem, is a key feature in all interview procedures. As a final adjunct to the analysis and to retain the element of participatory involvement in the research process, all participants were invited to a feedback day to hear about and comment on the results of the study. The group discussions that ensued merely reinforced the analysis as done and therefore, I suggest, validated the findings in a specific, participant focussed, way. 5.7 Conclusions

This Chapter has explored some of the debate about methodology that is pertinent to this study. At the same time it outlines the methods employed in this study. Harding has argued that: A closer examination of the full range of feminist social analyses reveals that often it is not exactly alternative methods that are responsible for what is significant about this research. Instead, we can see in this work alternative origins of problematic, explanatory hypotheses and evidence, alternative purposes of inquiry and a new prescription for the appropriate relationship between the inquirer and her / his subject of inquiry. (1987, p.vii) Methodologically this study does not break new ground. The use of qualitative methods explicitly allows for results which are situated and partial and which, as the Barnes citation earlier suggests, provides some understandings of a view of reality experienced by some subjects. Bernick (1991), utilising Stanley and Wise's (1983) work on research and Majorie Shostak's study of a !Kung woman (1981), discussed the important aspects of understanding and utilising women's experiences in research. The three principles of feminist research that Bernick identifies are that: "the personal sphere is central to women's experience" (p.125); "each woman's process of 123

explaining herself and the life story she tells as a result of that process must be respected" (p.126); and that "neither process nor the story of one woman can be fully understood in isolation from (at least some) other women's processes and stories" (p.130). This is certainly one of the grounds on which this research represents something new. Bernick goes on to conclude that "what counts as knowledge must be grounded on experience. Human experience differs according to the kinds of activities and social relations in which humans engage." (1991, p.131).

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Chapter Six - Disclosure as Lived Experience 6.1 Introduction This Chapter focuses on disclosures and reactions to disclosure. For clarity, in this Chapter the transcribed speech of the research participants has been cleaned for ease of reading. Analysis of the language and speech of participants is contained in Chapter Seven which includes uncleaned sections of text. This Chapter has been organised using the response codes from the first level analysis of the interviews and written pieces. The Chapter starts with some information about the women participants in this study (6.2). The Chapter then examines what I call the imperative to disclose (6.3). Next the Chapter examines the responses to disclosure in general (6.4) before looking at the different response types (6.5-6.12). This first exploration of response types refers to disclosures made within non-professional relationships. The Chapter concludes by looking at the disclosures within professional relationships, by which I am referring to disclosures that occur within the professional lives of the listeners (6.13). Professionals are classified as those who might expect to be disclosed to in the course of their working lives professions within such fields as teaching, the mental health system, and the medical system more generally. This section again looks at the three response types developed out of the fieldwork data pertaining to disclosures within professional relationships (6.14-6.17). Finally this Chapter concludes with some thoughts about the general experience of disclosure of childhood sexual violences (6.18). 6.2 The Women Participants

It is not my intention to outline the histories (of sexual violence or of lives) of the women who participated in this research. Although the women did share their individual stories, their narratives also combine powerfully and reach beyond the individual. Additionally, the sorts of information which might be considered pertinent as contextual information, such as an explication of the abuse histories, smacks of a prurient and voyeuristic interest in what perpetrators do to children. Although the specifics of the abuse histories are relevant to some of the discussions below, this information is introduced as required, but in many instances the women's narratives need no contextualisation. The analysis sample consisted of ten women. Nine identified as white and one as Jamaican. At the time of interview four women were in their twenties, three were in their thirties, and three were in 125

their forties. The women, as a group, had above average educational histories: only one had no post-compulsory education, one identified A Levels as the highest qualification gained, and four had or were working towards Bachelors degrees with one other having re-entered education recently to gain a vocational qualification. Three had or were working towards postgraduate qualifications at the time of interview. Socio-economic backgrounds of the womens families revealed five identifying as working class and four as middle-class or upper middle class. One participant declined to answer this question. The women who participated brought a wide range of life-experiences to the interview. The common element was that they had all experienced childhood sexual violences. Perpetrators included parents (including two mothers), neighbours, teachers, other relatives, and friends fathers. The violences began between infancy and fourteen. Notably, the least intrusive violence reported was digital penetration, with most of the women identifying the violences as including intercourse. No women reported non-contact abuse in this sample. Some women identified more than one abuser: this ranged from two abusers to many (in one case the woman had effectively been prostituted by her mother and stepfather). The group in total represents a diverse group of women with varying childhood histories, backgrounds, and life stories. 6.3 Debbie Tiha Alice Ellie The Contradictions of Disclosure I dont generally tell people now, I tend to keep it a secret. Ive got close friends and Ive told them. I mean its not the sort of thing that just comes up. I go on the premise that I wont tell anybody. Its something I try to avoid. Its not something I would, I suppose its, its something I kind of see as something I do because I have to at times but if I can get away without having to do it for a long period of time, or having to talk about it very much then thats better.

During interview all women were asked how they felt about telling people they had experienced childhood sexual violences. The answers highlighted a contradictory position. These women had volunteered to participate in research on disclosure of childhood sexual violences. Yet almost without exception the women talked about avoiding disclosure and not wanting to talk about abuse if they could. This contradiction suggests that reluctance to disclose comes not from shame about 126

the experience as has been suggested by psychological literature (see for example Nathanson 1989 or Santoro Tomlin 1991), but from prior experiences of disclosure and the reactions it provokes37. Many of the women interviewed made direct links between the responses they previously received and their current disinclination to make disclosures. Alice [Disclosure] changed my relationships with people, some I know I will never trust with my story."

In terms of the rationale for disclosures the common perception, fostered by psychological perspectives, is that disclosures are a cry for help or seeking some sort of action from the listener. The majority of disclosures, however, were made to develop relationships or simply so people know. Lucy I tend to tell people now when I think they are ready for it but also when not telling starts to make me inhibited in my relationship with them." I don't know why I tell people, it's just part of me, I just say what's happened to me because that is part of me and I'm not really ashamed of it, so I tell them." I decided I HAD to disclose because the secret was creating tension in our lives.

Lisa

Claudette

This conception of disclosure reinforces it as an everyday act akin to other stories about the self that women might tell. This is a new characterisation of disclosures of childhood sexual violences. To view disclosure as such shifts our understandings from questioning why women disclose (as an individualised act) to how disclosure is reacted to and what this reflects about society (as a socially understood action rather than a personal problem). At the same time this reframing of disclosure as an everyday act of storytelling challenges the presumption that there are universal good and bad reactions to disclosures. This dichotomous representation of disclosure reinforces the depersonalisation of disclosure that creates an objective scale of good to bad rather than considering the contextual factors and individual responses of the people involved. Those responses seen as universally good, such as reassuring the speaker that the abuse wasn't their fault, were critiqued by the participants. Lucy She [Lucys mother] said to me that it wasn't my fault which I know is one of those ideal type responses lauded by social workers and the like but in truth I had never thought it was my fault. I didn't understand what was going on and when I worked it out I never felt like I'd asked for it or was responsible for it. When my Mum said that I began to question whether I was abnormal because I hadn't felt guilty about it."
Samantha

37

This is not to say that a sense of repugnance towards childhood sexual abuse did not affect some participants.

wrote to me after her interview saying: On disclosure: I wonder what one can really expect from other people in terms of asking them to listen to something too repulsive to contemplate.

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Professional texts such as Protectors Handbook and Courage to Heal emphasise listeners responsibilities to make clear that the speaker is not responsible for the sexual violences. It is important that the protecting parent [as a listener] conveys to the child that it is the perpetrating adult who is responsible for the sexual abuse. Regardless of the child's behaviour, it is an adult's responsibility not to sexually abuse. your child needs you to be clear that the abuser is responsible for what he [sic] did. (Smith 1995, p.61-62) Be clear that abuse is never the child's fault. No child seduces an abuser. Children ask for affection and attention, not for sexual abuse. Even if a child responds sexually, even if she wasn't forced or didn't protest, it is still never the child's fault. It is always the responsibility of the adult not to be sexual with a child. (Bass and Davis 1988, p.316) Don't say or imply that the client is to blame for the abuse. No child is ever to blame. Yet at one time or another, most women believe that the abuse was their fault. Teach them otherwise. One survivor said, People kept telling me it wasn't my fault, it wasn't my fault. But they never told me why it wasn't my fault.(Bass and Davis 1988, p.347) Obviously where a child or woman does feel that the abuse was wholly or partially their fault the reassurance (or teaching) can be an important part of coming to terms with the experiences. But Lucy never felt it was her fault and thus this good response made Lucy question the way she had previously considered the sexual violences38. I would like to propose that rather than employ this good / bad distinction we should rather understand responses to disclosure as situationally appropriate or inappropriate. This moves the discussion of disclosures away from the determinist framework of good or bad and towards a relative framework that allows us to explore disclosure as a socially inscribed activity. The participants, in their written pieces and interviews, discussed some 83 separate disclosures in total. This gives an average of over eight disclosures per participant although the spread was not even across all ten women (for example Ellie talked about seventeen separate instances of disclosure whilst Samantha mentioned only five). This is, however, an indication that the previous treatment of disclosure as being synonymous with first disclosures misunderstands the true nature of disclosure as a life-long process. Of the 83 disclosures the majority received negative responses (detailed later in this Chapter) which ranged from criticism of the disclosure itself to abusive responses based on the disclosure. Whilst
38

Other stories, for example Lisas (p.207) and Debbies (p.210) also mentioned this response of its not your fault but with a key difference here it seems to have been used appropriately to a person who did feel some element of guilt / responsibility about what had happened.

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coding the disclosure instances five codes had to be developed to encapsulate responses women found unsupportive (critical of disclosure, abusive, pity, ill-informed / macho, disbelief). One code was developed relating to responses found to be ambiguous (ambiguous response / no response) and only two relating to responses deemed to be supportive (empathic / knowing, resolving). The fact that the majority of codes related to unsupportive responses was not a result of skewed questioning. Questions asked for the written pieces were purposefully neutral, asking only for examples of disclosure and reactions, whilst the interview questions purposefully asked for both experiences which the women found supportive and experiences they did not. Additionally most participants did discuss a variety of reactions to instances of disclosure including positive response. Thus the over-representation of unsupportive responses highlights that disclosures are not generally well received. LL Ellie What do you think the reasons are for you working on the assumption that you are not going to tell people? Partly I suppose because of some of the reactions I've had in the past and, erm, I suppose generally the assumption that it's not fair to expect people to deal with it unless they've had experience or training, but no-one seems to fit into that category of being able to deal with it"

Alice I wonder if there is a false sense of If I tell I'll get a good reception when very often the reception is not good." 6.4 Responses to Disclosure

Coding for responses to disclosure used categories as close to the meanings from participants' interviews as possible. A brief summary of the codes allocated is in Table 14 below. Non-Professional Relationships Empathic / Knowing Ambiguous / No Response No. 20 11 Professional Relationships Understanding Not supportive (includes abusing trust and judging) Disbelief / Ignore No. 12 12

Abusive 9 7 Macho / Ill-informed 7 Disbelief 5 Critical of Disclosure 4 (Totals 90 as some instances fitted dual Pity 2 categories) Resolving 1 Table 14: Brief summary of the codes allocated to instances of disclosure discussed by participants The categories are discussed in more depth below but in summary, friends were overall the most supportive with seventeen instances of empathic reactions. Many of these were reactions from friends who had also experienced some form of childhood abuse or deprivation. Relatives tended 129

towards ambiguous responses or no response at all whilst partners39 most often gave ill-informed or macho responses. Results from disclosures within professional relationships showed that both General Practitioners and Counsellors scored highly as understanding, whilst teachers and psychiatrists reactions were spread widely throughout the three professional response categories. Other professionals, included Court Officials, Community Psychiatric Nurses, Social Services, and the NSPCC, were not mentioned enough times to evaluate. 6.5 Empathic Responses40

Empathic responses were those responses deemed to be most supportive. Many of these empathic responses came from other women who had experienced childhood abuses or depravations hence the dual code of empathic / knowing. In fact without exception disclosures to those who had experienced childhood abuses or depravations received empathic responses. Defining empathy is difficult but here it is taken to mean an attitude of trying to understand the speaker from within the speakers own life history rather than of trying to walk in their shoes. Having a knowing respondent to disclosures appeared to lessen isolation and allow the discloser to see themselves connecting with others without having to deny their childhood experiences. Empathic responses were not connected with stable prerequsites (such as training or similar experiences). However two factors were constant in discussions of empathic responses. Firstly there is a reduction in isolation and secondly a perceived renormalisation of self (see later section). Where the listener is not also a survivor then an empathic response appears to be connected with three factors. Making the space to talk about it. Treating the speaker with respect. Showing a genuine emotional reaction.

One example of an empathic response comes from Alice when discussing her first disclosure as an adult. Alice We'd known each other for years and she knew that there was a big, a sadness about me, a huge you know, over my life and it took me a long, long time before, I mean years, you know, before I actually said anything. She knew that I'd had an unhappy background but that was all she knew really and then one day I just felt I can't keep

39

Partners in this case refers to people told when they were the partner of the woman disclosing, whether or not the relationship is still current. 40 Empathy is a term used in counselling practice to describe the relationship counsellors should have with their clients. It is clearly differentiated from sympathy (feeling sorry for) or compassion (suffering with) to allow for a more respectful distance between client and counsellor.

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skipping around this you know, we'd get close to it and then I'd keep, you know, going off on tangents really and I said I do want to tell you what happened to me and it's horrible but I need to tell you. Its got to be somewhere private and you know. So what she did was she's got a house that's got a big attic room and we'll shut the door and the kids won't be home until teatime and we'll just spend the day in there and we'll talk. So, and I still didn't tell her all of it, but I told her most of it. Erm, and she cried with me, which was fine because it was a, it was empathy, it wasn't pity and it wasn't sympathy and you it was a real, she felt what I was feeling and suddenly understood. She understood so much of my life that up to that point didn't make a lot of sense I think." In this situation not only does the friend solicit the disclosure by making time and space for Alice both within the friendship and in life but her response is one of genuine understanding and emotion. This instance fulfils all three conditions for an empathic response. The friend made both physical space for the disclosure and makes psychic space by soliciting the disclosure. The friend treated Alice with respect, both in terms of response and by assuring the private space and time for the disclosure. Finally the friend responded with genuine emotion, or as Alice says "and she cried with me, which was fine because it was a, it was empathy, it wasn't pity and it wasn't sympathy and you it was a real, she felt what I was feeling and suddenly understood." An example of a disclosure to a knowing listener was discussed by Debbie and Lisa. They both discussed the situation in which they disclosed to each other whilst on a mental health unit. Here it is the mutuality of the disclosure accompanied by a sense of decreasing isolation and renormalisation which seems important. Lisa I told my best-friend who had been, she'd been through something like what I've been through, not by her family but by someone else, a friend's family. But we've got a lot of strength from each other, you know, we met in hospital and telling her made me feel like I wasn't a freak, you know, I'm not a complete freak, I'm not mad like. I'm not a danger to other people like my psychiatrist said, I'm not going to hurt other children like my psychiatrist said and Debbie was really understanding, she was really, really good. We all knew that most of us had problems with our family and so it broke the ice and when we were on our own and when we were without staff we could sort say, Well you know that happened to me, I was able to say that I was sorry what happened to her and that she wasn't alone and I'm not saying it's not important what happened to you, thats why I'm saying you're not alone, I'm saying that because, erm, I can understanding what you've been through and, erm, it's not nice and, erm, things can work out and you know It's not your fault and we both said that to each other, you know. Even though we found it difficult and it took a lot of therapy and when we were at the hospital and sometimes we'd say it to each other. She said it to me and I said it to her. We were all at different stages when we were at the hospital and I'd been in there a lot longer than Debbie had, erm, and then we sort of worked on from there and now were really good friends and we can talk about things like that."

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Debbie

We were in the hospital and erm I think we were basically sitting there one day and she was saying what her mum had done to her and everything and I was thinking, and I said Well actually this happened to me and I think it was because we were all thrown into the same situation and most of the people there it something that had happened in their past. And I felt confident there because everybody, everybody had a history and I was more comfortable as well, you didn't feel isolated like you would with a stranger. It was quite accepted that these things happened and so I felt comfortable telling Lisa. I think I just told her what had happened at thirteen with my friends in the caravan. I didn't really go into detail about what happened, but I don't think it all came out at once I think it was bit by bit and every time we talked I told her more. I think Lisa was the only person who I ever felt comfortable telling."

The mutuality of this disclosure is important, as is the context of it: the disclosure took place whilst both women were staying on a mental health ward in hospital which was a place were abuse was discussed openly (particularly in group therapy which both of them mentioned in interview). Being in a space where abuse was openly discussed facilitated their disclosure to each other, and indeed is one of the conditions for an empathic response from people who haven't experienced abuse. But the elements of empathic response from other women who had experienced childhood sexual violence are clear here - firstly mutual disclosure lessened the isolation on the ward and in their general lives, and secondly the disclosure, as Lisa explains "made me feel like I wasn't a freak", in effect making Lisa feel like she wasn't abnormal because of her experiences. Tiha talked about an experience of disclosure, again in an atmosphere where talking about abuse was accepted. Tiha first mentioned this disclosure in her written piece and then continued the story in her interview. Tiha I was facilitating a workshop for a trade union on Violence and Abuse Towards Women. In the workshop one of the women was talking about sexual abuse that had happened to her and everyone was being very supportive. I suddenly, entirely unexpectedly, came out with the story of my abuse. I felt very unsure about it, after all I was supposed to be facilitating the workshop. But one of the women brought one of the other facilitators in, and people were very supportive, understanding and kind. It was the first time I'd cried about what had happened in front of anyone. (written piece) It was just really weird because the women were really just being very supportive to each other and had come out with various stories you know about things that had happened to them at work or in childhood or whatever and I just suddenly found myself telling them about the abuse that had happened to me as a child and I, I mean that was actually the first time, apart from when I told it as a child and had not been believed, that was the first time that I'd told anyone about the abuse. Erm, I mean it helped me feel good, I mean I felt it was very difficult because in some ways I felt incredibly embarrassed, you know that here I was supposed to be talking it and at one point I did break down and cry you know and it was like. And also somehow, what, what was really interesting was, was we kind of, became even more because suddenly it wasn't me lecturing people - it wasn't someone academically talking 132

Tiha

about it or you know being academic about abuse and the women that were involved realised that yes I had been involved and it was like the atmosphere of the workshop changed because it was an all-day workshop and this happened in the morning and I just think people felt that they could be as open as they wanted to be and that people's were. I mean the thing to me that was very releasing was that I was believed and that was actually the first time I was believed because as I said when I talked about it as a child I hadn't been believed, erm, and also people weren't judgmental about it either, and it was just a huge, and I suddenly realised I could talk about it and that was very freeing you know. That's what I can remember affected me. It was very, a revelation." (interview) Tiha's unusual experience of disclosing to a group (Alice also had disclosed to a group but with different results discussed later in this Chapter) shares certain characteristics with Lisa and Debbie's mutual disclosures in that the setting was one where the existence of abuse of women and children was explicitly acknowledged. This openness about abuse seems to have been key in prompting Tiha's disclosure. Secondly the creation of space to talk about it had been facilitated by Tiha and then used by the other women present in their support of each other. In this instance it appears that Tiha waited until she had witnessed the acceptance, respect, and space herself before making her disclosure. Some of the participants in the study explored the concept of empathy in their interviews. Debbie explained what made an initially empathic response from a former housemate. Debbie She was very good, she wasn't ever abused, she didn't know how it felt, but she tried to understand, tried to see it from my point of view. She was possibly, probably, she was first person I'd told but she was definitely the first person who said it wasn't your fault. And that pulled down my doors because I thought I must have done something, it must have been my fault."

Here the empathic response comes from expressing belief, not blaming Debbie, and trying to understand the speaker's point of view. Alice, in discussing her disclosure to her husband, talked at some length about the things that made his reaction so supportive. In this case it was the empathic emotional reaction which appears to have been crucially important. Alice Most of what I've done is work with kids that have been abused in some way, not always sexually. So I'm always reading stuff, so there's always stuff, there's stuff about sexual abuse all over the house, you know. And I knew that one day I actually had to tell him that this is what happened to me so what I did was I had this book, I think it was Courage to Heal or Allies in Healing or one of them. And I'd started going to counselling by then and I said to him something like I've got to do something about my past. But I hadn't said it. I hadn't actually said, I have been sexually abused. And we were in bed one day, one morning, I think it was a Sunday morning or something and I was just reading this book and I couldn't put it down it was so good and I got him to read a bit of it while I was sat beside him and I was reading it as well and I ended up in tears and said How would you feel if I told you that happened to me? And he just cried, he was just, he was brilliant, really, erm, he 133

didn't kind of blank it or anything he just, he was upset and sad that it had happened to me and he didn't know how to help, you know, he didn't know how to help, I mean I said It's just enough that I can tell you.. Believing that an empathic response will occur if disclosure takes place had become a key consideration for some of the women interviewed. For example, Claudette identified empathy as a key factor. Claudette It's people who I think can empathise with me that I will tell. I won't tell people who've had happy, settled, lives, go-lucky lives, I won't really tell them. Just hear them talk about people's, other people's lives who've had difficult circumstances, they just don't want to, I feel they don't want to deal with it, I will not tell them, I just wouldn't feel comfortable."

This conception of empathy employed by Claudette is strikingly similar to that used by Alice to make the same decision as to whether or not to disclose. Alice said, "if I felt they couldn't cope with it, I won't share it". In this instance the appropriateness of the response is precisely predicated on its ability to react in a way which the speakers considered supportive - to connect with their experiences on an emotional level and to be able to construct a situation in which this is possible. In total 20 instances of empathic or knowing responses were discussed by participants in this study (24% of the total number of disclosures discussed). The majority came from friends (85% of empathic / knowing responses). Three empathic responses came from partners of the women interviewed and no respondents talked about empathic or knowing responses from relatives. 6.6 Resolving

The idea of disclosure strengthening relationships or resolving problems within them is one used within psychological literature and forms an underlying basis of many of the discussions of setpiece disclosures such as that advocated by Schatzow and Herman (1989). However in this study only one example of a disclosure resolving or strengthening a relationship was discussed. Claudette gave the example of her disclosure to her half-sister; in fact her written piece was largely dedicated to exploring this disclosure. Claudette I wanted us to become closer. Prior to the disclosure I felt like the odd one out, as if I were carrying a secret that kept me separate from them. If I could share the secret with them then I imagined we would become closer. Importantly, I also wanted their support They [Claudette's siblings] were always aware that there was a difficult relationship between their father, my mother, and myself. Moreover, my sister had, when she was very young, walked in whilst the abuse was just about to occur / was occurring. I also shared a bed with her and her sleep was disturbed when I was taken out of bed by the abuser because I used to try and wake her in the hope that that would prevent the abuser taking me out of the room. My sister was therefore 134

disturbed by her memories and did not fully understand them and this was creating difficulties in her life. In interview Claudette expanded on the effects of this disclosure. Claudette She felt really guilty. She was, although she knew she was shocked to hear it, it was like yeah this is for real now. She was shocked and she was, I think, guilt, her guilt was the most overpowering thing that came across to me. Yeah. Just not so much what she was saying but the way she was saying things, if that makes sense, you could feel her guilt We've spoken about it a lot since because she's had like a breakdown recently because of, I think because she's carrying, seems to be carrying much more than I, she seems to be carrying the guilt of it on her shoulders. She's like the sort of person whos like very protective so it's like she couldn't protect me and she felt like she should have been able to, which I mean she couldn't, she was a child. She's supporting me and I'm supporting her to off load this feeling of guilt that she has. You sound incredibly close, I get the kind of feeling of how much you feel for her. We are close, it's funny, we don't see a lot of each other, we didn't until the disclosure, we like speak to each other on the phone but we're such different people, there is a closeness but also a distance in that we're such separate individuals but the disclosure's made us closer like we'll say you know we love each other which we'd never say before and like we actually embrace now which we'd never did before. So we are a lot closer which is you know, it's interesting, it's something good."

LL: Claudette:

The resolution for Claudette and her sister came, in Claudette's opinion, from the fact that it both demolished the wall between them which resulted from the abuse, but it also resolved the memories that Claudette's sister had of the abuse. Claudette described this in interview saying "you know if it's a secret, the secret is never completely concealed, there's like little hints of it fluttering around". In fact this partiality of the secret was apparent in the disclosure event itself. Claudette I kind of asked her more than told her, I said, Do you know what happened? And she kind of said, erm erm, she had an idea. So she sort of said, Yeah kind of, something about you and Dad not getting on and some kind of conflict there or you know he doesn't like you or you don't like him. And then she said I remember growing up and there were things, you know, he used to beat you or hit you a lot and then I said Yeah because, and then I just said something like he abused me and then I said Sexually but the thing, I didn't have to say much more to my sister because of, she, I think she's, she knew, because she's seen certain things."

The fact that Claudette and her sister shared knowledge of partial secret meant that the disclosure itself could also merely allude to what happened rather than having to actually detail what had happened. But in this situation the two factors of reducing the barrier between Claudette and her sister and also completing a partial picture combined to make the disclosure one which brought Claudette and her sister closer together.

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For other participants in the study, however, this was not the case, and some rejected any notion of resolution being possible through disclosure. Silvia for example talked about her reasons for not telling her mother about her abuse by her stepfather. Silvia Really, at the end of the day why does she need to know? What's it going to do? You know, what, it's not going to make me feel much better knowing that she's miserable and it's not going to make her feel much better. You know, at the end of the day I think well what's the point? So you don't see telling people as a way of strengthening or making more intimate those relationships that you've got? No, not particularly, although it's been important to me that people know, certain people know, but at this stage in my life I wouldn't say so."

LL: Silvia:

For Silvia then, although at one point she might have felt it important that some people she knew were told, she does not consider disclosure resolving. Given the negative reactions received by participants in this study to disclosure this view is understandable. Although texts such as Schatzow and Herman (analysed in Section 4.4) implicitly suggest a resolving function to disclosure particularly in terms of telling family members there is little evidence in this work that this is the case. Suggestions that disclosure will resolves other issues in family relationships is, of course, a dangerous one particularly as disclosure of childhood sexual violences may not only further disrupt familial relations but where the woman is also placing herself at risk of various negative responses too. Resolution through disclosure appears to be a rare occurrence and the overall attitude to resolution being achieve through disclosure is not supported by this work. 6.7 Ambiguous / No Response

The coding of both of these response types into one category arises from the reactions of the women interviewed. Many of the stories that might on the surface have been coded as no response actually involved a more ambiguous relationship and set of events for both the speaker and the listener. No disclosure was not responded to in any way, either at the time or later. In many of the stories the lack of response was connected with other ambiguous circumstances contextualising the disclosure. The example from Samantha demonstrates how these two categories operate together. Samantha "My parents found out that he was a self-professed paedophile when I was 12 and asked me whether he had done anything to me. I explained. My mother said I would be fine. However she continued to invite him to the house until I was 16 although he still tried to corner me and grab my breasts. When I was 16 he told me that he had had an affair with her and, when I asked her about it, she said that he had no right to tell me that and banished him from our family's existence [emphasis original]. Actually she does forget now and mention him occasionally. I think that her (and my father's) failure to feel any indignation on my behalf or desire to protect me may have affected me more than the abuse."

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Here it is the interplay between an ambiguous response and a lack of action that Samantha felt had affected her in later life. It is the ambiguity of the response (to ask whether anything had happened but continue to invite the perpetrator to the house despite him self-confessing his status as a paedophile and continuing abusive acts) which complicates the reaction for Samantha. She was asked whether anything had happened but her affirmative response then was, to her knowledge, not acted upon. Alice described in her writing a similar experience as an adult. Alice I was forced to tell my husband's father because of his new found friendship with my father. It seems that my father-in-law's need to be liked by all included my abusive father. Once I had told him in words of one syllable that I did not wish to receive messages from my father because of abuse issues, I wrongly thought he might be more supportive, he is not. He chooses to be blind and deaf to what I have said.

She continued in her interview to say that the problem arose when Alice cut off contact with her father. Her father approached members of Alice's husband's family to try and get their contact details, and was refused by Alice's mother-in-law and other members of the family. Alice So, he didn't get anywhere so then he rings up my husband's father. And this is a man who's got some quite serious psychological problems himself and has such a strong desire to be liked that he goes along with just about anything and everybody, you know, and always stands on the side of the poor, downtrodden soul who's actually a shit but he can't see it. And, erm, he started putting pressure on me It's your father how can you deny him access to his grandchildren? And I was not going to tell my father-in-law in any detail, which is what he wanted to know. He kept on and on and on. So I said I'm not going to go into detail with you. My father was abusive when I was young and I don't want him anywhere near my children. And he still to this day and this is kind of two years now, still can't cope with that. He [the father-in-law] remarried and she's [Alice's new mother-in-law] had a go as well You are going to feel so guilty and you're going to feel awful when he dies, what are you going to be left feeling like? and I just said I really feel I need to say something to you at this point, I said, I've explained to you why I don't contact my father. Have you any idea how you're making me feel by doing this? You are actually saying to me that you believe my father and you don't believe me. Because if you believe what I've told you, you'd never be asking me this. You'd never be putting me in this position. And I said to them If it were someone who weren't related to me and I told you, you wouldn't have a problem with it would you? Dirty old man down the road? But because it's my father you can't cope with it can you? and they still can't cope with it and they still support him and don't support me which I actually find really hurtful. They don't accept it, they don't understand it, so I've given up really."

For Alice in this situation the ambiguity arises from the fact that her father-in-law has never said that he does not believe what has happened (as she expressed elsewhere in the interview) but he felt that her father still had the right to see his grandchildren. Even when Alice challenges her father-in137

law and his new wife they still refuse to see the problem they are creating. The ambiguity here is one of loyalty within family relationships. Alice's expectation that a simple explanation of her reasons for not having contact with her father should be enough to prevent any further pressure being placed on her is not fulfilled. Alice feels like she is in a position whereby no matter how much she explains within her own limits, she is never going to get her position accepted, but what her father-in-law wants as an explanation (what Alice describes as the detail) she does not want to give. Alice And I was not going to tell my father-in-law in any detail, which is what he wanted to know. He kept on and on and on. So I said I'm not going to go into detail with you. My father was abusive when I was young and I don't want him anywhere near my children.

Lisa described a different form of ambiguous response from her elder sister. This sister had left her mother's home before the abuse involving Lisa started. The abuse that Lisa suffered was complex in that she was not only abused by several of her mother's boyfriends but her mother also prostituted her to others. The elder sister left home before the stepfather who initiated the abuse came to live with Lisa's mother. Lisa I've talked to her about it but she's turned very hard, she's dealt with it in a completely different way, I talk about it and I'm quite emotional and sensitive and will do anything for anybody and I'm very honest. She's quite hard and quite, being honest, quite two-faced really and she's, she's put a bit of a barrier between herself and what's going on, she's blocked herself off from it she doesn't have anything to do with our Mum really. She'll see her about once or twice a year but erm she'll see it as though she hasn't got any relationship with my mum's husband now, she'll see it as though he abused me and mum had nothing to do with it because she can cope with that a lot easier than with knowing that my mum had things to do with it, 'cos she has a relationship with my mum whereas with mums husband she had nothing to do with him, she moved out before I moved in with them. She won't have anything to do with him and won't go to the house. Mum has to see my sister and my niece at Grandma's house; she won't go to mums house. So we have talked about it but she'll, sort of brush it under the carpet and not talk about it, a barrier really."

There is no suggestion that Lisa's sister disbelieves the disclosure of abuse. Rather Lisa's sister chooses to ignore part of what Lisa told her (that their mother was an abuser) and lays the blame on their step-father. However, her sister does not let her mother see her niece unless the meeting takes place at her grandmothers house. There is an ambiguity being played out at the level of reaction to disclosure. Lisa's sister does not want to believe or discuss that their mother is an abuser but also refuses to let her mother see her daughter unsupervised.

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Lisa and Ellie (who were both abused by women) pinpointed abuse by a woman as a key factor in ambiguous responses from others. Ellie talks about her friends not seeming to understand what she has told them. Ellie I think different people find different things harder to deal with, like, erm, I think that, erm, because her, my mum abused me as well as my dad and a lot of people find that incredibly hard to swallow, that a mother could abuse her child and, erm, I mean that is probably something that comes up time and again. They, people, will blank it, it'll be like they haven't actually heard it and they'll kind of ask questions like couldn't your mum do anything about the abuse? and stuff like and have you talked about it with your mum? and stuff like that. I don't know, if they really understood what I'd said then they wouldn't have actually said any of that. I've found a few times that people who I've told always seemed to say if my mum had been abusing me it was kind of a cry for help almost from, because of the physical abuse she was getting from my dad. And that it wasn't really abuse, it was, I've had that a few times that it wasn't really abuse if it was from your mum and, erm, that it was, I don't know, that it was maybe something not serious and not to make as big a fuss over."

Here, as with Lisa, the ambiguity arises from the mothers involvement in the abuse. Yet for Ellie this ambiguous response comes from friends rather than family. The apparent minimisation of the abuse by her friends because it was by a woman is not uncommon. Lisa too talked about this problem. Lisa I did get questions like, you know, what on earth did you do to your mum for her to do that? Why does she hate you so much? and that made me think why did my mum hate me so much because, you know, you have the idea about what a mum should be and what my mum was. Because I kept thinking it must be my fault because mums they give birth to you and they are supposed to love you from day one and they are supposed to look after you, and not only did my mum know what was going on with me she was helping and getting money from what was happening to me. I think the reason why people think it's strange is because they can't make sense of it because it's unusual really."

Ambiguous responses, therefore, appear to be connected with two factors. The first is a link between the perpetrator, the victim, and the listener, as in Lisa's, Alice's and Samantha's stories. The link between listener, victim, and perpetrator does not necessary need to be in terms of blood relational ties - for Alice it was the relationship between her father-in-law and his wife and her father / perpetrator, for Samantha it was the extra-marital affair between her mother and the perpetrator. The second factor (in an and / or relationship) is an unusualness to the story being told, such as abuse by a woman, as in Lisa's and Ellie's stories. In total eleven instances of disclosure were coded as ambiguous / no response which represents 13% of all disclosures discussed. Most often this sort of response was received from family members. Six instances of ambiguous response came from family members, which represents 55% 139

of all ambiguous responses. Four such responses were received from friends (36% of ambiguous responses), and the remaining 9% (1 response) came from a partner. 6.8 Critical of Disclosure

Several of the participants related stories of their disclosure being criticised by others. Some of these criticisms were based on beliefs about the nature of disclosure and what it represented. Others related to beliefs about what possible effect disclosure might have on the speaker. Ellie related an example of such criticism. In her written piece Ellie commented upon one of her first disclosures when aged about sixteen. Ellie I tried to mention it to the pastor's wife at my church. I said that I thought I might have been sexually abused but that it wasn't from my father. She stopped me there and pointed out Genesis Chapter 9 Verse 20 to 27 41. The pastor's wife compared my situation to this and told me that I was to pray with her about it once in the vaguest possible terms and then not mention it to anyone else ever again.

Ellie's does justify the pastor's wife's response by saying that she "had shared a flat with my mum for a year just after they were students and I would hope that any of my housemates would think twice if anyone said that of me". She does however also say that the response she got made her "even more confused about what had happened and whether I was making a big deal out of nothing. or indeed whether I was going mad as my mother always claimed I was". The basis of the criticism is not clear: however, the implication from the story of Noah to which Ellie was referred suggests that the pastor's wife viewed the disclosure as akin to gossiping or publicly embarrassing Ellie's mother in the way that Ham was deemed to have done to Noah. Ellie The implication(s) would be me gossiping about someone or quite seriously spreading rumours about someone that weren't true. The only way she could kind of take it in I suppose was thinking that what I was actually talking about was saying that my mum had done something like that [the Noah story] to me as a sixteen year old instead of, of as a tiny child quite badly abusing me. I think that was the only explanation she could think of for what was going on so she basically said to kind of not tell anyone else and not even to talk to her about it ever again.

The view of this disclosure as gossip (i.e. idle talk) is interesting in light of the derivation of gossip, which in an early form also meant to give name to or sponsor (OED). Thus although
41

Genesis Chapter 9 (figures in brackets relate to verse numbers) (20): Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. (21) He drank some of the wine and became drunk, and he lay uncovered in his tent. (22) And Ham, the father of Ca'naan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. (23) Then Shem and Ja'pheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father; their faces turned away, and they did not see their father's nakedness. (24) When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him. (25) He said "Cursed be Ca'naan; lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers." (26) He also said "Blessed by the Lord my God by Shem and let Ca'naan be his slave. (27) May god make space for Japheth and let him live in the tents of Shem and let Ca'naan be his slave."

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gossip in modern usage is a pejorative term of condemnation for idle chatter and is synonymous with spreading rumours, earlier usage has a more complex derivation including the power of naming (from godsibb meaning godparent). The patriarchal power of sponsorship (transfer of name) is subverted in this case to also give a similar conferment of power to a process of naming an act. In Ellie's case the response of implying her actions are gossip by use of the Biblical reference is, perhaps unwittingly, appropriate, in that Ellie was using the power of naming. However, that said, the pejorative way in which the implication of gossiping was operationalised is clear. Another example of the criticism of disclosure comes from Lisa's testimony. Lisa related to me the story of her disclosure to a friend at University. This followed a time where a previous disclosure to a male friend at University had led to abusive, sexually harassing telephone calls from the man. Lisa When I came here I sort of wanted people to know and I'm not quite sure what that's about really. I appreciate its a normal environment and it's normalised, it's the most normal environment I've been used to and I, I told people and then I got these phone calls and then had people saying to me You should really be careful who you tell because you're not friends with them all and one particular person said this to me. You should be showing who you are for what you are now and not for what's happened to you and you should just be a healthy student who works, who's doing well at college and not with all the baggage and it's made me think about that really. To start with I was a bit angry, I thought well it is part of me and I can't get rid of it, but this person who told me this is quite a strong character and I started thinking, well yes she may be right. It didn't get me into, it didn't help this situation when I had these phone calls from this bloke and are people thinking, you know, this person said people are, you shouldn't want to be pitied and thats not why I tell people, to be pitied, but that's what this friend said to me that, erm, If you tell people, people are going to pity you and say oh haven't you done well at this University because of this rather than seeing, like most people, oh she's at University, you know, she's getting two two's, two one's whatever and doing well. People are going to think Oh she's been through all this and she's still got to University, she's been through all this and yet she's doing well."

Here it seems clear that the basis for the criticism of disclosure is the perception that the disclosure is then responsible for a change in the way that people see the speaker. In particular, by disclosing the speaker somehow differentiates themselves from the perception of a normal person, and this means that Lisa's achievements are reassessed as more remarkable for it (see discussion of stereotypes below). The friend here suggests that disclosures by Lisa may mean that people see her achievements against a backdrop of her childhood experiences and that this is, somehow, problematic. What I think is happening here is that Lisa's friend is advising against disclosure, because by disclosing, but still achieving, Lisa is actively challenging the stereotypes of a woman who has experienced childhood sexual violences. This challenge makes her achievements, in light of the stereotypes, all the more remarkable. 141

Ellie too had a similar response from a friend at University. In this case Ellie had disclosed to two friends together (the friends were a couple at the time of disclosure). Ellie I don't remember very much about her initial reaction. All I remember about what [the male friend] said was that he said, he told me not to tell anyone else because it would really change their view of me. It wasn't, it was a warning I suppose if I wanted to actually do what I wanted to do at University and be respected, I suppose, and I shouldn't tell anyone else about it. Erm, and at the time I thought it was just him being male and that was the way he acted generally but, that he didn't normally talk about his feelings anyway to most people, but I suppose looking back I can see that it has had an effect definitely."

Here the basis for the warning is the listener's view that disclosing sexually abusive experiences in childhood will lessen the respect from others towards Ellie. Just as the warning from Lisa's friend was that disclosure would make people think differently of her, so the same warning here is given to Ellie. Moreover both reactions imply to a greater or lesser degree that the reactions of others are somehow the responsibility of those disclosing (this is discussed in Chapter 7). Responses that are critical of the disclosure appear to be connected with one of two factors. The first is that they are reliant on what could be classified as dogmatic identities, that is those identities which create their own credo. In these interviews this would include a Christian identity. These reactions tend to relate to a conflict between the prevailing understandings of the dogmatic identities and the disclosure itself. For Ellie's disclosure to the pastor's wife this meant that she had brought the pastor's wife's credo as a Christian (who could, perhaps, not countenance other Christians committing sexual violence) into question. The second factor linked to responses critical of disclosure connects to issues of perceived identity in relation to women who have experienced childhood sexual violences. In particular they seem to relate to cultural narratives about the inability of women who have experienced childhood sexual violence to cope in later life, about them being damaged and forever connected with the childhood violence in a way which makes them unable to move on. These perceptions of identity from others relate closely to the cultural narratives and a belief that these stereotypes cannot be challenged individually (if at all). Ellie's story about the response of her male friend and Lisa's story about the response of her female friend certainly seems to match this idea. In total four instances of responses critical to the disclosure were discussed by participants (5% of all instances). Relatives and partners constituted one instance each and friends accounted for the other two instances.

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6.9

Macho / Ill-informed Responses

The macho response was most evident in reactions from male partners of women who had experienced child sexual violence (80% of all instances of disclosure to partners, 43% of all instances of macho / ill-informed responses). All the women talked of present or past heterosexual partners although no question was asked as to their current sexual identification. The combination of ill-informed responses and macho responses arises as they were closely linked, both being based on inaccurate perceptions of sexual violence. A macho response is based on hegemonic masculine identities. Macho responses are based on two key cultural narratives of sexual violence: the sexual violence victim as childlike and in need of protection, and the crime of sexual violence as deserving vengeance42. Silvia relates her experience of telling two partners over her life-course. Silvia I've told my son's father and my current boyfriend. Both of them reacted very similarly, wanting to beat the shit out of my father. I was kind of pleased by the level of emotion and anger they had about what had happened to me, but my father being beaten up is the last thing I would want. Both of them clearly find the whole child abuse thing painful and difficult to think or talk about.

It is worth noting that professionals are not immune to making macho responses to disclosures of childhood sexual violences. Lisa Another teacher that I told when they noticed that I'd been quite withdrawn and staying behind after school and things like that and also I think that my RE teacher must have said something about my behaviour or something and he - it was a bloke and he said to me, the Head of Year, he said Well you know, he probably didn't mean it, he must have been drunk or something. And he was making excuses for his [Lisa's stepfather's] behaviour so, that sort of set me back a bit really. On the one hand I was sort of getting some concern [from the female RE teacher] and then he just reinforced my own views about what was going on, just that I deserved it, all that, you know that it wasn't really my step-dad's fault it was just something he had, he had some problems. And so that took away the seriousness of it and that, the hurt I was going through, it was just he was drunk or something. He was just like we men stick together and I know that's a bit sexist but he was sort of saying, you know, he could be drunk or something, he could be wound up, he could be stressed, he could have been anything as if these were excuses for what happened. Anything but he was a complete pig and did that to you and shouldn't have done."

For Lisa the minimising of the sexual violence she experienced by a man is interpreted as being part of the chivalric code of masculinity ("we men stick together"). In this case it is not the sexual violence per se which constitutes an expression of masculinity. It is the minimisation of the sexual
42

Demonstrations in several areas of the country (most notably the Paulsgrove Estate, Portsmouth) in 2000 following the disappearance of Sarah Payne showed the level of retribution some members of the public are willing to carry out in response to the sexual abuse of children. In this instance this included harassing innocent residents on suspicion that they were abusers.

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violence and its excusing which is perceived as part of hegemonic masculinity and in particular as part of patriarchal culture and the silencing of women. Another more complicated example came from Lucy. She talked of a disclosure to a male teacher but the response was coded as being a non-professional relationship because of its precise nature. Lucy It's complicated really because there was a real sexual chemistry there, we enjoyed each other's company and nothing physical happened but there was such a strong bond between us which was a real adult sexual and emotional attraction. He was a teacher and as such never broke the boundaries of professionalism but at the same time our relationship was charged with this tension.

Here Lucy is talking about engaging in a relationship that she remembers as being suffused with adult sexual overtones (Lucy was around 15 years old at the time). She remembers it as nonabusive and she also said in personal conversation that she enjoyed the tension and ambiguity as much as she thinks the teacher involved did. Lucy The first time I told someone it was a teacher I had been very close to. I think he knew I wanted to tell him something quite serious and for about two weeks he either didn't have time to talk or we kept missing each other when I was trying to get a quiet time to talk with him. In the end we agreed to meet one morning before School started. I sat down and all I managed to say was When I was younger there was this man who lived next door and he, he I couldn't say anymore. The teacher finished the sentence with abused you and then put his head in his hands. There was silence for minutes and then he said Leave it with me and walked out. I had wanted someone to say something to me that actually meant something rather than walk away from me. At the moment I told him I saw the realisation dawn on his face and I realised I had damaged our relationship - you could see the disappointment and the fear on his face. Previously to me telling him we had got on really well and I thought he had respect for me, I saw that respect disappear when I told him. The next time I saw him was in a corridor, he said to me I can't deal with it, I've told your Head of Year, you have to go and see her now and he walked away. Our friendship was never the same after that, I thought he was someone I could trust and talk to and in the end he passed the buck because he saw an image of me he had created disappear.

It is obviously very tempting to try and assign motivation to this response in light of Lucy's comments about their relationship. However motivation is not necessarily the basis for understanding responses to disclosure. Lucy in personal conversations had suggested that the teacher's response in this case was connected to his sense of their relationship as one that was safely, but excitingly, sexual. Her suggestion, that the disclosure somehow disrupted his heterosexual masculine involvement with her, is an interesting one because it suggests that disclosure of prior experience of sexual violence somehow impacts upon a sexual relationship. Interestingly the nature of disclosure as storytelling about sexual experience was also raised by Claudette. 144

Claudette:

"In intimate thing. It's like, you know, I wouldn't go around saying My boyfriend and me did this last night but when you're disclosing in effect you're almost doing the something like that, I can almost see them picturing it when I say it".

However, it is the emotionality in Lucy's comments that are most striking in this instance. She says that she thinks an image of her disappeared for the teacher and therefore he was obviously emotionally shaken when she made her disclosure. Lucy felt betrayed by the response of the teacher because she felt the relationship was engaged in heterosexual interplay in a non-threatening way. Her disclosure suddenly seemed to make that engagement more risky and therefore the teacher walked away from their interactions. Lucy's description of the moment of disclosure illustrates the intense emotionality of the situation. Lucy I sat down and all I managed to say was When I was younger there was this man who lived next door and he, he I couldn't say anymore. The teacher finished the sentence with abused you and then put his head in his hands. There was silence for minutes and then he said Leave it with me and walked out. At the moment I told him I saw the realisation dawn on his face and I realised I had damaged our relationship - you could see the disappointment and the fear on his face.

There are many interpretations of the teacher's response, however specifically it is the interplay between the heterosexual relationship, masculine identity, and disclosure that are most interesting. The heterosexual relationship appears to have been altered by Lucy's disclosure, yet for Lucy nothing had changed. The knowledge of the sexual violence that she had had throughout their interactions, when disclosed, abruptly closed down those exchanges between her and the teacher. By sharing the knowledge, in effect, Lucy unwittingly altered the nature of the relationship. It is possible that the teacher's interactions with Lucy were based on the stereotype that teenage girls are sexually budding and yet innocent and Lucy's disclosure altered the perception of her identity away from this cultural narrative and into a narrative about the knowing and seductive abuse victim. This reaction was based on a perception of Lucy's changed identity and how the teacher involved related to that. The identity of someone who has experienced sexual violence has taken on an exclusive and monolithic identity within cultural narratives - whatever else the woman is seen as, she is also characterised first and foremost as a survivor of childhood sexual violences. The destruction of her image as the perfect teenager and replacement of it as a victim of sexual violences and therefore a knowing teenager may be the cause of the teacher's reaction. However, ill-informed responses are not limited to these macho responses. Both Alice and Ellie discussed other types of ill-informed reactions. Ellie continued her discussion of the disclosure to

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two friends (part of which we looked at earlier in relation to the male friend's response) to talk about the response by her female friend. Ellie It did change the way she sees me in the long-term though. She seems to use what I've been through as her trump card to make her better than me. If we ever argue or I have a grievance against her she always brings it out and says well you do transfer your upset at your parents onto other people don't you? [When Ellie tried to talk about this phenomenon with her friend] she put it down to my being paranoid because of feelings of inferiority caused by my parents. Nothing I could say could convince her otherwise."

The stereotype in use is that of a victim fixated on their past and unable to relate to others in any way except through the prism of their victimisation. For Ellie this means that her friend interprets her every action through the knowledge of her previous victimisation. The use of this knowledge as a trump card suggests an attempt at resilencing Ellie because of the knowledge that the friend has about her past. In fact it suggests that Ellie is deemed to have no reply to whatever is said precisely because she has disclosed the sexual violence. Claudette also talked about an ill-informed response made by a partner. Claudette When I told him he just didn't know how to deal with it he was just like Oh right OK. He was really uncomfortable with it and not supportive, he just couldn't get to grips with it, he just felt that you know Oh it happened to you, you've just got to get on with it and just now shut it away and just like plod on. Nothing, I couldn't talk to him about it."

Claudette here identifies the response of being told to move on as ill informed. Alice, too, talked about a similar reaction from a friend. In this instance Alice had asked the friend who she first disclosed to (discussed in the Empathic section) to tell a group of mutual friends what was on her mind and the response of one member of the group was discussed by Alice at some length. Alice Now this man is the dearest, he's a lovely bloke, he would do anything for anyone that guy and he's very good at protecting people and looking after people. He was furious, he wanted to go and kill my father and you know all this sort of stuff and anyway when we finally got together again and I was there a week or two later he said something like You've now got to put this behind you, you've just got to put this behind you, there's no need to go to counselling, you just need to forgive your parents and all the rest of it, just get on with your life and put it behind you. Now I know that man really well and we're still really close and I know the motivation was he couldn't cope with it and he really wanted to help me but it was the worst thing he could have done really."

In Alice's example we see the coming together of the two elements of this type of response; an initially macho response followed by an ill-informed response of telling Alice to put the sexual violence behind her (dictating the changes she should make). 146

Common to all these instances of ill-informed responses to disclosure is that they dictate to the speaker what they should do. For Ellie it was that she should stop the transference from her parents to her friends which the friend involved assumed was happening and for both Alice and Claudette it is that they should just forgive and forget and move on. The imperative here to change one's own way of thinking about the sexual violence is the key factor in the view of the speakers. 6.10 Disbelief / Bewilderment

Disbelief and bewilderment may appear to be an unusual combination of responses but they are based on similar ideas - they come, in different ways, from an unwillingness to countenance sexual violence as part of the listeners own lives. At one end of the scale this may be connected with contextual factors such as age. Lucy gives an example of this discussing disclosure to two of her friends. Lucy I told them because they had been really good friends throughout the whole school thing. We used to spend almost every evening together so one day I just said I wanted to explain what had been going on. I just told them what was happening and why. They were silent for a while and then we went back to what we were doing. It was strange but I hadn't asked them for anything. They both said they were there for me if I wanted afterwards. I think they were just shocked and confused.

Contextually both Lucy and her friends were about fifteen years of age and, as Lucy's exploration of the instance shows, the disclosure was purely in terms of explaining what had been going on. Another example comes from Ellie who talked about telling a friend of hers from University. Ellie I told her about my parents abusing me just before the end of the first year. I thought that it was affecting me a lot at that time and I wanted her to know what was going on to avoid her becoming confused at why I was acting strangely. She was a but shocked when I told her and repeated what I'd said back to me, almost in disbelief."

Bewilderment can be viewed as an understandable response to disclosure because the listener in most circumstances does not know what is going to be said. However, in Ellie's story above, the bewilderment shades into a position of disbelief, as Ellie says "almost in disbelief". The connection between the two responses becomes clearer here. Bewilderment may be understood in terms of shock and the unexpectedness of the disclosure, but disbelief makes a connection to an intransigence towards a personal understanding of childhood sexual violence as something which is common enough to be part of the lives of the people the listener knows. Alice discussed an incident that suggests a dichotomy between a level of appreciation that sexual violence happens, and the personal challenge of it. Alice was taking a vocational course related to 147

her work and she had disclosed her experience of childhood sexual violence to the whole of her student peer group during one session. Alice The course is based on groups and groupwork and we had to share bits of ourselves and it took me a long time because there is a lot of that I will share with others but a big chunk that I won't or I have to be very safe to do that. And I took a chance, I took a chance in the group really and just said Well actually because the subject was related to my background and I said Well, actually that's the kind of background I come from and it was a real mixture, partly shock for folks in the group and there wasn't a response for a minute. One person looked very tearful and one or two others tended to, sort of, you could tell they weren't, they didn't know how to respond, they were gobsmacked and there was some compassion and a bit of pity I think. You know seeing a group of fourteen people, erm, and no-one wanted to talk to me about it. One or two people said Oh you were very brave to say that in the group but no-one actually wanted to talk about it."

Here Alice highlights a contradiction - the course was discussing abuse and yet when Alice disclosed "no-one wanted to talk". Despite the acceptance on one level (it was part of the course and Alice did not say anyone had dismissed the idea that abuse happened), when the discussion becomes personal there is a tendency to not discuss the issue and to not acknowledge it. As a form of resistance silence from listeners can be powerful. The only response Alice received was that she was "brave to say that", suggesting that talking about sexual violence is still seen as taboo. Something that breaks an imperative to silence and also makes clear that despite an admiration for the bravery of talking about her history the perception of taboo remains no-one wanted to talk to me about it though. Another form of resistance to disclosure was discussed by both Elizabeth and Tiha who talked of instances where they were met by resistance in the form of disbelief to the disclosures they were making. Elizabeth I decided I wanted to know if the same thing had happened to my sister - although I doubted it as she was younger than me. When I told her she said, I don't believe you. That was it - she has never mentioned it again. I became more and more unhappy about it [the abuse] and I suppose after the abuse started I told my parents and they didn't believe me and then I kept on, I was also running away from school a lot at the time which was, they weren't very happy with that. I mean that was kind of in the end why I told them because they kept on asking me why I was running away from school and so, and so, I kept on and eventually they did believe me and they went to the Headmaster and the Headmaster turned round and said not only did he not believe me but it couldn't have happened because I wasn't pretty enough."

Tiha

In both circumstances here Elizabeth and Tiha talk about immediate reactions of disbelief from relatives and all the openly disbelieving reactions did come from relatives in the sample of 148

disclosures made within non-professional relationships. Samantha told the only story of a relative reacting in a way that was classified as bewildered and that disclosure was to a relative by marriage (her sister-in-law). Samantha She had come to visit us and I think I'd definitely been drinking but I think really I was trying to explain to her I was angry with my parents, I was thirty, I was over thirty, and I was still angry with them and because she had married into our family and I think maybe had a child, I think I was still in process of trying to get people to understand, why I might be angry with my parents and my prior history, what the family was to me, how I related to the family and why I might not see things the same way as she did. And I think in a way I did want to shock her out of her complacency as well. Possibly. I seem to remember that we were sitting on the doorstep here I think I was trying to tell her a number of things, it wasn't just that [the history of abuse] that I was trying to get over to her, I was trying to say to her what my parents were like and that was just an example. And can you remember her reaction? I think she didn't want to know that, I'm sure she didn't want to know. I felt that she felt so out of her depth with me, I'm sure it was a side of life that she didn't want to know about I think."

LL Samantha:

Here the lack of family history on the part of the sister-in-law (who married into Samantha's family) becomes the key element in the disclosure. Samantha does not give much detail here except to say that she thinks it was something her sister-in-law did not want to know. The key idea here of an unwillingness to countenance is apparent. Samantha did finish the account by saying that she had become a friend with her sister-in-law after the disclosure. There is an ambiguity in this disclosure because of Samantha's lack of detail about the reaction (Samantha did also say during the interview "I think I'm not very helpful, partly because my memory is not good to be honest anymore") however the explication of bewilderment is clear. Samantha's sister-in-law, having married into the family, is suddenly told a family history which includes the fact that her new parents-in-law did not react to protect their daughter when they were told that she was being sexually abused. Although bewildered responses are often understandable in terms of the contextual factors relating to the disclosure, it is the connection with disbelieving responses which make them of great interest here. The shading becomes apparent in Ellie's story (above) in that an extremely bewildered response becomes "almost" disbelief for Ellie. The perception of the response here becomes important, from the information gathered we cannot comment on how the listener thought they had reacted, however the idea of impression management becomes important precisely because a reaction can affect the speaker. 6.11 Pity

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The participants discussed elements of receiving pitying responses in more detail than any other response type, mostly as a pervasive and unwelcome response to disclosure. However, it was also almost always discussed in connection to other forms of negative response and rarely as a response type on its own (hence the low frequency in Table 14). Only two instances of disclosure reaction could be solely categorised as pitying but respondents returned to the theme of pity many times. Alice, in particular, talked powerfully at some length about her feelings on pity. Alice For me the prejudice is pity, I can't stand it. Oh you poor thing, I couldn't stand it. I guess to me pity is quite a destructive thing. I've had the odd person say something like Are you alright? after someone's been talking about something that's been very close to home for me and I'm sure the motivation is that they're actually trying to care for me, but it feels very much like Well I don't know if Alice can hear this. You know? And I hate it. You see this person as having been abused and you don't talk about this in front of them or you don't do that or you don't you know. I've had somebody say to me Oh I saw this film, so-and-so a while ago, but you wouldn't have liked it, it would probably have upset you."

Pity in this case is not the definition of the use of pity as a noun: a feeling or emotion of tenderness aroused by the suffering, distress, or misfortune of another, and prompting a desire for its relief, compassion, sympathy (Oxford English Dictionary), but rather that of its use as a verb: to feel pity for; to compassionate, commiserate, be sorry for (in modern use sometimes implying slight contempt for a person on account of some intellectual or moral inferiority attributed to him [sic] or a ground or cause for pity; a subject of condolence or (more usually) simply of regret; a regrettable fact or circumstance; a thing to be sorry for. (Oxford English Dictionary, emphasis mine) What becomes clear in this definition is that the pitying response is not limited to the event (of childhood sexual violence) but is also applied to the person. For Alice this feeling of regret is prejudice43. The experience is part of Alice's history, part of herself, and therefore the regret cannot only apply to the event but also to part ofwho Alice is. In effect it is not what has happened that becomes regretted, but what Alice herself (and any other woman who has experienced childhood sexual violence) now represents. Debbie, too, talked of the experience of pitying reactions. After her disclosure to her family whilst in hospital her mother then informed the neighbours at her parental home of what Debbie had said. Explaining that her mother wanted everyone to know because she wanted them to think this is what he'd done to my daughter and she said it was to protect the children now. However for

43

Prejudice - "Preconceived opinion; bias or leaning favourable or unfavourable; prepossession; when used absolutely, usually with unfavourable connotation. An instance of this; a feeling, favourable or unfavourable, towards any person or thing, prior to or not based on actual experience; a prepossession; a bias or leaning to one side; an unreasoning predilection or objection."

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Debbie the experience of this outing by her mother meant that she began to feel judged by her neighbours. Debbie [They made me feel] like I was dirty, like I'd done something wrong. It was my fault what had happened. They looked at you with these like sorrowful eyes, you know, it was horrible. Some people would come up to me with that look of pity in their eyes and say sorry. Just the way people reacted to me made me feel like I had done something wrong, not him."

For Debbie then this response of pity made her feel blamed for what had happened. Lisa also talks about the effect of pitying responses. Lisa This person [a friend] said people are, you shouldn't want to be pitied and that's not why I tell people, to be pitied but that's what this friend said to me that, If you tell people, people are going to pity you and say oh haven't you done well at University because of this rather than seeing, like most people, oh she's at University, you know, she's getting good marks and doing well. People are going to think Oh she's been through all this and she's still got to University. And I don't want people to pity me and I don't want people to think like that at all. I'd hate to think that people are doing that."

Other participants discussed these other aspects of pity, identified by Alice. For example Alice talks of the protective reaction which was also mentioned by Claudette when talking of her disclosure to her siblings. Claudette The one thing I regret is that I believe my siblings now treat me in an almost pitying way. I feel almost as if they are subtly treating me with kid gloves. They don't argue with me the way they do amongst themselves occasionally. Perhaps it is just because I am not an argumentative person. I have not married although I have had long-term relationships. I am happiest by myself and I believe they pity me and think this is an effect of the abuse. However I know that it is just my nature, I am very independent and enjoy doing things on my own, even though I have a large supportive network of friends. Therefore I feel that I am seen as an object of pity and that is something I am not happy about because I am truly a happy, contented person."

Most participants discussed elements of the pity reaction, although many of them did not discuss specific examples of it from their own disclosures. Pity is, therefore, perhaps more part of the everyday experience of disclosure than an explicit response type in its own right. However, as it is so strongly felt that pity is a large part of many negative responses, its inclusion is warranted here as a separate response type. It is interesting to note that it is the disempowerment involved in being pitied which appears to be most negative for women who have experienced childhood sexual violence. 6.12 Abusive

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All abusive responses share one characteristic: the removal or attempted removal of choice from the speaker by the listener. They all relate to the speaker being compelled or being coerced into doing something that they otherwise would not have done. In many ways the discussion of abusive responses within non-professional relationships and within professional relationships could have occurred together, however, the betrayals within non-professional relationships are different to those within professional relationships. In the continuation of the story about disclosure (in the Empathic Responses section) to her friend and housemate, Debbie highlighted coercion being used to create a situation of blackmail. Debbie In the beginning she was very understanding, very sympathetic, but she was a control freak and by the end of the time I spent in the flat with her she was threatening to tell my parents. She scared the life out of me. I was so scared, I was angry at her to think she held that over me, she blackmailed me. I think she's quite sick to hold it against me. It was a really cruel thing to do, to hold something like that against you."

Another example of coercion came from Lisa who discussed two abusive events linked by disclosure. Lisa I made friends with this bloke at University and told him a bit about what happened to me in the past and then I got abusive phone calls, endless phone calls about it. What he'd like to do to me and all the sorts of things I'd told him had happened to me. He was ringing me up saying I know you like it, you know, I want to abuse you stupid and things like that. And when my ex-fianc found out that I'd been abused he got more and more into what had gone on with me. This is when our relationship changed. It started with him just controlling me and then it became physical then I got beaten up and things by him. He threw me down the stairs, hit me in the face."

Revictimisation is discussed as a sequelae to sexual violence and much research has been conducted into the risk factors for revictimisation, for example frequency and duration of sexual violence, penetration or forcefulness of sexual violence, and the perpetrators degree of relational significance to the child44. Yet here Lisa makes plain that it was the disclosure, the act of talking about the sexual violence, which prompted further abusive experiences from two separate men. The mimicry of her disclosure by the man at the University who made abusive telephone calls, and the ex-fianc's characterisation as getting more and more into what had gone on with me highlights that talking about the sexual violence appears to be a trigger for further abuses by men. In the literature on survivor revictimisation the role of disclosure as a prompt for, or cause of, further victimising experiences is absent. In fact whether disclosure is an important factor for
44

See Beitchman, Zucker, Hood, DaCosta, and Akman 199, Carey 1997, Elliot, 1994.

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revictimisation has not been explored. Conceivably Lisa's experiences may be coincidence (that she disclosed to both men and that both men victimised her), but the close link between the disclosure and the further victimisation makes this argument of coincidence unlikely given that both men used the information from the disclosure as the basis of their revictimisation of Lisa. Abusive responses in non-professional relationships are relatively uncommon (accounting for 15% of responses in non-professional relationship). Largely this relates to the fact that within nonprofessional relationships the power balance tends to be more equal unless the listener decides to explicitly use coercion or force against the speaker. However, as we shall see later, within professional relationships, where there is an existent power imbalance between the listener / professional and speaker / non-professional, abusive responses are much more common. 6.13 Disclosures within Professional Relationships

Disclosures within professional relationships were coded separately because of issues of responsibility in these relationships. In most (but not all cases) disclosures within professional relationships are made for specific reasons: to secure intervention, to shed light on a problem, or to try and deal with the past (for example with psychologists). Coding for disclosures within professional relationships was simpler with three response types: understanding responses, disbelieving or inaction responses, and abusive responses. The ten participants discussed thirty-one instances of disclosure within professional relationships, which accounts for a third of all instances discussed. Of those thirty-one instances twelve (39%) were instances of an understanding response, another twelve were instances of non-understanding responses whilst the remaining seven (22%) were instances of disbelieving responses. The three response types do not map exactly onto the response types for disclosures within nonprofessional relationships, but they do share some similarities. For example, the understanding response type is closely associated with the empathic response within disclosure to nonprofessionals. A disbelieving professional response is relatively self-explanatory, whilst an nonunderstanding professional response covers a range of responses, from abusive acts following the disclosure to simply not showing any comprehension of what was being said to them. A local survey of survivors carried out for the North Yorkshire Mental Health Co-ordinating Group (Hooper, Koprowska and Milsom 1999) found that across a range of professionals the responses (in terms of helpfulness) varied considerably (see Figure 3 below). In particular we see here that General Practitioners (51% helpful, 19% not helpful), Psychologists (50% helpful, 21% 153

not helpful), Psychiatrists (41% helpful, 50% not helpful), and Social Workers (64% helpful, 27% not helpful) all have a mixed response in terms of helpfulness. Although limited by geographical scope this survey shows that not all responses to disclosure of childhood sexual violence within professional relationships are well handled.

Figure 3 - Respondent views on helpfulness of professionals responses From Hooper et al. 1999 p.19 6.14 Understanding Responses within Professional Relationships

Nearly 40% of disclosures within professional relationships received understanding responses. The elements previously discussed as being necessary for an empathic response, within non-professional relationships (showing respect, genuine emotional response and making space for the disclosure) are similarly needed for an understanding response within professional relationships. As Coulborn Faller (1993) argues, despite education and training, which specifies how to perform our professional roles, each of us has personal reactions (p.10).

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Hooper, Koprowska, and Milsom (1999) also categorise some of the types of factors which contextualised a positive experience with professionals for their respondents; these included: the personal approach of the worker; the knowledge and experience of the worker; time and encouragement to talk; responsiveness; negotiation and choice.

These factors relate closely to the three preconditions for an empathic response in disclosures within non-professional relationships, that also form the basis of the understanding responses within professional relationships. A potential model for understanding these response factors is below. The Personal Approach of the Worker
The Knowledge and Experience of the Worker

Making Time to Talk Time and Encouragement

Genuine Emotional Reaction

Showing Respect Negotiation and Choice

to talk Figure 4 - Synthesis Model of the Factors for an Understanding / Helpful Response within Professional Relationships (elements in italics refer to Hooper, Koprowska, and Milsom's factors, non-italicised elements refer to factors from this study). In all the cases of an understanding response discussed below at least some of these elements were present in the disclosure instance discussed by the participants. In many it is clear to see that most of these factors are present. psychologist. Tiha She was just, I mean apart from being very supportive, she asked me the questions that I knew I needed to ask myself that I couldn't ask myself either because it was too close or because, you know, I wasn't clear enough what I needed to ask myself. [After some sessions on how Tiha felt about herself] the psychologist actually turned round and looked at me and said And you've achieved all you've achieved despite carrying that weight around with you and then we looked at each other and started to laugh as weight is a physical issue for me too For example Tiha discussed an instance of disclosure with a

Here we can clearly see some of the elements discussed above. The psychologist made space for Tiha to talk about her experiences of childhood sexual violence and the way she felt about herself.

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She showed a genuine emotional reaction when they both make the same realisation (the laugh), and she shows obvious respect for Tiha as a person, through the approach she takes. Another example of an understanding reaction within a professional relationship, this time with a psychotherapist, came from Debbie. Debbie My psychotherapist has been brilliant, but they seem to be really reluctant to, the psychiatric system, to look at counselling and normally when you do get counselling, because psychologists and psychotherapists are in such demand you get twenty weeks and it's all supposed to be solved in twenty weeks. But it don't work like that. The psychotherapist I've got at the moment is not twenty weeks it's as long as I need her [] I had this psychotherapist for three years as a group psychotherapist so in the group I'd told them about two years ago [about the childhood sexual violence], so when I started one-to-one she knew. And she's been really helpful."

So here, although Debbie does not talk about what makes her psychotherapist so good, she does talk about feeling supported by her psychotherapist. Part of the issue she raises, however, relates to the creation of space (and in this case time) to talk about the experiences of childhood sexual violence. Alice, too, had received an understanding response from a counsellor that she saw at a voluntary organisation working specifically with childhood sexual violence. Alice I was met by a professional counsellor who knew what she was doing and her response was perfect in that she held eye-contact but she wanted to hear my story and that was so liberating and I guess it was really important for me that I knew what her background was and the first half an hour of the first meeting was me sort of going Why are you doing this? What's your qualifications? and you know, and I had to be really sure that this person could handle what I was going to say."

Again it is the making of space to hear the story which seems fundamentally important, alongside knowing the counsellors own reasons for working in the field (Hooper et al.'s Knowledge and Experience of the Worker). Lisa too wrote briefly about a psychologist she had seen. Lisa She went at my pace. I told her stuff in my own time. We looked at my flashbacks and what they meant to me. We looked at my inability to trust people. The psychologist became a friend to me.

Hooper, Koprowska, and Milsom (1999, p.20) also identified the ability to go at one's own pace as important to the time and encouragement to talk factor in a helpful approach by a professional. Here Lisa highlights it and the supportiveness of the help from the psychologist is apparent in this passage. However it was not just mental health professionals who were identified as being supportive respondents within professional relationships. For example Lisa talked about the RE teacher who 156

believed her and gave her the choice of what action would be taken about her disclosure of childhood sexual violence. Lisa I just went up to her and said that my step-dad had put his hands up my top and she was quite concerned and I was quite surprised by her reaction really because I hadn't had that reaction from anybody else so I was quite surprised she sort of believed me and wanted to do something about it [] I was in tears, I was on my own and she took me in another room, a comfier room and we sat down and she said Has he done it before? and I said No never and she said Well what should we do about this and I was going Nothing, nothing you know even though I was pleased that she, you know, said and was asking me questions and was therefore concerned. I was panicking that what might happen out of all this because I'd said something about my Mum and my step-dad. And I was trying not to panic really."

The concern shown to Lisa by this teacher is an example of the genuine emotional reaction, whilst the teachers questioning about what Lisa wanted to happen showed an ability to discuss Lisa's choices. Of course the decision to give the child, Lisa, a decision about whether and what action was to be taken is contentious. However the teacher did one important thing in this handing over of decision-making (which could be debated at length) in that having offered Lisa the choice she did abide by the decision Lisa made. The teacher had no reason to suspect that Lisa's disclosure did not fully explain the level and duration of the sexual violence she was experiencing. Ellie talked about her experiences of disclosure to a Social Worker for the NSPCC whilst she was trying to ensure that her sister did not experience the same forms of childhood sexual violence that she had. Ellie I went to the NSPCC and had an informal chat with one of the Social Workers there. They were great and advised me to leave it a few months until after my A Levels as it wouldn't make that much difference to my sister and if my Dad was violent it could mess up my exams.

Here again the negotiation and choice made available to Ellie is a central feature of her story of disclosure. Her disclosure was believed and she was advised to hold off making a more formal report for her own safety (advice which she took). Alice compared two instances of disclosure to General Practitioners, which contrasts understanding responses to non-understanding responses. Alice I did tell my GP. A new GP, I found myself desperately wanting a female GP. I couldn't have given a monkey what they were before, because I wouldn't have told them anyway but I really wanted female GP and I found this woman who was really nice, just heard about her or something, and I went to see her and over the years [prior to this] I've had an eating disorder, I've had a real bingeing and vomiting, I had a real problem. And we were talking about my weight and I thought I've got to tell this woman, I've got to take a chance because I look like somebody who can't be 157

bothered to go on a diet, you know, that's the picture that seems to emerge and it's got bugger all to do with diets, you know, so I said it, I just said it, I said you know Look I've been receiving counselling for sexual abuse in my past I do struggle with my eating. And she was fantastic, she became very quiet and listened and she said I will do anything I can to help you beat it, but I won't put any pressure on you. You tell me what you need. She was fantastic. I nearly fell of my seat, you know. I thought this is amazing somebody I can tell. I can remember telling a GP years ago and he was a very good doctor, a really nice chap and I can't remember how we got to talking about it but, I think I asked him a question related to that and he just looked at me and said If you'd like counselling for that I do understand, he said I understand it can still be really difficult. Oh and it was awful, I burst into tears, I didn't want to cry, I didn't know that I felt like that, it was awful, you know. But whatever it was that, in a way maybe it felt like he took control and was telling me that I needed counselling, whereas she didn't." In this story Alice explicitly compares the treatment she received from two GP's. The new GP offered both support and help but did so in a way that emphasised Alice's choice in the matter and offered her support personally ("I will do anything I can to help you beat it, but I won't put any pressure on you"). The previous GP however decided that Alice's experiences of childhood sexual violence automatically determined her need for counselling, and phrased this in a way which emphasised Alice's damaged goods status rather than her active status as a woman ("If you'd like counselling for that I do understand, I understand it can still be really difficult"). The two approaches differ precisely in terms of the three categories identified as being important in an empathic / understanding response. These are the genuine emotional response (the new GP's personal manner versus the old GP's detached manner); making space to talk (the new GP offering her personal support versus the old GP's suggestion of referral); and treating the speaker with respect (the new GP's acknowledgement of Alice as having the ability to determine what is right for her versus the old GP's suggestion that counselling is the only appropriate option). In terms of Hooper, Koprowska, and Milsom's factors for a helpful response the new GP fulfils their criteria: she responds in a personal way, encourages Alice to talk about what she needs, and emphasises negotiation and choice within her response. Silvia, too, talked about a disclosure to her GP that received an understanding response. Silvia I'd been seeing my doctor for quite a while before, before she asked me and also that, she was just such a good doctor. I'd had so many shitty doctors in the past plus she was a female doctor, she was one of the first female doctors that I'd actually had. I'd had such like bad experiences with doctors just being arsey and just dismissive and like I had a horrible experience when I was sixteen just after I left home with this doctor and he was always trying to give me a smear every time I came in and he really freaked me out and I'd had other really bad experiences as well and I really didn't trust doctors at all [] But she seemed really understanding and she seemed like really patient and she was a really nice person and she didn't seem at all threatening and you know she, and she actually asked me at the end of the day which 158

nobody else had done and which was like amazing. You know, and I, by that time I felt as well that I felt at that point that I was absolutely at the end of my tether, so I was ready to tell someone. You know, I was ready to open up to somebody a bit more because I was really thinking if I don't I was going to end up killing myself, I was really that bad. I don't know if she hadn't of asked me whether I would actually have been able to say anything to her, you know, I was so grateful. But I think at the same time, I think I was dropping hints to her, so, you know, but obviously she could have been a lot less perceptive than she was but obviously, I feel lucky that I got her rather than, rather than making me feel positive about the medical profession it makes me feel lucky that I got a good doctor." Here, Silvia's General Practitioner had asked whether Silvia had experienced sexual violence and in her written piece she elaborated on what had happened. Silvia She was really great - she just said to me, the first time I'd ever been asked, Did your father sexually abuse you when you were little? and when I said Yes she sorted out some therapy for me straight away with a service for women survivors. So this doctor and this therapist I had for a while were the first people I ever disclosed to.

The direct questioning that the General Practitioner put to Silvia made clear that there was space for Silvia to talk about her experiences of childhood sexual violence, and taking the step to ask Silvia whether it had happened encouraged Silvia to talk. At the same time the respect for Silvia is made clear by the fact that the General Practitioner had asked the question rather than making an assumption and that she organised a therapist at an appropriate referral service rather than through a general counselling referral service. In both Alice and Silvia's stories the General Practitioners were female whilst previous bad experiences had been with male GP's. Whether this trend is more generalizable is not clear. Ellie also talked about support received from members of her departmental team at University. Ellie I've also told my Department. I told my Supervisor and the Chair of the Board of Studies halfway through my first year. They were both really supportive, although I think they were really shocked to begin with. It has been so good to have people like them who believe in my ability to succeed in life.

Here Ellie foregrounds the support received from the members of her team to whom she had disclosed and particularly (against the backdrop of disclosures to friends, which had infantilised Ellie) also talks about their confidence in her abilities irrespective of her experiences of childhood sexual violence. Here Ellie's disclosure quite obviously asks for no intervention into her life but, rather (it would appear), asked for her situation to be considered if relevant. There is no action that her Supervisor or Chair of the Board of Studies could take which would ameliorate the situation. However their confidence in her reflects an understanding of childhood sexual violence as an experience within Ellie's life-course which does not determine her identity or future, unlike many of 159

the responses she discussed with disclosure within non-professional relationships (see previous sections). Of all the understanding responses to disclosures within professional relationships, five related to disclosures to mental health professionals (psychologists, psychotherapists, counsellors, or psychiatrists), three to disclosures to General Practitioners, two to disclosures to those involved in education (teachers, lecturers), and two to professionals within the legal aspects of the child protection system (Police, NSPCC Social Worker). In all the cases however, the factors highlighted in Figure One were consistent factors highlighted in the stories as told. In particular an overriding sense of being treated with respect was evident in the stories of understanding responses within professional relationships even where the disclosures were not made as requests for help. 6.15 Disbelief / Inaction in Response to Disclosures Made within Professional Relationships

Participants discussed seven instances of disclosure resulting in either a disbelieving response or inaction. Where inaction resulted the situation invariably involved disclosure with the intention of requesting help or intervention in the situation, and the majority were made during adolescence whilst the sexual violence was still happening. Disbelieving responses, however, occurred at any point over the life-course (both whilst the sexual violence was taking place and after it had stopped). Tiha, for instance, discussed the disbelieving response from the Headmaster of the school at which a teacher abused Tiha who was approached after repeated disclosures to her parents that were not believed. Tiha Eventually they took me to see the headmaster. By this time I was 17 [the abuse started when Tiha was about 14]. He not only did not believe me, he told me I was not pretty enough for the music master to want me in that way. My parents said they were very ashamed of me. I left the school and left home.

Here the Headmaster not only did not believe Tiha but using the rhetoric of childhood sexual violence as being akin to adult sexual interactions, he refuted Tiha's desirability as well (which had a doubly harmful effect on Tiha). Lisa, similarly, discussed her disclosure to her Head of Year after her disclosure to the teacher discussed above. She initially discussed this in her written piece and then went into more detail during her interview. Lisa I then had to see my Head of Year, who happened to be a man. I just sat dumb. He said I was over-reacting. He asked me if my step-dad was drunk. I was hurt by this comment. Does it make it alright if he was drunk? Well he said it might mean he didn't mean it, he may have got a bit carried away. I knew I had been abused by Mum and her boyfriends." (written piece) 160

Lisa

The Head of Year he said Well you know he probably didn't mean it, he must have been drunk or something. And he was making excuses for his [the stepfathers] behaviour. [] And so that took away the seriousness of it and the hurt I was going through, it was just he was drunk or something and you know, what do you expect, you know. He was just, I don't know, he was just like we men sticking together and I know that's a bit sexist but he was sort of saying you know he could be drunk or something, he could be wound up, he could have been stressed, he could have been anything. Anything but he was a complete pig and did that to you and shouldn't have done, really." (interview)

Here, although the abuse event is not denied in the way that Tiha's was, the seriousness of the event is denied and possible justifications are put forward for why it had happened. For Lisa, however, the impact was to deny her experience of what had happened and to silence her in future. Lisa finished her account by saying: "I then sort of thought very carefully about what I should say to anybody again really". Both Lisa and Tiha experienced disbelief at their experiences of childhood sexual violence but the differences are important. For Tiha the actual abuse acts were denied and she was told that it could not have happened. Lisa on the other hand was told that it may have happened but it was not serious and was perhaps a mistake or a result of extreme circumstances. Both responses however deny the experience of childhood sexual violence in a way that deters further disclosures. Similarly, whilst at school Alice disclosed the childhood sexual violence she was experiencing to a school counsellor. Alice first mentioned the incident in her written piece and then elaborates on it in her interview. Alice I used to describe to the counsellor the things that were happening to me, the things that were said, I told him more than enough without actually using the words sexual abuse. He chose to do nothing. I contacted him a couple of years ago, he said the reason for doing nothing was because he believed that if it ain't broke don't mend it. In other words I had a roof over my head so he felt it best to leave well alone. I never spoke of it again until two years ago. I was telling this guy, I wasn't graphically describing it but there it all was laid out in front of him, in glorious Technicolor and I contacted him a year or two ago. I found out where he was and I contacted him and you know I said Can you remember what I was like? and it was Oh yeah I remember you, what you did and I asked him Then can you tell me why you didn't do anything about that information? and do you know what he wrote back? I couldn't believe it, I still haven't brought myself to do anything about it I was so shocked, he said Well I believe in this philosophy of if it ain't broke don't mend it. I still can't get my head round that, I just cannot get my head round it."

Alice

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Here Alice discusses, in both her written piece and in the interview, the actions of the counsellor and, like Lisa, it was not the fact that sexually violent acts had taken place that was denied but the fact that this was a serious issue which needed intervention. Alice's response as a now adult woman with children of her own is to be stunned by the individual philosophy of the school counsellor, who acknowledged that he did know what was happening to her, but felt intervention was not the best option because (Alice surmises) she had a home. Lisa too talked about her experience of disclosure with a school counsellor. Lisa I eventually ended up with the college counsellor every day, every lesson. She was patronising. She talked to me as though I was stupid. She asked me if I was sure I was abused. This was exactly the response I dreaded. She kept ringing my father and breaching confidentiality.

Here Lisa too has a negative experience with a school counsellor in which the disbelief is expressed via questioning of her disclosure ("She asked me if I was sure I was abused"). Here the minimisation of the disclosure also takes place, as in earlier examples of this kind of response (Lisa's other experience with her Head of Year or Tiha's experience with her Headmaster), but in this case it takes place via its constant challenging by the counsellor. Ellie discussed an occasion when she made contact with her local authority Social Services department, following her interactions with the NSPCC social workers outlined above. Ellie I went to my local Social Services department. Eventually I saw my key worker and she said that she'd just sent a letter to my home address asking me to get in touch with then (my Mum usually reads all my post before I can get to it). The moment I said that my Mum sexually abused me but my father only physically abused us all she seemed to lose all respect for me and treated me like a child. I think she thought that I was messing her around or at best telling lies to cover up for my Dad sexually abusing me.

In this circumstance Ellie was hoping to ensure intervention to prevent further abuse of her younger sister rather than seeking intervention on her own behalf. However in this case it was the nature of the sexual violence being disclosed which caused the disbelieving reaction (see section below on sexual violences by women). In this case the disbelief prevented intervention being received by either Ellie or her sister. Elizabeth discussed an occasion when she disclosed to a community psychiatric nurse (CPN). Elizabeth A community psychiatric nurse I once had tried to tell me that lots of memories are falsely imprinted, so it was better not to dwell on it.

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This suggestion of disbelief without actually being explicit reveals a desire not to countenance sexual violence on the part of the listener, even where their professional role may make it inevitable that women will disclose to them (such as a CPN). Similarly Tiha recounted the story her when she had disclosed to her General Practitioner. Tiha When they registered me, and they registered and went through the life history thing and I did mention abuse but nothing ever, you know nothing was ever particularly said and she wasn't a particularly supportive doctor anyway. So I actually asked my doctor (much later) if there was someone that I could be referred to because I felt there were issues that need to be sort out, so she referred me."

In this instance Tiha's disclosure was not acknowledged at all by her General Practitioner and when Tiha wanted support she had to ask specifically for it. The difference between this instance of disclosure to a General Practitioner and that discussed by Alice above is striking. Both arise out of the same situation, registering with a new General Practitioner, however Alice's treatment and Tiha's differ significantly. Whereas Alice was offered support and help whilst her ability to choose was maintained, Tiha had her disclosure ignored. Of the seven disbelieving or inaction responses to disclosures within professional relationships two were made to teachers, two to educationally based Counsellors, one to a social worker, one to a community psychiatric nurse and one to a General Practitioner. The preponderance of disclosures which received this response were made whilst the sexual violence was still occurring (five out of seven instances). This raises important issues about the acknowledgement of responsibilities as regards professional relationships and ongoing childhood sexual violence. These five responses come from women of a variety of ages, from their twenties to their fifties, and therefore the argument cannot be made that they are biased due to their age. Certainly the stories of disclosure to teachers in this section told by Tiha and Lisa, or the stories of disclosure to education based Counsellors told by Alice and Lisa, are examples of pairs of disclosures separated by around thirty years or more and yet they have striking similarities. 6.16 Abusive Responses to Disclosures Made within Professional Relationships

Twelve instances of abusive responses to disclosures made within professional relationships were discussed by the participants in this study. Broadly they break down into three types: abuses within the education system; abuses within the mental health system; and abuses within the legal system. The education and mental health systems share certain characteristics; certainly the power to act in what is perceived to be the child / patient's interests without having to obtain their consent. Indeed, this aspect forms the basis of many of the abusive responses experienced by the participants of this study. The legal system shares this power in some aspects of its work. The fact that the victim is 163

not generally represented in criminal court hearings for example (where the prosecution represents the Crown), and can be silenced in civil hearings (for reasons such as being deemed incapable of their own representation by way of age). The adversarial nature of the legal system in the United Kingdom may also influence the abusive responses contained in this section, particularly for Debbie whose experience of being a witness in a criminal trial is below. In Lucy's cases it is the prevention of her being a witness in a compensation hearing that she marks as being abusive. It proved to be almost impossible to analyse these stories in any great depth. The abusive nature of the responses speak for themselves and any analysis could only reiterate the events as told by the participants, so for this section I intend to merely reproduce a few of the stories and conclude with some thoughts about them. It could be argued that some of the stories categorised above as inaction or disbelief, also constitute abusive experiences (for example Tiha's headmaster or Alice's school counsellor or Ellie's social worker), and I do not dispute that they straddle the two categories since inaction can become abuse in its own right. In fact, many of the stories told above were double coded as both disbelief / inaction and abusive. However the stories below all contain an additional factor which meant that the two categories could not be conflated. In the four stories below there are also separate instances of abusive behaviours, which are not necessarily linked to disbelief but rather, in cases like Lucy's Head of Year or Lisa's psychiatrist, the abuse is predicated on the fact that the disclosure is believed. Abuses within the Education System Both the stories relating to abusive responses within the education system in this section come from Lucy. This is because Lucy wrote about two occasions that had elements markedly different to the other abusive instances in education discussed in the above section. Lucy I went to my Head of Year and said that I wanted her to arrange a counsellor or something so I could sort myself out to tell my parents. Instead she locked the office door and rung my Mother. I was locked in until my Mum arrived and then sat there as the Head of Year said Now tell her what you told me. So I had to tell her. It wasn't what I'd envisaged and I think it was incredibly abusive. Not just being locked in an office waiting for my Mum to arrive, but actually to take away control like that from someone who was obviously trying to deal with her own problems. At University I began to suffer really badly with depression. I kept going but my housemates weren't helping one bit. Then one day I found out that one of them had not passed on three messages from my Mum, they were all about an old family friend dying and the funeral arrangements. I had made my usual weekly call to my Mum and found out that the funeral was the next day and I couldn't make it. She told me she'd left three messages with this lad. I was furious, I went berserk. I went in and challenged him with what he'd done and all he could say was I didn't think it was important. Anyway I went mad and the next day things had got so bad I 164

Lucy

decided to move out of that house. The next thing I know there was a phone call from the Senior Assistant Registrar [the highest administrative post at that University] demanding I go and see him. So I did and basically he told me that as someone who had been abused and suffered from depression there was no place for me at his University. I was furious and he added that he was a JP [Justice of the Peace] and therefore he fully understood what sexual abuse does to a girl because I see it every day in my court room. I stood up and mustered all the poise, attitude and pride I had left by that point and looked him straight in the eye and said No-one is going to drive me out of University, no-one is going to tell me I am a failure for something someone else did to me over fifteen years ago. And with that I picked up my bag and walked out. I was shaking like a leaf by the time I got outside but after I'd told my academic supervisor what had happened he told me he'd heard from the Senior Assistant Registrar who had informed my supervisor that he had decided not to send me down for the time being. In both these cases Lucy experienced abusive responses at the hands of those who had believed her. In the case of her first story she is detained and forced to disclose to her mother by a Head of Year who ignored her request for some kind of external help to facilitate the disclosure. In the second story her academic ability is doubted because of the experience of childhood sexual violence in a situation where neither her experiences of childhood sexual violence nor her academic ability were at issue. Abuses within the Mental Health System All three stories related below refer to treatment as an inpatient. Most of the participants in this study had some contact with the mental health system either as an outpatient or an inpatient. In the majority of cases however that contact was limited to seeing a psychologist or psychotherapist or counsellor at some point during their lives. However, some participants had had a much more serious interaction with the mental health system, and Debbie, Lisa and Tiha all related abusive responses to their disclosures within the mental health system. Debbie In actual fact one psychologist I saw gave me this leaflet once, this A4 sheet of paper with all these [things], and one of the things it said on it is although it's wrong to be abused, children actually get aroused by it and I had to answer these questions about did I feel aroused, did I enjoy the feelings. I was disgusted. I hated it. I couldn't believe this psychologist had actually asked me those questions. I was completely disgusted." He [a psychiatrist] basically just locked me up for fifteen months, really. Erm, he got the police without asking me, erm, he sat in with the police there without asking me, erm, he talked to the police as though I wasn't there, erm, and then he had me sectioned as a danger to myself and I wasn't really. He drugged me up a lot and he just wasn't very nice and he said things like, you know, he did say things like What did you do to cause this to happen to you? they were sort of the words he used, What did you do? not why did, or have you made some sense of what happened, if he'd said it like that then maybe I could understand it but it was a lie, what did you 165

Lisa

do. You know as if I was going round with a short skirt on and then maybe I asked for it or something, you know, that's the sort of idea I got from him. That he was sort of a sixty-one year old git basically. I remember he said to me when I, when I, he had me on, he didn't let me have any responsibility. And he, he made me feel very powerless and he made me feel, it was just the same as how I felt when I was being abused which was helpless and powerless and not being able to get out of the situation and he made me feel like that, just, prescribing out drugs left, right and centre, making me have ECT, sectioning me when I didn't even know what was going on and I was only nineteen and really not helping the situation, just treating me with no, giving me no rights whatsoever. It was complete crap basically." Tiha One of the things that was really difficult about being sectioned was the fact that I was also at one point restrained and now as far as I am concerned if someone restrains me, they're abusing me, and I'd actually learnt and I didn't know I'd really learnt it, but I've learnt to go rigid if someone abuses me and its I'm a big person and I made them work actually very hard because it's like every bloody bone, and it was like and at one point they actually left me, because my knees gave way, and they left me just to lie in the corridor. And it was only one of the patients that actually gave me any water in the end. And they got a lot of things wrong, or, with what they did to me during that time [but] they did actually believe that [the childhood sexual violence]. OK they didn't believe I was doing a PhD, they didn't believe that I had my own money, they didn't believe that I was a writer, you know, they didn't believe there was a whole load of other stuff which only when I started to get the outside world involved did they believe but they did believe the abuse."

Tiha's experience here is not only of physical abuse via restraining and leaving her on the floor (Tiha has other medical problems which make this extremely abusive) but it is also of her whole life not being believed apart from the fact that she had experienced childhood sexual violence. For Lisa her experience was that she was sectioned (under the Mental Health Act) and forced to take medication and submit to other psychiatric treatments such as Electro-Convulsive Therapy because of the psychiatrist's perception of her problems relating to her experiences of childhood sexual violence. At the same time, however, there is no question that he did believe her story of childhood sexual violence going so far as to involve the police in her case, although he appears to have appointed himself as her guardian or interlocutor in the process. Debbie's experience differs from the other two in that it relates to a line of questioning by a psychologist about the actual experience of childhood sexual violence and her (physical) reactions to it. All three of these experiences involve the removal of choice from the women telling the stories and the external interpretation of their identities as women who had experienced childhood sexual violence. Debbie was assumed to have experienced pleasure during her abuse. Tiha was restrained and disbelieved about anything other than the abuse (perhaps suggesting disbelief that someone who had experienced childhood sexual violence could have money / be doing a PhD, and so forth).

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Lisa was sectioned, forced to take treatment, and infantilised by the psychiatrist in charge of her case. Another participant however (who is anonymous for this section) works within the mental health system discussed the attitudes towards woman who had experienced childhood sexual violence that she encounters there. "I still don't think the professional bodies really deal with it very well. I think the [mental health] profession has got a lot to look at. There was one specific client who when she came to the service she'd been abused and she was anorexic, she's been sexually abused and was anorexic. She left the service and moved in with her girlfriend, she then declared herself a lesbian, and many of the staff saw that as typical. So if you're female and you've been sexually abused, you will become a lesbian and you will have an eating disorder and you'll have all kinds of other psychological problems. It then made it impossible for anyone else to say Well actually I've been abused and I don't do that, that's not me. There is very much a culture of sexually abused girls do this and that's in the profession, you know, that's in professional atmosphere. This is what will happen because that's very typical of an abused girl, that's what she'd do." This candid description of the way mental health professionals perceive women who have experienced childhood sexual violence is telling and also makes clearer the sorts of abuses experienced by Tiha and Lisa. The assumption of certain characteristics for women who have experienced childhood sexual violence then, according to the excerpt above, influences the way such women are seen and, according to the stories told by Lisa and Tiha, influences they way they are treated within the system. However, as the inclusion of examples in previous sections shows, it is not all mental health professionals who appear to share this culture. Of the responses discussed by participants in this study it is psychiatrists who particularly appear to mistreat women who have experienced childhood sexual violence (two examples) and community psychiatric nurses (two examples). One interesting point is the comparison with counsellors in terms of the instances discussed for this study. Empathic Abusive Responses Responses Counsellors 4 Psychiatrists 2 Community Psychiatric Nurses Table 15: Psy-science professionals and responses to disclosure Disbelieving Responses 1 1 2

This broadly follows the results in Hooper et al.'s survey of service provision for women who had experienced childhood sexual violence in North Yorkshire. Hooper et al. found that 50% of contacts with psychiatrists were deemed not helpful whilst 92% of contacts with psychotherapists

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and 76% of contacts with counsellors were deemed helpful. 65% of contacts with CPNs were deemed helpful but 13% found them unhelpful (Hooper et al. 1999, p.19). Abuse within the legal system Two women, Lucy and Debbie had experiences of the legal system in relation to their experiences of childhood sexual violence. For Debbie it was a criminal case against the man who abused her alongside his own daughters, whilst for Lucy it was a civil case seeking damages from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board. In both cases the participants identified the procedures of the courts as the basis of their negative experiences within the legal system. For Debbie, the adversarial nature of criminal trials left her feeling as if she had been on trial, rather than the perpetrator of the sexual violence against her. For Lucy the presumption that she was unable to speak for herself because she was under eighteen at the time that her compensation hearing took place made her feel silenced both as the victim of the crime and as a person. Debbie I was on a secure unit being restrained a lot because I was very upset and this nurse convinced me to do something about him because I was thinking Im here locked up and hes out there. So I contacted my solicitor who then contacted the Child Protection Unit, they came and took a statement and they took statements from his daughters because hed abused them as well and it got sent to the Old Bailey. And it kept getting held over because they wanted psychiatric reports, they wanted medical reports, they wanted questions and statements, queries of statements, and initially he pleaded guilty to everything then when he got this good barrister he said he wouldnt plead guilty. And it went to the Old Bailey and it got held up four times, it just kept getting deferred for whatever reason and eventually the judge just turned round and told him that he either pleaded guilty, because he was trying to plead guilty to come counts and not others, he either pleaded guilty or it would go to trial and if he had to put me on the stand he would go to trial for everything and he came out pleading guilty. But under, because it happened in [the eighties] or something, I cant remember exactly the year, and child abuse wasnt recognised he had to be sentenced under old laws so he only got four and a half years whereas if he had been sentenced under current laws he would have got ten.[45] So how did that whole process make you feel? Angry, frustrated, not just the fact that it kept getting, you know, postponed for whatever reasons, but when it finally happened, the sentencing, it was a great relief. He was actually going to prison. Not long enough but he was going to prison so it was like a great relief. [] The police were very good with me but, erm, although I didnt go to court [as a witness], I wasnt allowed to go to court, I was pulled to pieces in the court. The defence tried to discredit me because I had a psychiatric history, so I feel angry. Ive seen people that go to trial and I think its disgusting the way they are treated. They are made to look like they are the guilty party and theyre on trial, not the bloke who is on trial. I think its disgusting. [] The police were brilliant but the way, the fact I nearly went to trial and the defence tried to discredit my statement because of my psychiatric history I think is, I dont know

LL Debbie

45

Because of a lack of detail in the participants timings for these events it has not been possible to pinpoint what shifts in legislation or sentencing frameworks are being referred to here.

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LL Debbie

how people defend people like that when they know theyre guilty and the fact is that he only went to prison because they had statements from his daughters as well. If it had been my statement on its own he probably never would have gone to prison because of my psychiatric history. And do you feel your psychiatric history is a result of what happened? It plays a big part, Im not saying its everything, its partly a result of other things as well but it plays a big part. Because it sort of got me first into the psychiatric system because I went to counselling, saw this counsellor and when I started confessing what had happened and went into detail I just got more and more depressed until in the end the doctor decided that I had to be in hospital. Since then other factors have come in but until then that was the main factor. Later my Mum and I decided to try for some compensation from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board. We made the application but I was under the age of eighteen and so my Mum signed the forms. Everything was OK until three weeks beforehand when we were told that the perpetrator had a right to attend and defend himself against the allegations. We found this out from his mother who rung to ask what it was about. I spent three weeks not knowing whether he would be there or not. Once we got to the court it was a nightmare. The panel refused to let me speak at all which made me furious. The frustration meant that I eventually broke down in tears and the panel leader then said Oh dear we were hoping not to upset her as if I wasnt even there. I did get some compensation but I think Id rather not have and not gone through that.

Lucy

In both cases discussed here Debbie and Lucy identify the measures put in place to ensure a fair hearing for the defendants / accused as factors which cause them to experience the legal system negatively. For Debbie, the fact that as a paper witness she could be challenged, without opportunity to correct the challenges, made the hearing seem stacked against her. For Lucy, apart from her treatment by the panel itself, the fact that she was not informed by the Board that the accused could defend himself at the compensation hearing and found out from the mother of the perpetrator in her case problematised the whole experience. This was linked to that the fact that the perpetrator was offered an opportunity to speak whilst she was actively silenced by the panel hearing her claim, which doubly reinforces the desire by the legal system not to hear the voices of women who have experienced childhood sexual violence. In both cases, however, the outcomes were moderately favourable for the women, Debbie saw her perpetrator go to prison for a number of years whilst Lucy was awarded some compensation for the sexual violence she experienced. However in both cases the victory quite obviously appears soured by the experiences of the legal system itself.

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Abusive responses In all these stories of abusive responses, however, it is the denial of the womens ability as selfdetermining individuals which forms the key base for the experiences being abusive. The concomitant removals of choice and power from the women involved by authorities external to their everyday lives are the methods by which the this abuse is carried out. Tiha and Lisas experiences within the mental health system, perhaps, show the most obvious abuses of them as individuals and citizens. However, the experiences within the education system (within the formative years of childhood) are discussed as having had a long-term impact on the participants (and this is also true of the disbelieving and inactive responses discussed above). Within the legal system, where the basis of the system is to validate the claims of crime or refute them, both women felt that despite a de facto validation through the outcomes, their experiences actually undermined the validation process the legal system is supposed to engender. Within professional relationships, the presumption is that the listener will have received adequate training in matters pertaining to childhood sexual violence. The receipt of a disbelieving or abusive response can make women wary of disclosures within professional relationships in the future, even where such disclosures may be to their advantage. The need for adequate and sensitive training on childhood sexual violence is obvious from many of the stories above. It may not be enough, however, if it does not also take into consideration the need to question and challenge presumptions on the part of the professionals themselves towards the experience and survivors of childhood sexual violence. Lisas story of the presumptions made by her Head of Year at school which justified the act she had disclosed are located in a cultural narrative on childhood sexual violences which defines them as rare events caused by extreme stress or alcoholism. Both Lucys experience whilst at University where the man responsible for her abusive treatment identified himself as a Justice of the Peace, and Debbies and Lucys experiences within the legal system show a clear need for adequate training for legal professionals which encompasses challenging legal presumptions about women who have experienced childhood sexual violences. For General Practitioners the fact that the responses tend to be ones of omission rather than supportive action are key, particularly as the medical consequences of childhood sexual violence (such as increased risk of cervical cancer or possibility of HIV infection) become more widely known. By failing to acknowledge the issue of childhood sexual violence when identified during the taking of case histories, the possibility of overlooking medical needs of patients is clear, not least where procedures such as cervical smear testing (as in Silvias case) may be problematic and /

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or upsetting. This is not to dismiss the supportive responses received by some women from, on the whole, younger, female General Practitioners (for example Silvia, Alice and Ellie). Similarly in the education system, although some moves were made towards adequate response procedures to disclosure of childhood sexual violence (see Jones 1989, Mahony, 1989), these improvements have been neither far-reaching enough nor sufficiently implemented to create a major difference. Teachers are an obvious figure of authority to whom children may disclose childhood sexual violence because of their involvement at the time the abuse is being perpetrated and their status in loco parentis for the children under their supervision. Despite this fact, however, stories separated by almost three decades showed remarkable similarity in the way disclosures of childhood sexual violence were treated. Although Lisa and Lucys disclosures were not met without outright denial, as Tihas had been, in both cases the women were treated badly. Those professionals who were reported as providing understanding responses to childhood sexual violence invariably fulfilled the criteria identified at the outset of this Chapter for empathic responses within non-professional relationships, and the importance of this cannot be underemphasised. It is clearly not enough to merely manage these disclosures in an adequate fashion even within professional relationships; they must also be responded to genuinely to ensure confidence in the systems in place. 6.17 Conclusions

Of all the disclosure stories related during this research, over two-thirds referred to disclosures made in the context of non-professional relationships. Yet the literature on disclosure which exists, primarily deals with it as a problem, to be handled by professionals. Indeed, as Ellies comments in later sections show (see p.317 and p.350), this notion of needing the knowledge of a professional to deal with disclosure of childhood sexual violences has passed into common understandings via, I would argue, emerging cultural narratives. There is thus a gap between disclosure as experienced, mostly within non-professional relationships and where the disclosure is not made to seek professional help, and the academic / practitioner understanding of the experience. In fact, as argued in Chapters Three and Four, rather than the limited nature of disclosure as represented in these literatures, disclosure is best understood as part of the everyday human activity of storytelling. The reasons for disclosure, the contexts in which they are made, and the results of them are too disparate and varied to characterise as seeking assistance from others. This limited and fallacious characterisation only serves to disempower and de-skill those who hear disclosures

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within non-professional relationships, by distinguishing this activity of everyday listening as being something which should be done by trained professionals. In fact, it is the responses made within informal networks, friends, relatives, and so forth, which appear to be most important, if solely by dint of frequency. Yet the preconditions for an empathic or supportive response to disclosure are not, contrary to the professional discourse, complex or specialised. As seen in Section 6.5 the preconditions: making the space to talk, treating the speaker with respect, and showing a genuine emotional reaction, are not reliant on specialised skills, but rather on the human skills of listening to stories. If disclosure of childhood sexual violences is an everyday activity within the lives of women who have experienced it, then listening to the disclosures cannot be seen as a specialised and professional activity. Indeed the preconditions for a supportive response within professional relationships are identical to those within non-professional relationships. The fact that these general skills map so closely onto Hooper et al.s framework for professional response should be read not as an argument for the training of the general public, but as a re-evaluation of the nature of professionalism and professionalisation in this area. Finally, the positive element of this Chapter is that just over a third of responses to all disclosures were empathic or supportive. I classify this as a positive result, because it shows that positive and affirming responses to disclosure are possible. The key element, beside the three mentioned above, is that responses are situationally appropriate and, I would argue, that disclosure is seen as an individual event, demanding an individual response, rather than seeing it as an event to which a blueprint ideal response can be drawn up. There can be no single good response to all situations of disclosure of childhood sexual violences (see for example Lucys story p.201). Instead we need a paradigm shift in considering issues of childhood sexual violences so that we see individual women who have experienced these events but who share only that one common element.

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Chapter Seven - Themes and Issues 7.1 Structure of this Chapter This Chapter brings together some themes and issues from the data. Some of the sections were issues raised by the participants during the research. Other sections arose from the analysis phase that deserve separate commentary. The first section looks at the phenomenon of breaking confidence and passing on disclosures to others (7.2). This section arose because of striking similarities between stories where knowledge of childhood sexual abuse in the life of a particular woman was passed on to third parties without the consent of the woman involved. In none of the stories is the outcome of this breaking of confidences positive. Futhermore, in no story does it lead to intervention (when related to disclosures whilst the abuse is happening) or a more understanding response for the participants. The second section looks at the differences in response received by those women who were disclosing abuse by women (in both cases their mothers) (7.3). The third section looks the stories of mothering told by the participants during interview (7.4). Three of the women interviewed were mothers and all freely discussed what impacts they saw the experience of childhood sexual violence having on their mothering style. This section explores the similarities between the accounts of very different styles of mothering and discusses the shared notions of vulnerability that were alluded to in each description of mothering before moving on to directly address issues of disclosure within parenting. The fourth section explores issues of language within the interviews and writing (7.5). It is subdivided into five sections. The first subsection covers issues relating to disclosure and the construction of stories and it traces a similar storytelling pattern through a number of disclosures discussed in the research. The second subsection examines issues the different narrative descriptions employed in the stories of disclosure. The third subsection discusses the language used to disclose (rather than to describe disclosures). The penultimate subsection looks at the issues of confession, testimony, and autobiography initially raised in Chapter Three and discusses the relevance of each narrative genre within disclosures of childhood sexual violence. Finally, the fifth subsection explores the literary allusions made by participants during the research process and examines some similarities in the stories used. The fifth section looks at issues relating to responsibility and the allocation of responsibility within the disclosure process (7.6). It is particularly concerned with examining how disclosure is passed between the disclosure participants and how it is negotiated within their exchanges. The sixth 173

section (7.7) looks at the issue of judgements within disclosure events and explores some of the stories and concerns about being judged, whilst the final section explores the role of disclosure in re-normalising the self-identities of women who have experienced childhood sexual violence. 7.2 Passing on disclosures

Many of the participants talked about their disclosures of childhood sexual violence being repeated to others without their consent. Almost without exception this had led to unpleasant or abusive situations arising for the women who had experienced childhood sexual violence. For example, two of the situations Lucy described involved the passing on of her disclosure to another person. Lucy had told a teacher at her school about the sexual violence that she had experienced (another facet of this story is explored in more detail in Chapter Eight). That teacher had then passed on her disclosure to her Head of Year. Lucy picks up the story: Lucy The next time I saw him, in a corridor, he said to me I can't deal with it, I've told your Head of Year, you have to go and see her now [] I went to my Head of Year and said that I wanted her to arrange a counsellor or something so I could sort myself out to tell my parents. Instead she locked the office door and rung my Mother. I was locked in until my Mum arrived and then sat there as the Head of Year said Now tell her what you told me. So I had to tell her. It wasn't what I'd envisaged and I think it was incredibly abusive. Not just being locked in an office waiting for my Mum to arrive but actually to take away control like that from someone who was obviously trying to deal with her own problems.

Lucy's disclosure was that she had experienced abuse some ten years earlier and that the abuse had ended with a family relocation. The passing on of the disclosure could be seen as an attempt at intervention with the child's interests at heart. However the passing on of the disclosure led to Lucy being locked in an office and forced to disclose to her mother, at a time when there was no ongoing child protection issue relating to the sexual violence. Another experience of the passing on of disclosures through teachers comes from Lisa who talked about a teacher who had reacted supportively then passing her disclosure on to her Head of Year. Lisa When they noticed that I'd been quite withdrawn and staying behind after school and things like that and also I think my RE teacher [who Lisa had originally disclosed to] must have said something or, about my behaviour or something and he - it was a bloke - he said to me, the Head of Year, he said Well you know, he probably didn't mean it, he must have been drunk of something. And he was making excuses for his [the step-fathers] behaviour so on the one hand I was sort of getting some concern [from the RE teacher] and then he just reinforced my own views about what was going on, just that I deserved it all, all that, you know that it wasn't really my step-dad's fault it was just something he had, he had some problems. He was just, I don't know, he was just like we men sticking together " 174

On both these occasions the passing on of disclosures (the breaking of confidences) led to negative consequences for the women involved, in terms of their treatment. Lucy had her choices removed in terms of planning her disclosure to her parents, whilst Lisa had the sexual violence she experience minimised by her Head of Year. However, it is not just within professional settings that this sort of breaking of confidences occurs. Participants spoke about it happening within other less formal contexts too. Both Ellie and Debbie talked about situations where their disclosures were passed onto others in social networks. Ellie When the positions [in the social organisation] came up for being on committee my name was mentioned a few times and I wasn't particularly bothered about whether or not I got on. But I actually found out that someone who didn't really know much about my situation had gone to, erm, it's kind of done through democratic process but there are a few people who you can explain difficult situations to and they can influence things without having to tell the whole rest of the people who are voting. And, erm, they had gone to those people and said that I had a very, very difficult family situation. I think they explained a little bit about what's happened and what I was dealing with, or not only what I was dealing with but just the fact that it had happened and, erm, said that they didn't think I would want to be asked, and so the fact that they made that decision for me without actually asking really annoys me. And I think, I didn't care about it until I actually found out what, why they'd decided that, erm, and there are a few other things and also, again after that someone, erm, one of my friend said about, asked if I was kind of upset about not being on Committee and things like that and I said Well, to be honest with you it's not that big a deal and she was like Oh yeah you've got that thing from your childhood haven't you? You definitely shouldn't have been on Committee then and that type of thing. That people don't even bother to ask they just make judgements and they don't even bother to assess where I was up to myself emotionally or what I was capable of at that time. It was just because that had happened therefore anyone who had been through that type of thing obviously couldn't cope with any form of responsibility and, erm, that really annoyed me. "While I was away she [Debbies mother] told the neighbours because she thought everyone should know. Because he should be judged. He should be kept away from their children so she thought it was her duty to tell everyone. But I hated the thought that they knew. How did that make you feel? Like I was dirty, like I'd done something wrong. [Like] It was my fault what had happened. They looked at you with these sorrowful eyes, you know, it was horrible what happened."

Debbie

LL Debbie

For Ellie, this is a situation of multiple people breaking her confidences as Ellie's disclosure to a friend (and she has no way of knowing which friend) became common knowledge throughout one of her social networks. In Ellie and Lucy's stories one of the key factors has been that the women themselves were not asked any questions about their own choices in those situations. Lucy was not asked whether she wanted to disclose to her mother at that point and in fact even when she 175

expressed her desire not to do so she was ignored. In Ellie's story she is not asked whether she wants to stand for the position or not. In both these cases the women are deemed not to be appropriate sources of information on their own wants and desires, in effect, they are infantilised and assumed not to be able to make a decision because of the nature of the information which has been passed on. In all four of these cases the breaking of confidences / passing on of disclosures led to negative situations for the women involved. In all cases this occurred when the women's own social identities and emotions were already going through changes: Lucy and Lisa were disclosing their experiences of sexual violence for the first time, Ellie was establishing herself within a new network of social relationships at University, whilst Debbie had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital for depression, at the time the disclosure was passed on, and had just been discharged when she received the pitying responses from her neighbours. On all these occasions no discernible positive effects are apparent from the disclosures being passed on (which would be expected from a disclosure being passed on for the purpose of intervention, for example). The ubiquity of negative situations arising from breaking confidences also suggests an interesting process is occurring. We can assume that in face-to-face disclosures the woman disclosing is also trying to manage the effects of the disclosure and in face-to-face situations the seriousness of the events under consideration and the individual nature of the phenomenon can be managed (however difficult it is). Not having that individual interaction prevents women who have experienced childhood sexual violences from attempting this management. Although negative responses to face-to-face disclosures were also experienced in two-thirds of cases, the fact that where disclosures were passed on the results were always negative raises issues. There are obviously important factors at work here, other than management of disclosure situations; however it is currently not possible to understand these processes from the data gathered for this study. 7.3 Sexual Violences by Women

Two of the participants (Ellie and Lisa) in this study had experienced childhood sexual violence perpetrated by women, in both cases by their mothers. Both talked in interview about the experience of disclosing sexual violence by women. Ellie My Mum abused me as well as my Dad and a lot of people find that incredibly hard to swallow, that a mother could abuse her child. And I mean that is probably something that comes up time and time again, that people will blank it. It'll be like they haven't actually heard it and they'll kind of ask questions like Couldn't your Mum do anything about the abuse? and stuff like And have you talked about it with your Mum? I don't know, if they really understood what I'd said then they wouldn't 176

have actually said any of that. I've found a few times, especially with older people, that they have always seemed to say if my Mum had been abusing me it was kind of a cry for help because of the physical abuse she was getting from my Dad, and it wasn't really abuse. I've had that a few times that it wasn't really abuse if it was from your Mum and that it was maybe something not serious and not to make as big a fuss over. Lisa It's quite rare for a mum to abuse a child and sexual abuse them at that rather than a male, men, erm, that makes me feel more why has it happened to me, it's quite unusual, it doesn't happen that often, it's like when I watched a programme and it happened to have an interview with someone and it happened to her and that's made me feel like thank god I'm not a freak, it has happened to other people. I felt something in common with her saying that. But yeah I was treated differently when they found out it was my mum and I did get questions like what on earth did you do to your Mum for her to do that? Why does she hate you so much? and that made me think why did my mum hate me so much because, you know, you have the ideas of what a mum should be and I kept thinking that it must be my fault because mums give birth to you and they are supposed to love you from day one and they are supposed to look after you and only did my mum know what was going on with me she was helping and getting money from what was happening to me. You know, trying to make sense of it and I think the reason why people think it's strange is because they can't make sense of it because it is unusual really."

For Ellie disclosure of her mother's role in perpetrating the sexual violences here is routinely met with incredulity and minimisation. But more centrally, Ellie identifies it as being "like they haven't actually heard it". Lisa too refers to not being heard when she talks of her experiences, but also links this to the fact that the sexual violences she experienced were unusual, and therefore people found it difficult to fit them within the cultural narratives they were familiar with. Renormalisation in this situation is also more difficult as this experience (sexual violences committed by women) is a minority of another (albeit sizable) minority (experiencing childhood sexual violences). For Lisa it was seeing a television programme that featured another woman who had experienced childhood sexual violence perpetrated by a woman that made her feel "thank god I'm not a freak", the implication being that responses to her disclosure had made her feel isolated and unusual. Ellie also told another story which reveals a more fundamental issue relating to this unusualness factor. Ellie I tried to get Social Service to do something to ensure the safety of my youngest sister (who was a young 13 year old at the time), I don't tell many people this as they rarely believe it. I went to the NSPCC and had an informal chat with one of the social workers there. They were great and advised me to leave it a few months until after my A Levels as it wouldn't make much difference to my sister, and if Dad was violent it could mess up my exams. It was over my A Level study leave and my Mum was getting scared that I was talking about it so she kept me inside the house and banned me from using the phone unless she was standing over me, she said it was to make sure I worked hard for my exams. I was scared that under those conditions she would knock my confidence enough to make me unsure about what really happened to me so I told my GP as a safety net in case I couldn't tell Social Services by the end of my exams. The day of my last exam I saw my GP again and 177

she called Social Services. Two weeks later I hadn't heard anything so I went to my local Social Services department. Eventually I saw my key worker and she said that she'd just sent a letter to my home address asking me to get in touch with them (my Mum usually reads all my post before I can get to it). She then decided to interview me there and then (something I wasn't prepared for). The moment I said that my Mum sexually abused me but my father only physically abused us all she seemed to loose all respect for me and treated me like a child. I think she thought that I was messing her around or at best telling lies to cover up for my Dad sexually abusing me. Here the unusualness of Ellie's disclosure (or rather the challenge that it posed to the cultural narratives of childhood sexual violence) meant that Social Services did not intervene to help protect her younger sister. Additionally it meant that the material reality of Ellie's sexual violence was ignored. It is the disclosure of an unusual sexual violence, in this case by a mother, which led to Ellie's treatment as either a liar or protecting her father. Whereas within non-professional relationships the reaction of disbelief or bewilderment may have negative effects, within professional relationships, such as the example above, the reaction of disbelief serves to continue the risk of another child being abused (as in this case). Issues of belief are always difficult to negotiate, but in this case it seems clear that the cultural narratives about childhood sexual violence were interpreted as fixed. That is that rather than seeing the narrative that sexual violence is largely committed by men, allowing some sexual violence by women, it instead was interpreted as precluding the latter. Here it appears it is the interpretation of the common accepted stories as truths that caused Ellie to be dismissed as a liar or as protecting her father by accusing her mother. Drawing on these examples about the reaction to unusual / challenging aspects of histories of childhood sexual violence, the lessons can be applied to disclosures in general. The unusualness argument that both participants make above reflects more widely on the nature of disclosure. Given the prevalence rates discussed in Chapter Two, the act of sexual violence against a child is relatively unusual in itself, particularly if that violence involves contact sexual violence by the perpetrator (as opposed to obscene telephone calls or indecent exposure). Thus the disclosure of childhood sexual violence in itself can be seen as expressing something unusual. Given an additional unusual factor for the sexual violence (such as blood relation to the abuser or a woman being the abuser) the reactions are predicated on the unseen nature of childhood sexual violence itself. 7.4 Sexual violence and Mothering If the patterns of childrearing were entirely formed by the parent's own direct experiences then the human race would probably have died out several thousand years ago (Caroline in Malone, Farthing, and Marce 1996, p.34) 178

Of the ten participants in this study four were mothers. Although one of these was the one who declined to take part in interview, the remaining three talked at some length about their experiences of mothering. During interview I prefaced questions on mothering to make clear my interest as someone who does not have children. Consequently the answers focussed largely on parenting styles, the influences of the experience of childhood sexual violences on parenting, and discussion of disclosure to children. This section reports on some general issues of parenting first and particularly those relating to notions of vulnerability and concern for children, and then goes on to discuss disclosure in parenting relationships. Given the depth and complexity of these particular narratives they are quoted at some length. Childhood Sexual Violences and Mothering Alice is the mother of two children, a son in his mid-teens and a daughter who is nearly twelve. Alice It makes me more paranoid with my daughter. I have to really work hard to let her out on her own. I really do. She wanted to get a video the other evening, this is how paranoid I am, she really likes love stories and she wanted to get a video. She's nearly twelve right, and she wanted to go and get this video herself. And it was like half-five, you know, it wasn't late, it was daylight, all kids outside. And she wanted to go alone and I said Alright then so long as it don't take too long. Well it got past the half-hour and I'm not, I've gone into video shops with them and it take ages to choose a video. And I couldn't cope with it. So I put on my coat and my shoes and off I went down the road and she was like What are you doing here? and I couldn't say, Well I'm paranoid actually. I've been open and honest with the kids about my background, not in detail, but they've seen the literature I read I must admit. I have said I had a very unhappy background so I worry about them a bit more than I need to. I've done my best to be open about it and ensure they don't have contact with my father and I've told them why and they didn't like him very much either which is interesting so it wasn't a difficult thing to tell them. Now had that been my son I wouldn't have panicked. I would have started to worry but I wouldn't have put my coat on and gone down the road and looked for him. It would have been kind of an hour, hour and a half before I'd look for him but my daughter it was like half an hour coming to three quarters and I could not have sat there, I could not sit there, I just had to go. To get the thoughts out of my head. Because she's small and blonde and blue eyed, you know, to me every paedophiles dream really and that's my stereotypical picture of what a paedophile is So yes it does affect the way I think".

The issues Alice raises here about mothering are multiple. Alices starting point, that her own experiences of childhood sexual violences have made her paranoid about her daughter's safety, is made more interesting because the actions she uses to exemplify her paranoia could, by others, be interpreted merely as parental concern. The story is presented in terms of her own interpretation of her actions as obsessively overprotective ("it wasn't late, it was daylight, all kids outside"). Yet she also contextualises her reactions as if she is willing to be challenged on them, describing her 179

daughter as "every paedophiles dream", and then explaining that this is in fact just her stereotype of a paedophile. However, the only challenge in the story is from her daughter, who asks Alice why she has come to meet her. What is obvious here is that Alice's expectation of challenge in her story is not directly linked to her daughter's explicit challenge, but rather to an expectation that her parenting practices are challengeable because she has experienced childhood sexual violence. It is her own identity as a survivor46 which appears to make her parenting questionable, both in her own eyes and in the (perceived) eyes of others. Silvia (who is quoted at more length below), however, raised the image of women who have experienced childhood sexual violence as paranoid mothers as a cultural narrative. Silvia "I read a lot of literature about mothers that have been abused and they are, there seems to be a tendency for women that have been abused to be overprotective which I am not with my son [] I'm not paranoid about it at all. Paranoid is not a kind word to use at all because it's such a common thing and I think women that do worry about it a lot probably have got good cause to"

Another interesting point is the unspoken role of vulnerability in this story about her daughter. Alice obviously feels that her daughter is vulnerable (as Alice herself once was) and this is emphasised in the original story. However, when Alice describes her daughter, this same vulnerability is alluded to only through the oblique use of the word small as a descriptor. Thus Alice both acknowledges and downplays the role of vulnerability within her fears for her daughter's safety. In effect it is precisely because she is vulnerable that Alice becomes agitated and sets out to make sure her daughter is safe, but also because of the same vulnerability that Alice cannot explain to her daughter the reason for her coming to meet her. Alice's oblique reference to her daughter's vulnerability is then re-framed into a description of what paedophiles are attracted to, as physical sexual characteristics which may attract a man to a child. This present but invisible operation of the concept of vulnerability is also interestingly played out in a story about her son. Alice: "I had a wonderful experience last year with my son. He was coming home from a friend's house through town and it was like five o'clock in the afternoon, fine weather. Walking through town, he walked diagonally straight across where the public loos are, just in town, right in the shopping centre, right in the middle, a really busy part of town. A man approached him and offered him a fiver to masturbate him. My son came straight home and told me which I didn't realise at the time but I am so pleased really that he that he could, you see. Because I've often wondered whether my lunacies have put them off telling me things. But he came straight in and told me and I said We need to phone the Police and he's like (mumbling) and I said, That is how it works. If you feel bad and can't tell the Police they've won really 'cos they've made you feel like you've done something wrong and you haven't and that's what these people do. Oh right then he said, you know he understood that and so we got the Police round. And we were so lucky because this guy was wonderful, he said, I'm really impressed that you've told somebody and he [Alice's son] said that I said that they win if they make you feel horrible so you can't tell 180

46

Alice was the only participant who explicitly described herself as a survivor.

anyone. So my son was great! If they feel that they can come and say then I havent made it a taboo subject, you know, particularly for a boy being approached by another man. I mean my son was quite confused, really anxious and worried, he couldn't quite Anyway we had to go out that evening, walking through town again, going to a friends, all of us and my son made us walk all around to see if that bloke was there because he said Because I think if he's still there we need to get the Police straight away so they can catch him. So we had a stroll down the street. He was If anyone does that again I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that and he was quite empowered which was good. And he said to me afterwards I didn't tell the Policeman everything that I said to that man and I said Why not? and he said Because what I actually told him to do was fuck off! <laughs>" This story shows another contradictory position in Alice's self-interpretation of her parenting. Her daughter's trip to the video store was after this approach to her son from a man soliciting sexual acts. In these circumstances (and particularly as her daughter is younger than her son), an increased degree of vigilance from a parent would be expected. But this second story shows another aspect which belies (and contradicts) Alice's characterisation of her parenting as paranoid. She discusses her feelings about her son coming to her and telling her about this solicitation. She implicitly expresses her pleasure in being taking into his confidence in this way ("he was great" and his repetition of her own words to the Police Officer). Alice goes on to say that her son was "empowered" by the experience because he was planning potential coping strategies should it happen again. However, Alice does not comment on the positive nature of her response to his disclosure nor does she comment on her son's adaptivity in the face of new and challenging situations. In fact Alice does not see the positive in her own experiences of mothering when faced with a situation of solicitation to her son, yet she handled the disclosure in a way that affirmed her son's ability to cope and which validated his concerns about the event. In effect Alice provided the empathic response her son needed and which facilitated action being taken. What does, however, come through in her story is her justification that her son was doing nothing wrong when the solicitation took place. She takes four consecutive clauses within her narrative to establish that her son's presence near the toilets in the town centre was innocent ("just in town, right in the shopping centre, right in the middle, a really busy part of town"). Her concern here is that, employing the cultural narratives relating to gay men and cottaging, her son's presence would be seen as suspicious, because he was walking near public toilets when the solicitation took place. Her concern here is to establish her son's innocence and this is played out again in her comments relating to his confusion at the solicitation itself ("my son when he came back was quite confused, really anxious and worried"). The reaction of any mother to establish the innocence of her son (both sexual and in terms of the solicitation) is understandable. However her repeated insistence, both of his innocence of sexual understandings (related to homosexuality), and of his location at the 181

time of the solicitation, may be relating more to Alice's own fears about being an inadequate mother. To assure herself of the adequacy of the job she has done she emphasises the counternarratives of children's sexuality within her stories. For her son this is a pronounced sexual innocence as regards the solicitation of him by a man, for Alice's daughter it is the oblique references to vulnerability which are repeated and then negated in her story about the trip to the video shop. So mothering, here, is a negotiation of the perceived problems women who have experienced childhood sexual violence are characterised as having as mothers - that is, that their children are more vulnerable to sexual violence, or that they may, in protecting them with information, overdevelop their children's sexual knowledge. Alice was the only participant who identified herself as being over protective as a mother, however. The other two participants who were mothers and who talked about the impact of their experiences of childhood sexual violence on mothering took a different view. However in both, issues of vulnerability were raised, and all the mothers reported trying to ensure that their children were less vulnerable then they, themselves, had been. Samantha, for example, is the mother of a pre-adolescent daughter: LL Samantha Do you think it's affected you as a mother? I mean obviously, it's, it plays a part, but I think it's a smaller part of a whole really because my main aim it to make absolutely sure that her self-esteem is indestructible, that it cannot be damaged if I can possibly help it. So I've spent the last six years making sure that she won't, you know, suffer from depression, that she won't think anything bad about herself. I think that she, because of that, I don't think for one second that she would tolerate somebody touching her, interfering with her. She knows and I don't know where she got it from because she told me two years ago you know nobody can touch my tinkle, she calls it, she told me, so she's well aware of that but I don't think that's enough. I think they also have to have the confidence and that they know that they are secure and they know you'll always be there and that nobody is going to treat them badly. I may be wrong but I'd be amazed if somebody, she let somebody use their position of power and authority of just being older even, to get the better of her."

Here Samantha again acknowledges the inherent vulnerability of her daughter, but she has attempted to minimise the risks that this may pose to her daughter by making sure that she is confident in herself and feels confident that she can talk to her mother (Samantha). The issues Samantha negotiates here are similar to those explored by Alice but her reaction is different. Samantha explicitly makes central the issues of self-confidence and resilience. In effect Samantha negotiates her daughters vulnerability by giving her the tools to resist and report experiences rather than spending her time trying to protect her daughter. 182

Silvia, the mother of a pre-adolescent son, referred to both concepts (resilience and vulnerability) in her discussion of how it had affected her mothering: Silvia I read a lot of literature about mothers that have been abused and they are, there seems to be a tendency for women that have been abused to be overprotective which I'm not with my son, you know, obviously he's three and a half so I have to watch him and stuff like that but no, it's not affected me in that way, I'm not scared that he'll be abused. Obviously I like to know who he's with and you know that kind of business but I'm not paranoid about it all. Paranoid is not a kind word to use at all because its such a common thing and I think women that do worry about it a lot probably have got good cause to. I'm not anxious about it. I'm not anxious about him getting abused. And also like my kind of attitude towards my son is that I talk to him about his body and I talk to him about [how] his body's his and that people can't do things to his body that he doesn't want and that's his space and I'll keep kind of introducing those things and I would hope that if something did happen to him he would be in a position to talk to me about it because he'd know that I'm kind of open about those things and accepting of those things and that's the way I think it's affected my child-rearing in that I am much more proactive in bringing him up in a way that's he's more aware about those things. Obviously I don't want to scare him, and I think a lot of things that I knew about child abuse when I was a kid scared me, you know. It's made me quite determined to be as good a parent as I can in that I want to be, not that I expect my son to be able to say no in that sense because obviously that's stupid but I want my son to know the facts about his body and his rights and at the end of the day I don't think I can protect my son, I don't kid myself that I can. I can protect my son from a lot of things in life, you know, and hopefully being abused won't be one of the things but if it is then I don't want him to be completely ignorant about it and completely alone about it. You can't stop everything in life"

Here Silvia makes clear her philosophy on mothering which seems very much rooted in an appreciation of the limits that she faces as a mother. She employs a similar tactic to Samantha, in that she has sought to educate her son about his body and his rights over his body, and at the same time she acknowledges that neither her son nor herself may be able to prevent sexual violence from occurring. Silvia's acknowledgement of her limitations as mother may appear fatalistic. She sees them as a reflection of the truth as she has experienced it - her mother could not have prevented the sexual violence she experienced and, similarly, she understands that there is little, other than educating her son, that she can do to prevent sexual violence against him. Both Silvia and Samantha, interestingly, interpret the question of whether their experiences of childhood sexual violence had affect their parenting style to be a question asking about fear of victimisation of their child(ren). The two exchanges are reproduced below: LL As you know I don't have kids, do you think it's affected the way that you've mothered? 183

Silvia

I don't know really because I mean I read a lot of, obviously I read a lot of literature about mothers that have been abused and they are, there seems to be a tendency for women that have been abused to be overprotective which I am not with my son" A couple of people have raised the issue of mothering with child abuse in their past, do you think it's affected you as a mother? Erm, well, I mean obviously it's, it plays a part, but I think it's a smaller part of a whole really because my main aim is to make absolutely sure that her self-esteem is, is indestructible, you know, that it cannot be damaged."

LL Samantha

This interpretation by both participants of my question about affects on mothering to mean fear of sexual violence against their children is interesting. The answers both Silvia and Samantha (and to some extent Alice as well) give relate to their negotiations and strategies of the vulnerability of their children compared to the danger of being an overprotective or paranoid mother. Thus it could be argued that the effects on mothering are here expressed through an appreciation of the vulnerability that children have as regards sexually violent experiences. However, in all three cases, this vulnerability was acknowledged but downplayed by various strategies. Samantha accepts the vulnerability but says the self-assurance she is trying to instil in her daughter should help prevent anyone taking advantage of her. Silvia accepts the vulnerability but says there is little she can do apart from mother as best she can. Alice downplayed the vulnerability for her son, because he had already shown he could handle non-violent approaches (and possibly because of his age as well) focusing explicitly on the vulnerability of her daughter and how she negotiated her child's growing independence with her own needs. So the relationship between vulnerability, mothering, and the experience of childhood sexual violence is multi-faceted. There does appear to be an explicit acceptance of the vulnerability and strategies develop to try to minimise the risk of that vulnerability, but at the same time there is a conscious desire to not over-compensate, because of the mothers own experiences in childhood. Obviously with such a small sample of mothers, the findings here may not be generalizable to a wider population of mothers who have experienced childhood sexual violences. But it is worth noting that the negotiations of identity and vulnerability for both child and parent are not unusual and, in fact, are the same as all parents attempts to negotiate safety and autonomy for their children. Mothering and Disclosure In discussions on mothering, the three interview participants who were mothers were asked about whether they would tell their child(ren) about their experiences of childhood sexual violences. All three agreed that they would tell, but none had, so far, done so. For Alice, these reasons why were not discusssed. 184

LL Do you think there will ever come a time when where you will tell them [her children]? Alice Yeah, oh yeah I think I will yeah. Because one of my biggest things is that its made public, as public as possible. I really cant stand secrecy so I in no way want to keep any secrets from them, I want to demonstrate you know dont have secrets. Bring it out in the open, like with [my son] last year, thats the best thing you can do, tell someone, bring it out in the open. Thats the, you stand in a much more powerful place when you do that I think. Yes Ill tell them, yes. I want them to know, I want them to know partly because I want them to understand me but I want them to know that look Ive come through this and this is what Ive done with my life, and no-one has the right to take that away from you. Alice here states that her desire to tell her children is both an emotional and political move and yet, despite her sons experiences the previous year, she had not yet done so. This is not meant as criticism but to show the contradiction and tensions between wanting to disclose and actually doing so again. For Silvia and Samantha these disclosures had not yet been made because their children were too young. LL Do you think there will ever come a point when you'll tell him what happened to you? Silvia Yes. I would do. Not until he's older, when he's grown up, there is no way I'd tell him now, I mean he's only little and he doesn't, he hasn't got to asking about why we don't see his grandfather, he doesn't even know his grandfather properly exists. He's got other grandfathers because our family is so broad so I don't think he'll get to that point. My niece has asked me already why I don't see with Granddad and I've been like well because we just don't get on and actually it's not been that hard even, I mean, you think my Mum would be slightly suspicious about it but she's not because my Dad is such a twat that, he's such an unlikeable, horrible man that regardless really of anything that he did to me when I was a kid sexually I've got a million reasons for not talking to him, you know what I mean, so nobody's really questioned it because he's just, he's just unlikeable so everybody's just been like taking it as that really and that's what I said to my niece really I just said we don't get on and sometimes people don't get on with each other. But yeah I would want to tell my son at some point, but not for a long time. I can see that being a hard one actually. LL When do you think you'll tell him? S He's so little now. I mean when he's mature, when I think he's mature enough. I mean kids vary so much as well it might be when he's eighteen, it might be when he's sixteen, it might be when he's twenty-one. It depends what he's like when he's an adult and what's going on in his life as well. I think it is important that he knows especially as a boy because it's important that he kind of knows the kind of effects that those things have on people and the damage that it does, you know, I mean I try to bring him up in a non-sexist way and be aware of those kind of things anyway so it is important to me as a parent that he'd educated in that way. But at the same time I am much better now than I have ever been in my life and I, you know, ten twenty years I'm hoping that's its just going to get better and better and I'm going to get much more self-assured and much more you know everything. And he'll be able to see that people do cope with it, you know? Silvia again identified political reasons for disclosure, like Alice, in wanting her son to understand the effects of childhood sexual violences. This was one of a handful of oblique references to feminist debates on childhood sexual violences throughout all of the interviews. Silvia, however, also wants to empower her son through her disclosure. Samantha also referred to a desire to empower her daughter through disclosure. 185

LL Sam

Do you think there'll come a time when you'll tell her what happened to you? I know she's only small now. I expect so, yeah. I haven't thought about it at all actually. I think I might tell her [] if I need, if I feel she needs to understand or she's at risk I would tell her.

In all three conversations about disclosing to children, however, there are inherent tensions and I think that here the nature of disclosure as jointly being autobiographical and testimonial becomes most difficult to negotiate. Alice talks about disclosure as autobiographical, testimonial, and confessional, in that she wants her children to know because she is against secrecy (testimonial) and because she wants them to understand her (confessional). Silvia talks about disclosure as testimonial, as witness to her son about the effects of sexual violence, but also witnessing the inner strengths that people have to cope with experiences. Samantha talks of disclosure protecting her child (testimonial) from the same threats. It is a limitation of the sample that none of the women interviewed had disclosed to their children and therefore this line of enquiry cannot be followed further but certainly the contradictions between wanting to disclose and doing so are still very much evident in these passages. 7.5 Disclosure and Language

The question of language and disclosure is one that must influence any discussion of disclosure. How a woman discloses is a wider question than simply contextual factors but is also concerned with the intricacies of language as well. For example issues of how the stories of disclosure are constructed, what metaphors and references they draw on, and how they fit with what we know about the social aspects of women's talk are all central to understanding disclosure as a speech act as well as a social act. The questions raised by the interviews and written pieces collected for this project relate to four topics: disclosure and the construction of stories; disclosure language; confession, testimony and autobiography; and women's talk. Disclosure and the Construction of Stories The constructions of disclosure stories were quite clearly within the storytelling, narrative bent of human communication. This in itself is not surprising, given that the research was conducted entirely through two prominent storytelling modes of communication; writing of accounts and face to face interviewing, which encouraged the participants to tell me (a story) about their experiences of disclosure. So the fact that the data gathered was in a storytelling format is not surprising. However the similarities in story construction between participants was not so expected. There was 186

very close similarity in the oral stories (collected in interview) between the construction of the stories across all eight interviewed participants (see figure one). The similarity of this construction is interesting because it is tempting to view this as something more than synchronicity. At the same time we must be aware of the conventions of storytelling and the limitations thus imposed by our familiarity with the process of getting across a good story. However, there is the possibility that the similarity may guide our understanding of the important aspects of disclosure by the four aspects which contribute to the disclosure story: context, relationship, reaction, and overview. To facilitate an examination of these I am going to use two disclosure stories from the interview transcripts. One is a story from Debbie's interview about telling her immediate family about the sexual violence she had experienced, and the other comes from Silvia about her experience of telling a friend who was also an ex-boyfriend. The two stories are reproduced in full below. Debbie I was admitted to a psychiatric unit in [town on the coast] and my family came down and I had to explain to them why I was there and basically it was because I'd had counselling to do with the abuse and I'd got very depressed so I sat down and told them that this bloke had abused me for eight months and, not in detail what happened, but basically what happened and it was just, I was just - you could see this look of anger in their eyes, because they weren't just angry with him, they were angry with me for keeping it a secret. And they reacted with Why didn't you tell us? Why did you do this? And I knew then that I regretted telling them, I wish Id never told them."

187

Figure Six: Schematic Construction of Disclosure Stories

Contextual Information not just who, when, how, but establishing the relationship and giving the participants own view of the listener first

Immediate Context of the Disclosure what happened to prompt it

The Disclosure

Reaction

Overview thoughts about the disclosure situation and / or the listener

Silvia

Another time I remember I told another one of my friends that was like an exboyfriend that, erm, I'd known for a long time, and I was drunk again and I was in the street again actually and we just stopped somewhere and we were chatting and, erm, we were sat on a wall and I said to him. You know, I think we were talking about being in therapy and stuff and I said to him that the reason why was because my Dad actually abused me and he was like, he was really surprised. He obviously didn't know at all but he was kind of like Oh I wish you'd told me before because it explains a lot and I was kind of, I was quite upset by that really because I felt like I didn't really want my behaviour explaining away, you know. And also like, you know, yeah obviously I can accept that to some extent but, but a lot of the relationship between me and him I didn't feel was, was err, I didn't feel it was because I was fucked up or anything, I felt really it was because he, he was fucked up, you know. And I felt like in a way saying that I felt like he was putting his shit onto me really and putting me in a position that Oh you can't deal with these things because this happened to you rather than Oh you're just a human being in a relationship."

The context, then, broadly, refers to events which surrounded disclosure, in Debbie's case the fact that she had been admitted to hospital and in Silvia's case that she and her friend were drunk and talking. The immediate context are those circumstances which prompted the disclosure, for Debbie 188

the visit of her family wanting to know why she was in hospital and in Silvia's story the discussion of her being in therapy and the reason why. The disclosure section of the story then forms the central aspect of what happens. Interestingly in the two examples the disclosures are discussed in some detail (this is partly due to the fact that both stories came from near to the start of the interviews and therefore also constituted the disclosure to the interviewer about their experiences of childhood sexual violence). The reaction section of the story then relates how the speakers felt the listeners had reacted. This is not necessarily a verbal response, but may also include reflections of non-verbal communication (as in Debbie's story). The final section is the close of the story that was invariably an overview of the experience for the participants. Both Debbie and Silvia's story can be broken down through these five stages of storytelling.

189

Debbie's Story
Contextual Information

I was admitted to a psychiatric unit in <town on the coast> and my family came down And I had to explain to them why I was there and basically it was because I'd had counselling to do with the abuse and I'd got very depressed

Immediate Context

Disclosure

So I sat down and told them that this bloke had abused me for eight months and, not in detail what happened but basically what happened And it was just, I was just. You could see this look of anger in their eyes, because they weren't just angry with him they were angry with me for keeping it a secret. And they reacted with "Why didn't you tell us? Why did you do this?"

Reaction

Overview

And I knew then that I regretted telling them, I wish I'd never told them

Silvia's Story Another time I remember I told another one of my friends that was like an ex-boyfriend that, erm, I'd known for a long time Contextual Information and I was drunk again and I was in the street again actually and we just stopped somewhere and we were chatting and, erm, we were sat on a wall and I said to him. You know, I think we were talking, I think I was talking about being in therapy and stuff And I said to him the reason why was because my Dad actually abused me

Immediate Context

Disclosure

Reaction

And he was like, he was really surprised, he obviously didn't know at all but he was kind of like "Oh I wish you'd told me before because it explains a lot"

Overview

And I was kind of I was quite upset by that because I felt like I didn't really want my behaviour explaining away, you know. And also like, you know, yeah obviously I can accept that to some extent but, but a lot of the relationship between me and him I didn't feel was, was, err, I didn't feel it was because I was fucked up or anything, I felt really it was because he, he was fucked up, you know. And I felt like in a way saying that I felt he was putting his shit onto me really and putting me in a position 190 that "Oh you can't deal with these things because this happened to you" rather than "Oh you're just a human being in a relationship".

The purpose of separating these sections of the disclosure story is not just to show the similarity between the stories, but it also shows the constructions of the stories and how the sections blend into one another. It also shows the logical nature of the story being told: the broad context leads into a specific context leads to the disclosure event itself leads to the reaction leads to an overview of the experience. In many ways this shows the conventionality of the storytelling process, but also the way in which the disclosure story in itself is no different to other stories with which we narrate and convey our lives. The conventionality of the storytelling process involved in the data merely reinforces that to the women narrating the stories these are merely part of everyday storytelling processes. The stories being told are not normal in terms of their content because the experiences being narrated happen only to a minority of girl children. However this applies to many sorts of stories which are not treated as a special and particular forms of speech event disconnected from storytelling as a mode of communication. Stories of Disclosure Another aspect of the disclosure story is the language used to express the experience of disclosure. In fact language used to describe the disclosure events gives interesting insight into the ways in which women who have experienced childhood sexual violence negotiate the situation of disclosure. For example many of the disclosures involved the participants describing their actions in terms of making a spontaneous assessment of risk in terms of the benefits of disclosure at that point in time. This assessment seems to occur at moments when the possibility for disclosure is already created within the context and the risk of disclosure appears to be minimal. Alice We had to share bits of ourselves and it took me a long time because there is a lot of me I will share with others but a big chunk that I won't or I have to be very safe to do that. And I took a chance, <laughs> I took a chance in the group really and just said Well actually, because the subject was related to my background and I said Well actually that's the kind of background I come from. " (Alice talking about a disclosure event to her student peer group) I thought I've got to tell this woman, I've got to take a chance becauseSo, erm, I said it, I just said it, I said you know Look I've been receiving counselling for sexual abuse in my past and I do struggle with my eating " (Alice talking about a disclosure event to her General Practitioner) And then one day I just told her. I don't really know why, I just thought she seems quite trusting and I'd never told anyone and it was just eating at me and I thought I'd

Alice

Debbie

just got to tell someone so I told her" (Debbie talking about a disclosure event to her flatmate) Tiha And, it was actually just really weird because the women were really err just being very supportive to each other and had come out with various stories you know about things that had happened to them at work or in childhood or whatever and I just suddenly found myself telling them about the abuse that had happened to me" (Tiha talking about a disclosure event to a group of women on an Abuse and Violence workshop she was facilitating)

What is apparent through all these stories is not just the sense of engaging in a risk activity (disclosure) but also the spontaneity of the disclosures (often denoted by use of the word "just" to describe them). So even though these stories share an awareness of the risk they are taking in telling (in terms of social approbation) the decision to disclose appears to be made spontaneously in these cases. In fact it appears that where the women are involved in situations which already appear safer than everyday life then the disclosure is made easier but the acceptance of risk is still there. So, in Tiha's case, being involved in a training session on Abuse and Violence, and hearing the responses to other disclosures, means she is encouraged to spontaneously disclose her own experiences. For Debbie, her perception of her flatmate as trustworthy and caring (and the fact that the flatmate had previously helped Debbie escape a violent relationship) made her disclosure seem safe. These constructions of stories relate to the way which we, as everyday actors, negotiate tricky or dangerous situations, in that we assess the context closely, to try to estimate the benefits of the action. However this rational basis for disclosure is also, often, underpinned by a sense of having to tell someone as well. Other stories used the language of being compelled to tell for either internal or external reasons. Lucy she locked the office door and rung my Mother. I was locked in until my Mum arrived and then sat there as the Head of Year said Now tell her what you told me. So I had to tell her. (Lucy talking about a disclosure event to her Mother forced by the actions of a teacher) I was admitted to a psychiatric unit in [town of the coast] and my family came down and I had to explain to them why I was there." (Debbie talking about a disclosure event to her family) I think I would have told whoever I was with at the moment I remembered - it was such a shock and a need to let the feelings spill out. (Elizabeth talking about a disclosure event to her partner)

Debbie

Elizabeth

Silvia

She just seemed really understanding and she seemed like really patient and she was a really nice person and she didn't seem at all threatening and you she, and she actually asked me at the end of the day which nobody else had done and which was like, amazing. You know, and I, you know, by that time I felt, I felt as well that I felt at that point that I was absolutely at the end of my tether, so I was ready to tell someone. You know, I was ready to open up to somebody a bit more because I was really thinking if I didn't I was going to end up killing myself." ( Silvia talking about a disclosure event to her General Practitioner)

In all these cases the description of the disclosure is in terms of some force compelling the speaker to disclose whether that was an external force, as in Lucy and Debbie's cases, or an internal force, as in Elizabeth and Silvia's stories. In the cases where it is an external force compelling the disclosure, the language of coercion is a lot more pronounced, both participants using the phrasing "I had to tell" to express the sense of being forced into the situation. However where the compelling force is internal, as with Silvia and Elizabeth, the sense of force is expressed differently. In these cases it is expressed as an outcome relating to other possible, more negative, outcomes. Silvia talks of "being at the end of my tether" so disclosure becomes the least dangerous / harmful outcome, whilst Elizabeth talks of having a "need" to let her feelings out, which silently positions it as the least negative outcome in the situation. The differences between internal and external compulsions to tell are interesting. In the case of internal compulsion, the characterisation of the disclosure event is of something which can no longer be contained and must explode outwards. In the case of external compulsion, however, the characterisation is of a something being dragged out. However the interesting point is that the wider characterisation is the same in both cases, that of being compelled to tell in some form and the (emotional) violence of the externally compelling forces seems somehow mirrored in an (emotional) violence of the internally compelling forces. In some cases the language used to describe disclosure is that of free choice. Silvia I don't remember how I broached it, but I might have just said to him something like Oh, you know, I want to tell you something and basically I told him." (Silvia talking about a disclosure event to a friend) I've told, I've told sort of friends and friends, everybody does, I've got close friends and I've told them." (Tiha talking about her choices about disclosure) I think we were just, erm, having like an afternoon together, just the two of us, and we were like talking and felt really close and like comfortable and, erm, I said I have something to tell you about myself which I think is important and, erm, I just said yeah, I've been abused as a child by my stepfather." (Claudette talking about a disclosure event to her partner)

Tiha Claudette

Lisa

my RE teacher I got on really well with and I just went up to her and said that my step-dad had put his hands up my top." (Lisa talking about a disclosure event to her teacher)

In all these cases the description of the disclosure is very neutral, the listener is told or the speaker says, rather than the descriptions of force in the previous two types of description. This free choice language of disclosure, however, also reflects a greater degree of control over the disclosure situation, in that the speaker has chosen the time and place of the disclosure as well as the appropriateness of disclosure at that point. These three modes of description of disclosure account for almost all the disclosure events discussed by the participants. These modes of description, however, do not map onto the reaction categories outlined in Chapter Six meaning that the type of disclosure is not causally linked to the response received. An overview of two of the complete transcripts will suffice to explore this point. Lisa Disclosure to Description of Response Type Disclosure Teacher Free Choice Supportive (Professional) Head of Year (Teacher) Indirect Macho Friend Forced (External Factors) Empathic Psychiatrist Forced (External Factors) Abusive (Professional) Community Support Worker Indirect Supportive (Professional) Friend Free Choice Abusive Ex-Fianc Free Choice Abusive Sister Free Choice Ambiguous Table 16: Description versus Response Type in Disclosure Events discussed by Lisa (organised by order in transcript) Debbie Disclosure to Flatmate Description Disclosure Risk Taking of Response Type

Empathic (changed to Abusive later) Family Forced (External Factors) Critical of Disclosure Neighbours Indirect Pitying Psychologist Forced (External Factors) Supportive (Professional) Police Free Choice Supportive (Professional) Court Indirect Abusive (Professional) Friend Free Choice Empathic Partner Forced (Internal Factors) Empathic Table 17: Description versus Response Type in Disclosure Events discussed by Debbie (organised by order in transcript)

Therefore it seems clear from the tables above that there is no link between the circumstances of the disclosure for the speaker, and the reaction received. What is also interesting is that these Tables are both ordered chronologically and it is clear that there is no progression over the life-course towards a free choice position. Instead the risk-taking and compulsion descriptions are still in evidence at the lower ends of the Tables which represent the most recent disclosures. Here we can see that wherever a woman is in her life, and no matter how many time she has disclosed before, the risk taking or force element of disclosures can still be present. So disclosure of childhood sexual violences cannot be seen purely as a learning experience in which women learn how to manage disclosures better. Instead I would argue that this reinforced the notion that the response, the listener, and cultural narratives all play a strong part in the disclosure situation. Language of Disclosure The connection between how and why the disclosure is made, and the response to it, was explicitly asked of at least one participant in the course of their lives. Ellie Actually once when I tried to explain it [the negative reactions and stereotyping Ellie had received] to a Counsellor I had before, they, erm, I was trying to say how everyone's reaction or practically everyone's reaction had been, very, really, err, disempowering I suppose, they'd been very, some people have been very supportive when I've been quite upset but they wouldn't expect me to be able to move on from that upset stage I suppose and it's not very empowering I suppose to have that and my Counsellor actually said that question about whether it was me and the way I was telling it and the way I was doing it. But I really don't think it was fundamentally about the way I was telling people because there were different ways I'd told people and different people."

The language of the actual disclosure itself was also something questioned in the interviews, but again no overall pattern was forthcoming. In fact most of the participants who were asked a question about the actual way in which they disclosed discussed several forms of disclosure. Ellie There's, erm, there's kind of a really non-emotional way that I have told people and sometimes I tell people with when I'm not sure how they're going to take it, erm, or if it's someone I have to tell. And it's basically telling the basics of what happened without going into any detail, basically saying that I was abused by my Mum and my Dad and my Dad was also physically abusive. And, erm, and there's, that can be the way I'd tell people to begin with, erm, completely kind of matter of fact, and erm, that's generally what's happened."

During the course of the discussions about different disclosure events, the wide range of ways in which the participants had disclosed became apparent, and they ranged from simply factual statements like "I was sexually abused as a child" to more co-operatively constructed disclosures. In fact, on many occasions, the disclosure was not a discrete passage of speech by the woman who had experienced childhood sexual violences, but rather a co-operatively constructed joint speech

event between the speaker and the listener. Describing these sorts of co-constructed disclosures was difficult for the participants because they were not telling me just about what they said but about what was said and done in the co-construction of the disclosure event. Therefore any sense of a defining characteristic of a discrete event which can be recognised immediately by both the speaker and the listener as a disclosure event is misleading. In effect the disclosure may be over many sets of interactions, or just one, may take a matter of seconds, or a number of hours, and may be a monologue or a dialogue. The conceptualisation of disclosures as part of the narrative bent of human existence is fundamental to understanding the nature of disclosures. In this sense the dialogical nature of disclosures, the co-operative construction and the diversity of experiences are much more understandable than if disclosure is considered as a controlled and controllable speech event, which statically gives information from one person (the speaker) to another (the listener) Confession, Testimony, or Autobiography As discussed in Chapter Three there are three major genres within which disclosure has previously been understood - those of confession, testimony, and autobiography (see Chapter Three for these explorations). However the disclosures discussed by the participants in this study only fitted two of those categorisations. Many of the first disclosure stories told related to a testimonial form of disclosure. By this I mean talked about the facts of the sexual violence in any detail. Tiha I had run away from school a few times, partly because of the abuse and partly because I was bullied at school and eventually, because I had to explain why, I told my parents. The only words I had to use were the slang of the time, and I told them that he'd finger fucked me and made me suck him. My parents found my explanations disgusting and embarrassing and told me so. They also did not believe me, saying it was a respectable school and such things did not happen. Later I ran away again, I also stole things from my parents (small amounts of money etc) and I told them again several times. Eventually they took me to see the headmaster. By this time I was 17. He not only did not believe me, he told me I was not pretty enough for the music master to want me in that way."

Here the disclosure has the nature of testimony because it is directly and explicitly about the acts that have taken place. Tiha explained to her parents the nature of those acts in a direct manner with the intention of getting across the facts of why she had absconded from the school. Lisa in discussing her first disclosure to a teacher was similarly took a testimonial approach. Lisa I just went up to her and said that my step-dad had put his hands up my top. I said, You might think why I've been behaving a bit weird recently because I was just a bit shocked that my step-dad had put his, put his hands up my top and she said Has it happened before? and I said, No, never, never happened before."

Here the testimonial nature of the disclosure is underlined by the teacher's questioning, again it is focussing on the facts of what had happened and is designed to draw out information from Lisa about the event. The questioning is, however, non-judgemental, unlike the response Tiha received both from her parents and again when she repeated the disclosure to her head teacher (above), where he explicitly judged her story and dismissed it. The testimonial nature of disclosures like this appears to invite judgement in terms of the listener's dis / belief. As explored in Chapter Three the notion of testimonial and confessional disclosures is, amongst other things, also a reflection of the nature of responsibility for childhood sexual violence. Not unsurprisingly, none of the discussions of disclosure for this study were confessional. Other authors have argued that we live in a confessional society and that disclosures of childhood sexual violence can be seen as part of the confessional mode of everyday relations. The disclosures discussed within this research would not support any assumption that confession, defined as The act of declaring or disclosing (something which one has kept or allowed to remain secret as being prejudicial or inconvenient to oneself); to acknowledge, own or admit (a crime, charge, fault weakness, or the like) (Oxford English Dictionary), was an apt characterisation of the disclosures discussed. Only one participant spoke of confessing what had happened and exploring the context of this disclosure may highlight the reasons why. Debbie It sort of got me first into the psychiatric system because I went to counselling, saw this counsellor and when I started confessing what had happened and went into detail I just got more and more depressed until in the end the doctor decided that I had to be in hospital.

Here the disclosure is made during engagement with a mental health professional and, as Foucault and others (see Chapter Three) have pinpointed, the confession in therapy has taken over from the religious confession as the most likely scene of confessional activity. As shown in a previous Chapter the situations are broadly similar in aspect. Here Debbie talks about seeing a counsellor, but Debbies own engagement with the mental health system may also be a factor in her choice of the description confession. Debbie has spent a number of years engaging with the mental health system as both an inpatient and an outpatient and so her familiarity with the discourse of the mental health system may be a factor in her choice of words. More traditionally, however, the use of the word confess may also signify some residual feeling of guilt about the childhood sexual violence.

Autobiographically speaking, however, the disclosures discussed also have drawbacks. The stories told about disclosure reflect a part of a life-story, or rather they follow one thread of a life-story within which incidental other information may be introduced but which in total does not tell "the story of one's life written by himself [sic]" (Oxford English Dictionary). Instead disclosures are the release of autobiographical information to a chosen other, in a form not always chosen by the speaker (in terms of passed-on disclosures or forced disclosures). In this sense, then, the incompleteness of disclosure, and the fact that it can be in a form other than of the speakers choosing, means that it cannot fulfil the complete remit of autobiography. It is, nonetheless, autobiographical in that it is releasing information about the woman who has experienced childhood sexual violence's life to the listener (whether or not it is that woman who is the speaker). As an autobiographical project, disclosure of childhood sexual violence is made (like all other disclosures) with a purpose in mind (as discussed in Chapter Six) and yet, like testimony acts, it is open to judgment by the listener(s). In this sense disclosure could, perhaps, be best seen as testimonial autobiography. Within feminist writing this is certainly the understanding employed as the basis of the remit of books like Farthing and Marce's The Memory Bird (1987) and Bass and Thornton's I Never Told Anyone (1983). However, as Armstrong (1991) has commented, the context of testimonial speech about childhood sexual violence has altered since feminists first broke the silence on the issue. Armstrong argues that: When we first exploded the news that this crime against children was routine and widespread, we did so within a feminist framework of the exposure of multiple, licensed violences against women and children: battering, rape, marital rape Our analysis, our understanding, placed child sexual abuse squarely within this framework identifying it as a historical permission, a male right: as normal not deviant. The goal was to raise society's consciousness: to try for a consensus which - it seemed in that climate of feminist optimism - might now say, hey, let's revoke the license! ...There was no fight. If we expected to be told to shut up, we were wrong. If we expected to be told we were wrong that abuse was so common, we were wrong. If we expected to be told we were wrong about the sexual politics - we were wrong as well. (Armstrong 1991, p.29) However this situation of speaking out was within a context of many voices speaking out rather than on an individual level. What Armstrong refers to is a collective voice of women speaking out politically about the abuses they experienced. Individually, however, the speaking out that disclosure represents may never have been so accepted as Armstrong argues here. Politically, speaking out may have been accepted, but within the confines of individual relationships the situation is very different. Not only that, but whilst a collective speaking out may act as testimony to the abuses perpetrated against children, individual disclosure can only act testimonially in limited circumstances, either by disclosure to someone who knows the perpetrator, or who can intervene in

the violence, or when it is associated with the collective speaking out about childhood sexual violence. So the position of disclosure as testimony, confession, or autobiography is a contested one in which no descriptor appears to fully express the nature of disclosure within individual relationships. It is autobiographical information, it may be testimonial, it is even, perhaps, part of a confessional culture; however, it is not wholly any of those three. The nature of autobiography, as the telling of the story of one's own life, also fails to express the nature of disclosure on another level. As previously discussed, autobiography is always incomplete, the life as lived cannot wholly be narrated or written: selection of materials must occur. Disclosure, too, is always partial, and selection of information similarly occurs (see the Disclosures section in Chapter Six). However a key difference lies within the understandings of the passive / active dichotomy within the responses to autobiography and disclosure. Autobiography is received in a passive manner, the text is already as complete as it can be when passed to the reader / listener, and the reaction from the reader / listener is always personal and usually not shared with others. However with disclosure the reaction is active and expressed to the speaker. This dynamic model of reciprocated interaction which disclosure represents is different from autobiography in its formal sense. 7.6 Playing the Responsibility Game Sticks and Stones may break my bones But words can never harm me Children's Rhyme Most of the participants spoke of feelings of responsibility towards the listeners with regard to the effects of the disclosure. Alice explicitly expressed this by saying "one of my biggest fears has always been I'm going to say something thats going to somehow damage the hearer". Ellie, too, discussed wanting to ensure the safety of the listener and talked about her conversations with a man who had also experienced childhood sexual violences. Ellie: " he had been told by a friend that he had to be careful with his close friends who he told because, erm, and how much detail he went into and how much he expected of them because it was, erm, it wasn't always safe, it was difficult to actually think of the other person in that and people aren't actually trained to deal with it."

This idea that the content of disclosure is somehow damaging and needs training to be able to be heard is something reinforced by texts such as Bass and Davis and Gerrilyn Smith.

Just as survivors need support through the healing process, you need support as well. Some of this can come from the survivor, but the demands on her own healing are often too great for her to have a lot of energy left over to support you. Nor should you expect itYet you need someone to listen to your pain, your fears, your frustrations and your confusion. (Bass and Davis 1988, p.325) Finding people you can trust to talk about the abuse is just as important for you as it is for the child. You will need someone who believes and will not judge you. (Smith 1995, p.63) The portrayal here of disclosure, as something which can be personally challenging, appears to be based, again, on the idea of disclosure as a cry for help. But more importantly, it also highlights an idea of disclosure as something with the power to harm. This is not to deny that disclosure evokes emotions that the listener may want to discuss with others: however, the idea that disclosing sexual violence can in itself be harmful to those listening is an altogether separate concept. Ellie's story suggests that people need some sort of training to deal with disclosure, an idea propounded in psychological discourses about disclosure. Alice's story and the excerpts from Bass and Davis and Gerrilyn Smith suggest, similarly, that those listening to disclosure need, themselves, to be supported in that. All of this suggests the idea of disclosure as something which involves work, in the sense that it requires some sort of support or intervention, and immediately denies any consideration that the most appropriate person to speak to would be the speaker themselves. Additionally, both Alice and Ellie's stories imply that the women who have experienced childhood sexual violence are somehow responsible for the emotions of those whom they tell. This suggestion of responsibility can be seen as further enforcing silence on women who have experienced childhood sexual violence. By suggesting that there is a need to be wary of other people's responses to disclosure, the idea of the speaker being responsible for how the listener feels creates a situation where the speaker must then consider the after-effects of their narrative (as in Alice's case). This sense of being responsible for the effects of disclosure is in some circumstances reinforced by listener's perspectives on disclosure. Ellie My housemate told a few, a couple of friends and I know that other people have known vaguely, vague things without actually knowing the specifics like who I was abused by and things like that. It made me really annoyed, but at the same time when I actually confronted her about it she kind of made me feel like it was just me being hysterical, and of course she's needed to tell people about it and she was perfectly within her rights to have told them even if they weren't people she didn't particularly look to for support, It was almost as if I, I had asked her to do something so huge by actually telling her about my past, that it was just like because she was aware of it, it was this incredibly big thing to ask of someone and it was

inalienable right to react and, it was kind of unfair of me to be upset when she reacted in, in any way that she felt was appropriate." Here the listener (Ellie's housemate) explicitly denies responsibility for her actions and transfers the responsibility to Ellie. Yet, at the same time, the housemate argues that her decision to tell others need not be linked to a desire to seek support for herself (as Bass and Davis and Gerrilyn Smith suggest). In effect the situation here is complicated by this reaction: not only is it Ellie's responsibility to take account of the effect on the listener but that listener's decision to talk to others about it outwith the seeking of support is also Ellie's responsibility. By telling her housemate about the childhood sexual violence she experienced, Ellie is both made to feel both responsible for the consequences and unable to control or criticise them. The housemate is allocating responsibility without power to Ellie - in effect saying whatever has happened with regard to the disclosure is your fault but you have no right to control them. Ellie in this instance has been forced to take responsibility for others without recourse to them. She discussed her experiences of this situation during her interview. Ellie that type of reaction I've come across a lot. I think it's probably caused a little bit by guilt and people not being able to do anything about it and not being able to solve it and therefore they kind of backlash almost again and say oh you shouldn't have put me in this position. But it, for a while it felt like I couldn't actually tell any of my closest friends about it, like I was wrong to have told my closest friends about that fact that it had happened, even if I didn't talk to them about it or didn't expect much support from them, it was just wrong in itself to have done that or to have shared this huge part of my life at the time with anyone, it was wrong. It felt like in the fairy story Beauty and the Beast where the Beast is just so grotesque that for anyone to actually see him causes them immense distress and children have nightmares because they can actually just see this person."

Here Ellie addresses the emotional consequences for her of this transfer of responsibility. The effect of silencing highlighted above is fore-grounded, as is the image of childhood sexual violence as being so harrowing as to distress the listener. In effect this shows the cyclical nature which reinforces a cultural narrative about sexual violence. The narrative says that childhood sexual violence is too distressing to contemplate and so when a disclosure is made the explicit (figurative) appearance of childhood sexual violence frightens people. The connection is obviously between the listener and the act(s) being spoken about - missing is the consideration of the speaker within this situation. As with the pitying response (see Chapter 6) my argument here is that the experience and the woman who has experienced the act(s) of childhood sexual violence become synonymised. The implication of this is that the consideration of the act as, something "so grotesque that for anyone to actually see him causes them immense distress" (in Ellie's words) is continued over and the woman

is viewed accordingly. Not only is it the act which is seen as so grotesque but also the product of that act, the effect of disclosure is that the woman who is speaking becomes seen as a harrowing by implication. This transference of reaction from the event or act(s) to the women who have experienced childhood sexual violence may be a key factor in the stigmatisation of women who have experienced childhood sexual violence. It both relates to and interweaves with cultural narrative and stereotypes about childhood sexual violence. 7.7 Being Judged

The role of judgement within disclosures (or what are more commonly characterised as accusations) of childhood sexual violence is one which has been debated constantly since the issue of childhood sexual violence was highlighted in the late 1970s. Initially the focus was on getting people to believe in the existence of childhood sexual violence and texts such as Armstrongs Kiss Daddy Goodnight or Bass and Thorntons I never told anyone developed a testimonial approach to the exposure of childhood sexual violence. In recent years the emphasis has shifted towards trying to understand the bases on which accusations can be believed in light of the so-called false memory syndrome scandals (Wakefield and Underwager 1994, Ofshe and Watters 1995, and Pendergrast 1998 all provide commentaries on this issue). Judgement, however, goes beyond the debates about whether an event actually happened or did not; judgements about the characteristics of people, based on the criteria being debated. As I argued in the last section, one of the ways that cultural narratives operate is to be the basis of judgements about identity, which ensue from women's identification as having experienced childhood sexual violence. Being judged was one of the foremost reasons identified by participants in this study for being circumspect about disclosing. Ellie I think the whole fact that I do feel like I have been judged or people have made judgements because of the fact that they know that they've heard about either something that's happened to me or that they know that I have been abused. I find it makes me quite angry and very frustrated at times. It feels like there's nothing I can do to actually change their minds because they've got those views." How do you feel at the moment when you have disclosed and before the other person responds? Nervous. As if they are going to judge you."

LL Debbie

The concept of being judged was mentioned many times by most of the women who took part in this research. Interestingly, ideas of the testimonial nature of disclosure fail to consider the nature of judgement in disclosures. Although it is the women who are represented as testifying in these discourses they are also the one's who are being judged. In some cases it is not only about issues of

guilt and innocence in the original act, but also being judged for disclosing the experience. The issue of judgement underscores most of the accounts of non-supportive reactions from others. In short the cultural narratives lead to the formation of opinions about the identity and characteristics of the speaker from which the reactions then ensue. For example, in the case of the macho response the listener assumes that the speaker is vulnerable and in need of protection. This arises from cultural narratives relating to the loss of innocence and the infantilisation of women who have experienced childhood sexual violence, and the reaction is an attempt to remedy the perceived need in the speakers life. Similarly the role of other cultural narratives can be traced through other reaction types. The effect of this sort of judgementalism is described by Ellie and Alice in their interviews. Interestingly they both use the metaphor of boxes to express the sense of containment and restriction they feel. Ellie It felt like I was being constrained because of how people perceived me because they knew about the fact that Id been abused. It wasnt, it didnt feel like it was anything specific about what Id told them or what I hadnt told them, it was the fact that they knew Id been abused. So just the fact that they knew that one thing it felt like they put me into a box, this was what theyd imagined someone would be like having had that happened when they were a child. And it didnt feel like I fitted into that box but because I felt like it was me taking on the world almost and everybody else, even though it wasnt really everyone else The vast majority of people who knew about it just basically had this predefined thing of who I was and there was nothing I could do to change their minds on that. Everyone telling me all those things and treating me like I was this kind of person meant that it felt like I was being brainwashed into believing that I was not very capable of doing what I wanted to do or becoming more than what had happened. We stuff people into boxes so you were sexually abused so thats the box you belong in, you cant possibly belong in a different box because weve decided you belong in that one. You know, you cant be an abused girl and go off to be a lawyer or a whatever, good heavens me no, you couldnt do that. It almost instantly turns you into a leper, you know the equivalent of what a leper would have been, oh my goodness quick get away from this person I might catch it kind of thing. If I say I am successful and I was sexually abused thered be real confusion you know A professional person and yet you were a how can you. Ive even heard somebody say to me, and this was one of my friends, saying to me How on earth have you ever managed to do all that youve done with your background? and that makes me really angry actually. Somebody who doesnt know the details of my background but has been really quite surprised that Ive actually gone on and done various qualifications and so on. God howve you managed to do that with your background. Its almost as if you come from a poor background or you come from an abused background or youve got an alcoholic father or a whatever you cant possibly go on and be anything else, youve got to kind of stay in that box somehow. I dont know if thats true but thats what it feels like. I mean the fear of telling to

Alice

the group at college was that, OK the minute I say that Ive been abused are you going to see me differently?. 7.8 Normality and Renormalisation

The concept of normality was deployed in several of the interviews. The notion of normality or renormalising ones self-image has not been discussed in literature on sexual violence (see the weaknesses in approach identified in Chapter Two). The concept of normality or renormalisation was not used as a term denoting some static sort of norm, but rather was used in terms of an active process of renegotiating identity by the women who had experienced childhood sexual violence. The experience of childhood sexual violences are not normal in the sense that they occur to only a sizeable minority of girl children. However renormalisation / normality here refers to a sense of feeling more normal with stories from ones life which obviously are not the norm. In a sense what this refers to is being able to see ones adult self as normal whilst accepting some childhood experiences as being abnormal. Two examples illustrate the deployment of normality. Lisa talked in interview about telling Debbie, one of her closest friends, about the sexual violence she experienced. Lisa and Debbie were both patients on a specialist mental health ward at the time and the disclosure had been little by little in both private conversations and group therapy sessions. However, despite the abnormal setting Lisa discussed how this disclosure made her feel more normal. Lisa Its nice to know that youre not a freak and its nice to know that, erm, you can gain support from each other, and, its nice to know that someones not going to be judgmentaltelling her made me feel like I wasnt a freak, erm, me self-harming because of it, she did the same and it didnt make me think, you know, Im a complete freak, Im not mad like because I self-harmed, you know. Im not, erm, a danger to other people like my psychiatrist said.

The renormalisation here came partly from the fact that both Lisa and Debbie both had abusive experiences in their childhood. It appears that it is the ability to talk openly about sexual violence which aids the feeling of being normal (that youre not a freak). That talking openly also involves being able to talk without fearing the consequences that Lisa associated with telling other normal people (such as being judged). Being able, then, to talk in an open fashion, free from the common responses that people who havent experienced sexual violence tend to make, made Lisa feel more normal. Here, however, Lisa also alludes to the sorts of responses that reinforce her feelings of abnormality such as being judged, non-supportive responses, and being told that her innate character is somehow now flawed (that she would be a risk to others). In her interview Lisa emphasised that there was a reinforcement of her own feelings of abnormality when talking to others.

Lisa

I cant start talking about when I was working in the office or when I was working in a shop or whatever because I havent done that, and, for the last twenty-four years I cant suddenly start talking about when I was nineteen I did this and on my twentyfist birthday I did that because on my twenty-first birthday I was in hospital.

Although Lisa here is explicitly addressing the abnormality of her older teenage years and her early twenties she did in other conversations refer to the same feeling about her childhood. Silvia too talked about a similar sense of renormalisation that came from disclosure to her friends. Silvia Its just made me feel more normal really, made me feel less of a freak that I can say Ive got these problems and this happened to me and blah blah blah and its not like, theyve accepted me as a person rather than as a person thats been abused, really. And that, a lot of the things that Ive, a lot of the problems that I have are, are not exclusive to child abuse victims, theyre just normal problems that normal people have, you know, so-called normal people have and thats quite reassuring because you know.

Again in this section it is the sense of being treated as someone who is not abnormal which lessens Silvias own feelings of being out of the ordinary. Being accepted as a person rather than as a person thats been abused. But, and more interestingly, it is also the acceptance of the problems that she has had as being no different to the problems that other normal people have had. The acknowledgement of the universality of problems (which in Silvias case included excessive use of alcohol and drugs) meant that Silvia saw herself as no different from any other person with problems despite her history of childhood sexual violence. Surprisingly these two examples of re-normalising identity both occur in what appear to be contradictory settings or for contradictory reasons. For Lisa the disclosure of sexual violence to another patient on a mental health ward made her feel less isolated and helped her reassess her own feelings about herself (in contrast to the experiences she had of disclosing to people who had not been abused). For Silvia it was a realisation that lots of people suffer similar problems to herself, which led her to realise that she was not that different from anyone else. Silvia, however, in her interview, identified the way in which society characterised children and women who have experienced childhood sexual violences as one reason why she felt that this renormalisation had to take place. Silvia theyre kind of cursed out straight away, oh shes ruined for life. They can say that about a seven year old, you know what I mean, they are condemning her already, shes never going to have a normal life.

The stereotypes used to represent children and women who have experienced childhood sexual violence, in Silvias eyes, prevent those people from being treated normally or seeing themselves as normal. The double-bind imposed by such stereotyping is that for a woman who has experienced

childhood sexual violence to match these stereotypes, then she is seen as abnormal in the eyes of society. However, if she does not match these stereotypes she is also abnormal, for failing to take on the characteristics society expects from women who have experienced childhood sexual violence. 7.9 Conclusion

This Chapter has expanded the understanding of the disclosure event by looking at some of the themes and issues that arise within women's stories about disclosing childhood sexual violence. Some of them, for example Being Judged, are issues which aren't surprising in their appearance in the fieldwork data. Others, such as the universality of negative consequences from disclosures being passed on, are rather more surprising. In many ways those studies which have sought to understand why women might disclose childhood sexual violence offer a one-dimensional understanding of the disclosure event in that, they suggest, a woman decides for whatever reason to disclose and then does so. This Chapter, and the preceding Chapter, dispels some of that onedimensionality. It is not merely that a woman decides to disclose and then does so, but rather a more complex negotiation of wants and fears occurs before disclosure takes place. Women tell their stories of childhood sexual violence not as a cry for help necessarily, but because as a species we tell stories as a means of communicating something about ourselves to others. We hope that those stories will be received well but are aware (and in this case very aware) that this is not necessarily going to be the case. This Chapter has also looked at how women who have experienced childhood sexual violence tell stories about their disclosures. This offers some insights into the ways in which these events are viewed and how women construct themselves within the events. The next Chapter seeks to offer some wider ranging thoughts on the disclosure of childhood sexual violence including looking at the issues of cultural narrative, disclosures over the life-course and limitations of this study. Chapter Nine goes on to offer a concluding overview of this work.

Chapter Eight Disclosures of Childhood Sexual Violences 8.1 Structure of this Chapter

This Chapter contains some final explorations of the phenomenon of disclosure of childhood sexual violences. The first section looks at the role of cultural narratives (8.2), the second at patterns of disclosure over the life-course (8.3) and the third at discussing disclosure (8.4). The Chapter then moves on to highlighting some of the limitations of the study (8.5). The Chapter ends with some short conclusions (8.6). 8.2 The Just So Stories: Stereotypes And Cultural Narratives

As noted in Chapter One for the purpose of this study I have differentiated the concept of a stereotype and of a cultural narrative. A stereotype is a judgement placed on a single person, or a group of people, about how they are thought to be because of a limited number of characteristics (such as that a fat person must eat too much, or that a model must be unintelligent). A cultural narrative is the story that underpins those stereotypes. The story that informs the stereotype is more general and provides the justification for the stereotype. There may be multiple cultural narratives for one stereotype or overlapping cultural narratives which feed into the stereotype. This Section has been titled just so stories because the deployment of cultural narratives and stereotypes are extremely well described by this phrase. Just so described the ways in which stereotypes and cultural narratives are used to avoid explanations and individualisation of the stories of childhood sexual violences. Instead listeners can deploy their stock of just so stories (meaning that is how it is) and ensure that their understandings of childhood sexual violences are not, and cannot, be challenged. Cultural narratives define characteristics and explain them in a way that passes into common usage and understandings. These are then re-deployed by individuals fact and by other narratives such as news reports, fiction and identity group politics. The cultural narratives about women who have experienced childhood sexual violence are many and varied. During interview the participants of this study were asked how they thought society viewed women who have experienced childhood sexual violences, and their answers pinpoint many of the cultural narratives. LL Lisa Do you think society has a preconceived idea of what a survivor will be like? Yeah, that they are going to be a problem in the community. They are going to be a problem, they are going to need Social Workers, they are going to need CPN's, [Community Psychiatric Nurses], they are going to need monitoring, they are going to be unstable for a long time, they are going to be in and out of hospital, they are going to be safer in hospital beds, they need specialised units, they need, they need

monitoring and they need to be aware because people think they can be abusers themselves because they have been abused then they are going to be abusers." Alice The image of a survivor of sexual abuse is generally somebody who is completely wrecked and in pieces, alcoholic, drug-abusing. Somebody who's totally and utterly wrecked, I think, is the image of a survivor of sexual abuse. And it's still thought of as being related to a particular class and it isn't. All the facts are there, it isn't, it's right across the board equally but no it's seen as a kind of working class, poor, incestuous kind of culture. And it isn't and that is still, we've just decided as a society that that must be where that comes from. Therefore that is where it comes from and in reality it doesn't. I think there is a view of what a survivor of abuse is, it's some totally wrecked person who cannot cope with any area of their life." I think that there's probably still a lot of ignorance around, people either think that it's something that you're either in one of two camps, you're either in the camp where you're completely not dealing with anything or you're in the camp where yes it happened, yes it's dealt with and that's OK. I suppose that, the second camp is probably because of the film interest in it, it seems whenever it comes up in films it's generally either something which is either dealt with very quickly in the film or it's something you find out about a person which explains something, it's a link but after they've dealt with it. Or it's the other extreme where you've been through something and you're a kind of quivering wreck for the rest of your life and there is nothing else to be done and there doesn't seem to be much portrayal of it being somewhere in between where it does affect your life but it doesn't have to affect your live forever and it might not be so extreme. I think that seems to be the kind of view of society in general."

Ellie

Here, in just some excerpts, the range of narratives becomes clear, and one element that is strikingly clear is the fact that, without exception, the cultural narratives are negative representations of women who have experienced childhood sexual violences. As Santoro Tomlin (1991) argues the general public does, in fact, stigmatise incest survivors (p.557). The cultural narratives revolve around the invariable harm caused by childhood sexual violence and therefore womens inability to cope with everyday life, women will become drug-users, mental health patients, or abusers themselves and so on. What is problematic is that these narratives are re-deployed on an individual level. People in contact with women who have experienced childhood sexual violence employ these understandings to inform their reactions, responses, and actions towards women who disclose experienced childhood sexual violence. This deployment of cultural narratives can be seen through the stories examined in Chapter Six. But in other cases their constant deployment more clearly shows the role that cultural narratives can play in reactions to women who have experienced childhood sexual violence.

Ellie

"The way they decide who gets the organisation positions in the Christian Union [at Ellie's University] is by a sort of democracy. Anyone not eligible for a position (e.g. third years) meet up in the autumn term and discretely discuss the others and then they vote anonymously. In my first year one of the people involved told me that the only reason why I wasn't offered a post was because they thought I was dealing with too much at the moment. I'd told his wife about a things a few weeks earlier when she said that it had happened to her. He said that he knew what it was like because of his wife and so knew that I could do without the hassle of responsibility for a few years. In my second year I found out that I had been written off the list even though I was earmarked for a number of posts, when one girl who was well-respected mentioned to the old committee that she really didn't think I'd want a post as I was dealing with some really nasty stuff from my family. I hardly knew the girl and they completely ignored the fact that I'd been doing a good job of Welfare Officer in the Student Union for the past year, as well as half a dozen other positions in other organisations. I didn't care about not getting a post until I found out why I wasn't considered."

Here it is Ellie's identity (or rather the perception of her identity as a woman who has experienced childhood sexual violence) which then excludes her from the positions of responsibility. Moreover, the fact that this was all done without consulting Ellie during the process suggests most clearly that the understandings of childhood sexual violence and it's after-effects being used were those disseminated by the cultural narratives, rather than a complex and integrative understanding of Ellie as an individual. Tiha told a different story relating to the interplay between cultural narrative understandings of childhood sexual violence. Tiha I used to manage an advisory centre in [district] and it was actually one of the, it was one of the worst places Ive actually worked at, a real middle class bunch of bitches there. I mean Ive worked in, doing the sort of work I do Im used to working in stressful places and, I kind of made a mistake when I went there because it was after Id been working at [another district], doing a lot of senior level training and I was feeling very positive and very successful really and I went in there and the biggest mistake I made was, I mean it was the first paid managerial job Id got, Id done managerial jobs before but Id never been paid for them, certainly in the public sector. And I went in there and I tried to change it. I mean I was told I was being put in that branch because it was a difficult branch and they thought I could sort it out. And so I tried to change it from the word go when what I should have done is gone in there and looked around for six months or so and figured out how it worked and figured out how I was going to do it, but what happened was that these women became very defensive and how they were defensive was to attack me all the time. When we first went in it was a co-operative so we were all joint managers but then it was decided that too much money was being spent so they decided to make it a hierarchy, so we all had to apply for our own jobs. I got the Assistant Managers because I didnt even go for the Managers because I didnt want it and I was still working with people who Id been joint Manager with and they brought in a manager from outside. And at some point during all of this, because of all of this I was really stressed and I cant really remember doing it but I can remember saying, maybe I

reacted badly to something but I remember saying Look I was abused and you know what I mean? And it was like, all the reaction I got from it was Stop using your abuse as an excuse and I wasnt trying to, I really wasnt, I was just trying to use it as an explanation to the way Id reacted about something. Here the cultural narrative being employed is one in which women who have experienced childhood sexual violence are understood as using their experiences as an excuse for actions in later life. This abuse-excuse narrative47 is again tied into notions of responsibility in the lives of women who have experienced childhood sexual violence. Tihas explanation of her comments was reacted to as an evasion of responsibility by her for what she had done (reacted badly to a stressful situation at work). However Tiha later went on to relate another aspect of disclosure for her, which is that the abuse-excuse paradigm is more often employed by others (in her experience) than by women who have experienced childhood sexual violence. Tiha I mean its a bit like the old PMT thing, you know, as soon as men found out about PMT every symptom that you ever got was always PMT, you know, and with certain, with some sorts of people every kind of emotion that you ever showed would be because you had been abused.

This inversion of the abuse-excuse concept, where in fact it is the listeners to disclosure who assess behaviour from the standpoint that speaker has been abused, seems to be a common theme in disclosure. Many of the participants spoke of fears both of being judged, and also of a retrospective reassessment taking place, where their previous actions are explained in terms of the new knowledge disclosed. This phenomenon is explored more fully in the next section of this Chapter. Other examples of the ways that cultural narratives relating to women who have experienced childhood sexual violence are explicitly deployed in the reactions to disclosure could be explored here. For example Lucys experiences at University (Abusive Reactions Section in Chapter Six), or Alice's experiences of over-protectiveness (Pity Section in Chapter Six), both explicitly refer to stereotyping of women because of the disclosure of their experiences of childhood sexual violences. However, these cultural narratives are so pervasive that any such discussion would ultimately take up the majority of space for this research, and the tracing of such cultural narratives can be done both individually (by women themselves) and societally. It is not, however, the intention of this piece to devote much more attention to the tracing of these cultural narratives. It is, however, important to understand the pervasive nature of these cultural narratives and their role in the decisions regarding disclosure that are made by women who have experienced childhood
47

Recently this has found a new lease of life in stories about false memories of childhood sexual abuse and abuseexcuse has become a vehement backlash term for women who try to justify their actions through an understanding of the harm that abuse does. In effect this new deployment of the abuse-excuse punishes women who have experienced childhood sexual violence by using narratives as a tool. For more on this deployment see Wilson (1998).

sexual violence.

The identified reasons for not disclosing often revolved around issues of

judgementalism and retrospective reassessment of motive and actions, and the next section explores this aspect to disclosure. 8.3 Patterns of Disclosure over the Life-Course

The notion of the internalised compulsion to speak reinforces a view of disclosure as a violent speech act and indeed a speech act that can do harm. This idea of a compulsion to speak something which is (seen by the speaker as) potentially damaging reinforces the notion of disclosure as a speech act which is something dragged from the speaker in times of need. Although most of the participants in the study spoke about one instance of disclosure in this way, in many cases over their life-course the nature of disclosure changed from this violent speech act to a more reflexive view of disclosure. For example Silvia, expressed the fact that she felt her strategy had changed. LL Silvia How do you feel in general about telling people now? Well I don't mind as I said, I don't mind if they're not really that much to do with me and I'm not really emotionally involved with them then it doesn't really bother me, erm, and now I tend to get in quickly with people that I think, I mean I have to be responsibly secure that the relationship's going somewhere whether it's a friendship or whatever but I tend to get in there quite quickly with it and then it's out the way and it's just like an accepted thing and it's not, not built up and it doesn't get to like where I've got to tell them, I've got to tell them and you know which is horrible, horrible. And I'll never go through that again because there is no way I'd ever leave it, never leave it again now, which is one of the good things about getting older."

A changing attitude to disclosure over the life-course was commented upon by several of the participants. All the participants spoke about their disclosure strategies at the current time. For example, Silvia (above) and Samantha both talked about changes in their attitude towards disclosure and their strategies for disclosing now. Samantha I don't feel the same compulsion to tell people now at all. I sometimes, certainly not unless the subject of sexual abuse in childhood comes up. But I haven't got an overwhelming desire to, a burning desire to tell people, but if it comes up then I sort of, I sort of want to tell them that I do know something about it but not often."

Both Silvia and Samantha here discuss that they no longer feel a compulsion to disclose (in Silvia words "it doesn't get to like where I've got to tell them"). Instead both Silvia and Samantha talk about a much clearer strategy of disclosure - for Silvia that she will tell people fairly quickly after she is sure the relationship is one which will be significant and for Samantha that she doesn't discuss it unless the subject arises.

The idea of the uncontrollable disclosure was also used by two other participants, Lisa and Elizabeth. Both talked about disclosures that just happened because they felt they couldn't control them. Elizabeth Sometimes I tell strangers - people at parties, friends of friends. It keeps bubbling out uncontrollably. In my head I think that the abuse wasn't that bad - to tell people that I never see again - to see and hear their horrified reactions reminds me that it was terrible, that it shouldn't have happened. It's something I don't like admitting but I have a bit of a problem with it, now. It's in my head a lot and I've been through so much therapy it comes up, comes across when I can tell too many people really, too many friends. And you know maybe that's not such a good thing. So I'm trying to learn now to be more careful about who I tell and not just to give them a whole life history before they, before they know me too much."

Lisa

Here it becomes apparent that Elizabeth's purpose for disclosure is that by disclosing she can reaffirm her (flagging) sense of the injustice that occurred. She uses disclosure as a way to remind herself of the essential badness of the experiences she had as a child. Lisa's strategy, however, is in a transitional period. Her strategy is under negotiation; Lisa is trying to learn to be more discerning about whom she tells. Alice also talked about how she was developing a strategy of disclosure but her adaptation was very different to Lisa's. Alice I am very much in this place where I believe this sort of stuff should all be out in the open. I'm really, really against secrets and any sort of secret stuff so I want stuff talked about and I want it brought out in the open and I want people talking about it and I want somehow wherever I am to develop a culture of it being OK to say it. In schools and things I think that culture should be developed where kids know it would be OK if they disclosed something like that, that they will be kept safe. Erm, the sad thing is I'm not sure we guarantee that really but we should be able to, if we want kids to do that then they've got to know that they're going to be safe. Erm, so yeah, I'm sort of like on this quest to, erm, dig up any form of secrecy and get rid of it and expose it. That's where I'd say I am now."

Lucy, Tiha, and Claudette, on the other hand, all discussed strategies of selective disclosure. Lucy I think I tend to tell people now when I think they are ready for it but also when not telling starts to make me inhibited in my relationship with them. I won't tell people who've had happy, settled lives, go-lucky lives, I won't really tell them. Just to hear them talk about people's, other people's lives who've had difficult circumstances, they just don't want to, I feel they don't want to deal with it, I will not tell them, I just wouldn't feel comfortable. I certainly box people up into those who have suffered and those who haven't and I don't want to necessarily be around those who haven't been through anything because I feel, I just, it's really patron[ising], I

Claudette

think like they're shallow, I categorise them as being shallow, it's like You, I can't, I won't be able to talk to you, we'll have nothing in common, erm, because I think what has happened to me has made me always want to look at things very deeply and I want to be around people who talk about deep and meaningful things and if you're talking about shallow, I mean we all need to get, to be shallow and superficial just to relax and stuff I know that, but I do tend to stay away from people like that because I just feel there's not this understanding so I do look at them and think I don't know if I can trust you, yeah. Tiha I think I've talked about it with all my friends at one point or another so I don't have many acquaintances which might have something to do with it, if I had more acquaintances then I might be, and maybe, I haven't dated anyone in a long time maybe if I was going on a first date I'd be thinking differently. I suppose it's something about. I mean one of the things with friends, I choose my friends quite carefully, my friends I choose for the fact I can be comfortable with them and they accept me as who I am and I accept them for who they are and I actually have a pretty eclectic bunch of friends. They're people that you, you can be yourself with and that, who accept you for that, so yes those sort of people that you know I feel I can talk about it with."

All three selective disclosure strategies above share certain characteristics, however, interestingly, both Claudette and Tiha suggest their choice of friends actually facilitates their disclosures to them, in that they choose people on the basis of experience or attitude which will make them better listeners in a disclosure situation. For Claudette this is people who have suffered in their lives and who think deeply about their experiences. For Tiha it is people with whom she is comfortable and who are accepting. Womens current disclosure strategies have been categorised in Table 18 which shows two common and two unusual strategies. The first unusual strategy is Alice's openness towards disclosure and encouragement of others to talk about childhood sexual violence (this could also have been typified as an activist approach to disclosure). The second unusual strategy is Ellie's disclosure avoidance, where she attempts not to talk about childhood sexual violence at all. Participant Alice Claudette Debbie Elizabeth Ellie Lisa Description of Strategy Open disclosure and promotes disclosure Selective disclosure Selective disclosure Uses disclosure to reinforce the badness of the experience Disclosure avoidance Ongoing strategy adaptation. Trying to achieve selective disclosure Lucy Selective disclosure Samantha Guarded privacy unless childhood sexual violence comes up Silvia Selective disclosure Tiha Selective disclosure Table 18: Strategies of Disclosure amongst the participants

The two most commonly employed strategies are what I have termed selective disclosure and guarded privacy. Selective disclosure is where the participant articulated very clear relationship grounds on which disclosure is made. Guarded Privacy, however relates to where disclosure is made on the grounds that the discussion in which the woman is involved relates to childhood sexual violence. The difference between the selective strategy based on relationship grounds and on relevance grounds are interesting. For Samantha it appears that the disclosure is for a purpose of displaying knowledge, it is, in effect, a de-individualised strategy, whereas the selective strategy is intimately related to the relationship and the individuals involved. This section demonstrates that the strategies for disclosure which women who have experienced childhood sexual violence create are not fixed, but rather dynamic and fluid. Although most of the women had reached a point of selective disclosure, this cannot be taken as a sign of coming to some sense of understanding and being able to adequately manage the disclosure process. As I highlighted in the passages on the Stories of Disclosure (in Section 7.5) the career of disclosure over a womens life-course does not seem to bring them to positions of authority or comfort within the disclosure process. Those whose strategies I have described as selective disclosure range in age from their twenties to their fifties. No-one who participated in this study had reached a point of confidence about disclosing their experiences of childhood sexual violences. Even Alice who had the most open attitude to disclosure also expressed anxiety over each disclosure (see for example page 233 where Alice described her most recently disclosure). 8.4 Discussing Disclosures

Foucault posited that one of the benefits of characterising sex as repressed is that it gives any speaker the characterisation as a transgressor. In Chapter One I made the argument that my own motivation for this study was not to characterise myself in this way. Similarly none of the participants of the study described their disclosures in terms of purposefully transgressing boundaries. However, the transgression of social norms involved in disclosure became clear during this research. Many of the participants spoke of the way in which childhood sexual violence was not talked about even when they made a disclosure. Alice I don't, I don't really think society does deal with abuse issues actually. I think it's kind of lumped together with all kinds of crime and its, you know, its just one of those things. No-one in society does deal with it, if I'm honest. I don't see what we do generally as dealing with it. [] We don't even try to understand, I don't think, where someone's come from and why. It's all very, erm, on the surface I think. I think that's the classic thing, really is the way that we don't look at people as individuals we don't really hear what they're saying. []And no-ones asked

LL Alice

actually, interestingly enough, no-one asked. If someone says Oh you know I something, I dont know something Ive been divorced or something, people generally sort of say Ohh what happened? or you know, if you say I was sexually abused, no-one has ever said to me Well who did it? Who by? What happened? How old were you? no-ones ever done that. Which is interesting really. No-ones ever, ever pushed me for more information, Ive not had any questions. Its just dawned on me, no-ones ever asked. How do, how do you see that? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I think its a bad thing. I mean its part of this, erm, Its horrible and ugly and lets brush it under the carpet syndrome. I do, because I still think it and I know we talk about it more now in society than ever we did before but I still dont think were really accepting of what that means and there's maybe a fear about asking. Maybe folks are terrified of asking cos they not going to like what theyre going to hear. I dunno." When they say children have been sexually abused it kind of like, it's like they want to diminish what has actually happened, because if you say a child has been repeatedly raped, then it brings across what has actually been done to that child, but when you say sexual abuse it sounds as though so like if someone, there are different kinds of abuse but I think it make people just turn away from it, it's like a blanket over people, what's really happening. People don't want to know about it and by these terms it's like they're allowing them not to look at what is really happening. Society doesn't want to know for it's own reasons so that makes me angry [] I wish there were more people able to talk about it openly, 'cos that, the whole thing is so secretive in itself, it needs to be brought out so they know what to do about it so, but I think as well it would help people who have been abused being able to talk about it." I think that there's a lot of fear around it though, a lot of fear about discussing it and a lot of fear of, especially if it's someone you know, a lot of people can discuss it abstractly especially if they don't know I've been abused and we can discuss what an awful thing it is but it's in the same way as say discussing third world poverty or, erm, concentration camps or whatever."

Claudette

Ellie

In all these excerpts there is explicit reference made to how society does not talk about childhood sexual violence, how individuals also do not ask questions or discuss it, and how this negatively impacts on the life of women who have experienced childhood sexual violence. Alice's realisation that no-one had ever asked her questions about her disclosures in terms of asking for further details is suggestive of Ellie's discussion of how people may deal with it abstractly but not on an individual level. All three women talk about the fact that childhood sexual violences are not discussed openly either with women who have experienced childhood sexual violences, or in general. The lack of talk about disclosure presents another contradiction the women who had experienced childhood sexual violence were talking about their experiences and yet the listeners in the stories of disclosure were very much not responding to the discussions being initiated by the participants.

One participant saw this as a symptom of confusion about why the disclosure might be being made. Samantha talked about the way she felt that some people dont understand her purpose for disclosure. Samantha If I was really thinking about it you would tell people why you are telling them, before you even told them. You would say, you know, that you wanted some support or you wanted to know what they thought or something, you know. Then you, then I might have got out of it what I wanted, you know, but, erm, that is probably something I'm talking about now as theory."

Here Samantha proposes that to combat the confusion some people might feel at receiving a disclosure the speaker could explain why they are disclosing and therefore give the requisite information necessary to defuse the situation before it has occurred. However, although Samanthas interpretation might express some of the true nature of the disclosure event, there are obviously reasons why this confusion occurs. After all, if Plummer is correct and human nature is to be homo narrans (Plummer 1995, p.5), then the telling of a story about childhood sexual violence should be viewed no differently than any other story which an individual may narrate. In truth, stories about childhood sexual violence (disclosures) are seen as different to other stories. They are potentially stigmatising (like other disclosures, for example of HIV status or sexual identity), but they are also open to interpretation by others in a way which may negatively impact on self-image (like almost all stories) and they are also constantly about risk taking, even with close friends, partners, and relatives. This combination of factors is unusual for storytelling. Also unusual is the fact that whereas storytelling is generally teller driven (that is that the story teller rather than the listener controls the storytelling process), disclosures are far more clearly coconstructed, in that it is the listener who controls the reaction to the story and thereby controls the storytelling itself. In particular it is the way in which the reaction (wanting not to talk about childhood sexual violence) becomes identified as a key absence in disclosure situations. In many senses this reinforces the point that talking about childhood sexual violence is still an unusual activity on both an individual and a societal level. Only one participant, Lucy wrote about a disclosure event that was met with a discussion about it from the listener. Lucy I think the most surprisingly honest reaction I've had was from a mate of mine who hadn't been abused but her parents were social workers. I told her one long and particularly alcoholic evening when we were chatting. We discussed it later and she basically said she wasn't sure what to do and wanted to ask me but wasn't sure whether that was more dumb than just muddling along. We had a long discussion about her feelings and my feelings and it really strengthened our friendship 'cos I knew she was being honest with me and respected what I had told her."

Lucy positively portrays this unusual response from a listener the experience of being asked about the disclosure, and having a conversation about it initiated strengthened the friendship. It also makes clear that a key issue in the reaction to disclosures, honesty, is very important. Given the fact that understanding reactions within professional relationships and empathic reactions within non-professional relationships have as a factor a genuine response, the call for openness should not be surprising. However, that a key response in discussions about disclosure (that is about speaking about childhood sexual violence) should be these sorts of comments about discussing disclosure is interesting. Foucault's (1976) thesis that sexuality was not repressed in the Victorian era but rather dispersed into a profileration of specialised discussions may be a key understanding here. As Foucault argues it would be a mistake to see in this proliferation of discourses merely a quantitative phenomenon, something like a pure increase, as if what was said in them were immaterial, as if the fact of speaking about sex were of itself more important than the forms of imperatives that were imposed on it by speaking about it. (Foucault 1976, p.36) In her Foucauldian analysis of childhood sexual violence, Vikki Bell offers the following understanding. The recent discovery of incest as a social problem has meant that the questions it raises for sociology have changed. Sexual abuse within the household has become acknowledged as a cause for public concernThe ensuing discussions of incest have taken place on a much more public stage than had earlier musings of social theoreticians. Over the past decade or so many media discussions have highlighted the issue. (Bell 1993, p.2) But what Bell does not identify here, is that the same proliferation into specialised spheres, which was initially identified as repression by social theorists, may have occurred with the issue of childhood sexual violence. It is clear that the discussion about childhood sexual violences is subject to imperatives imposed upon it by those discourses in which it is referenced, that is within psychology, the media, and so forth. In the case of stories about childhood sexual violence, the response of not talking about the story being told can, perhaps, be seen as a response to the cultural narrative that states that only the people who have been trained can adequately respond to disclosures. Indeed reinforcement of this cultural narrative had been experienced by at least one participant in this study. Ellie she saidto be careful with close friends and how much detail he went into and how much he expected of them because it was, erm, it wasnt always safe, it was difficult to actually think of the other person in that and people arent actually trained to deal with it

This professionalisation of response to disclosures can be seen as a key element in the reason why childhood sexual violence is not talked about in general society. Whereas, before the rediscovery of childhood sexual violences, the silence was attributed to the repression of knowledge about childhood sexual violences, in the post-rediscovery period sexual violence is still not discussed, despite the argument that it is no longer a taboo subject. It appears that whereas previously the taboo was seen as being about acknowledging the existence of childhood sexual violences, it appears that now the taboo relates to the discussing of childhood sexual violences, even when others initiate the conversation. 8.5 Limitations of the Study

In any academic work it is important to explicitly acknowledge the limitations of both the methodology and the findings. Not unsurprisingly, for a small scale study involving only ten participants, I make no claim towards the generalisability of the factors discussed here, but do make claim to their appropriateness (Glaser and Strauss's fit with the data) within the context of the data collected. Methodologically, however, I must acknowledge the role of subjectivity in the findings. As explored in Chapter Three, Smith's assertion that the "knower as subject is always situated in the actualities of her experiencing" (Smith 1990, p.5) means that subjectivity is always present in research dealing with knowing subjects. In effect, although the subject of the study can be isolated in terms of the narratives they produce for research, they are also "an actual subject prior to the subject constituted in the text" (Smith 1990, p.5). Working with autobiographical stories inherently means relying on the veracity of the participants memories and understandings of the situations they are relating. Their interpretations of events are throughout this work the basis of further explorations, or rather the interpretations placed on events by the participants are the basis of all later analysis carried out. This mode of exploration allows for the subjectivities of the participants to be foremost (rather than the subjectivities of the researcher) but it also can hold distinct and unusual problems. In some situations it is clear to see how the participants interpretations may be skewed by, for example, a lack of external knowledge (external to the situation they are describing). To illustrate this I want to use an excerpt from Lucy's written piece in which she describes her first adult disclosure. The use of this specific story comes solely from the fact that this story was more obviously challenging than other examples. Lucy in a telephone conversation described her relationship with the person to whom she disclosed.

Lucy

it's complicated really because there was a real sexual chemistry there, we enjoyed each other's company and nothing physical happened but there was such a strong bond between us which was a real adult sexual and emotional attraction. He was a teacher and as such never broke the boundaries of professionalism but at the same time our relationship was charged with this tension.

Her written piece describes the disclosure event. Lucy The first time I told someone it was a teacher I had been very close to. I think he knew I wanted to tell him something quite serious and for about two weeks he either didn't have time to talk or we kept missing each other when I was trying to get a quiet time to talk with him. In the end we agreed to meet. I sat down and all I managed to say was When I was younger there was this man who lived next door and he, he I couldn't say anymore. The teacher finished the sentence with abused you and then put his head in his hands. There was silence for minutes and then he said Leave it with me and walked out. I had wanted someone to say something to me that actually meant something rather than walk away from me. At the moment I told him I saw the realisation dawn on his face and I realised I had damaged our relationship - you could see the disappointment and the fear on his face. Previously to me telling him we had got on really well and I thought he had respect for me, I saw that respect disappear when I told him. The next time I saw him was in a corridor, he said to me I can't deal with it, I've told your Head of Year, you have to go and see her now and he walked away. Our friendship was never the same after that, I thought he was someone I could trust and talk to and in the end he passed the buck because he saw an image of me he had created disappear.

The combination of Lucy's story above and the explanation of the relationship that she gave creates a story which is partial and subjective. In terms of the analysis of the story Lucy tells, there are many ways in which it could be read. Lucy may be correct in her analysis that this was a "real adult sexual attraction" in which case she is narrating a story of unprofessionalism and personal disappointment. It can be read as a story of the heterosexual enforcement of power on behalf of the teacher, in which he relates to her by flirting and then becomes concerned about the possible implications of this when she discloses previous sexual violence, or it can be read as a sexual interpretation by a maturing teenager which the teacher may have not encouraged. In each case heteronormativity can be seen either through the flirtatious relationship he appears to have engaged in. Some have commented that flirting is used by teachers as a way of negotiating their roles within the educational setting. In this context Lucy's claim that he never broke the boundaries of professionalism (by which she explained she meant he had not touched her sexually) is belied by an understanding that flirtation without development into a sexual relationship is still an inappropriate relationship with a student at secondary school. These conflicting, yet possible, readings of the situation open the discussion relating to how we can use narrative findings within research in a responsive manner. The basis of this research has been

to use the interpretations of the participants as the basis for the analytical categories and subsequent comments. However, the story told by Lucy raised issues about both the ethics of this and the judgement of the researcher to raise other possibilities. For example, Lucy here makes the claim that the teacher involved "never broke the boundaries of professionalism", yet many would argue that a flirtatious relationship already does precisely that. As a researcher I was torn between employing Lucy's understanding of the situation and exploring this story as a macho response, which amply illustrated the heteronormative myths which may come into play during disclosure, or whether to reject her understanding and emphasise the abusive nature of the teachers relationship with Lucy. To do the former risked decontextualising the story from external factors, such as developments in teachers awarenesses of childhood sexual violence (see for example Jones and Mahony 1989, Mahony 1989), whereas the latter denies the possibility that Lucy could have engaged in a sexual ` whilst still legally under the age of consent. As a researcher, then, I was challenged by several issues about the story - as it stands (without the contextual information) the story appears to be most suitably categorised as a macho response which highlights some of the issues about heterosexual normativity, teenage girls, and the challenges that disclosure may pose. As such the analysis of the story would have focussed on how the destruction of the image that Lucy felt the teacher had demonstrated, during the disclosure event, reveals cultural narratives about the sexually unaware. But the story also shows the heteronormative insistence that women should still be constrained by the patriarchal ideas of purity for women and how sexual innocence appears to be prized in terms of sexual desire. However the introduction of further contextual information in terms of Lucy's recollection of the relationship makes the analysis of her story more difficult. For example, whereas she defends the relationship in terms of her own maturity and the boundaries of professionalism, others may argue that flirtation itself breaks the boundaries of professionalism. Her interpretation of the teachers action can only be subjective - she states what she thinks was happening at the time. In many ways these points apply to all the stories told in this research - the subjective interpretations of situations and the partiality of storytelling itself can be challenged in these cases. However this study is ultimately concerned with understanding disclosure events from the perspective of those who are disclosing childhood sexual violence. Other research into the comparative experiences of the speaker and the listener may reveal more important insights into how disclosure events are coconstructed and how they are viewed and experienced differently by the speaker and the listener.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the relationship, and although Lucy's involvement could be either a precocious sexual attraction with an older man or another example of exploitation and possible survivor re-victimisation, the story in itself is interesting. It shows clearly the way in which the lack of response and the lack of discussion about the disclosure leads to Lucy feeling isolated and angry, and when combined with the subsequent story reproduced in Chapter Six of the locking in she experienced and the forced disclosure to her mother, the stories combine to show real problems with the way in which the school (mis)handled the situation. The inherent tension here between Lucy's interpretation and the external knowledge of movements within the teaching profession regarding childhood sexual violence aptly highlights some of the problems in using narrative within research. In telling the story Lucy offers her explanations for what happened, whilst the literature offers another interpretation. Storytelling is ultimately a vehicle for personally understanding the world and for sharing that understanding with others, and, as such, no story is generalisable to others despite situational similarities which may occur. Therefore Lucy's experience would not be the same as any other experience by a teenage girl of a flirtation with a teacher although it may share elements with other similar stories. As such the limitation of the study in terms of its narratological basis is purely that stories are subjective and are told subjectively. However issues of generalisability go further than simply the specificity of stories. Analytical categories which arise from the interpretations of the participants are necessarily limited by the range of understandings participants are familiar with and would employ in association to aspects of their own lives. This range of explanations necessarily limits the analytical concepts, available and may have meant that other response types or issues about disclosure are excluded. Certainly the limited sample may have led to the exclusion of certain response category types, for example those suffused with racist beliefs, previously highlighted by Melba Wilson (1994, p.6-37). However, despite these considerations, the analytical categories do meet Glaser and Strauss's concept of fitting the data, which they have suggested should replace generalisability as a criteria for grounded research (see also Baxter and Eyles discussion 1999 and my discussion of these issues in Chapter Five). If theory is faithful to the everyday reality of the substantive area and carefully induced from diverse data, then it should fit that substantive area. Because it represents that reality, it should also be comprehensible and make sense both to other persons who were studied and to those practising in that area. If the data upon which it is based are comprehensive and the interpretations conceptual and broad, then the theory should be abstract enough and include sufficient variation to make it applicable to a variety of contexts related to that phenomenon.

Finally, the theory should provide control with regard to action toward the phenomenon. (Strauss and Corbin 1990, p.23) Here I interpret Strauss and Corbin's comments as suggesting that, whereas traditionally quantitative research has claimed generalisability based on large sample sizes, Grounded Theory Methodology more adequately provides conceptual categories which have generality enough to fit circumstances other than those from which they were drawn. The distinction here between generalisability and generality is an important one - generalisability suggests that the findings can be abstracted beyond the data to offer some truth about the phenomenon under study. Generality however is a more guarded approach, which suggests that although possibly applicable to other similar situations the concepts cannot be seen as abstract data or rather that the concepts cannot live outside of the context of the data from which they are drawn. Grounded theory (despite Glaser and Strauss's insistence on positivistic traditions within qualitiative research) seems to me to best produce theories which express generalities but which also remain true to the specificities of the data. By not attempting to create a grand theory of disclosure what I hope to do is actually maintain both the individual nature of the stories and their commonalities. In this sense, the study is thus limited by my own expectations of it. Analysis was not carried out to create a single distinct theory which explains everything in the data (including the variations) but rather to create a better understanding (rather than a restrictive model) of disclosure for the adult women who consented to take part in the research. 8.6 Conclusions

This Chapter has brought together some wider issues raised by the research both in terms of the disclosure of childhood sexual violences and of the research itself. The first three sections explored issues of the deployment of cultural narratives, patterns of disclosure and discussing disclosures. All three are overarching themes from the research data. The final section has examined the limitations of the study and the ways in which research is always subject to tensions. Chapter Nine goes on to provide an overview of the research and some concluding thoughts.

Chapter Nine - A Theory of Disclosure 9.1 Scope of this Work Despite both a public and academic debate on childhood sexual violences since the early seventies (although both are limited in different ways), it seems we have very little information about actual experiences of women who have experienced childhood sexual violences when compared to the amount of writing we have from dominant perspectives and particularly the psy-sciences. We have still less information about experiences of disclosure over the life course and what impact these have on the ways in which women who have experienced childhood sexual violences are treated. This work has started to try and redress that situation by exploring the disclosures made by a small sample group of women over their life courses. Previous literature has portrayed disclosures as speech acts within specific contexts and with specific aims. Within professional literature the understanding of disclosure draws on the confesssional model where Hymers (1998) descriptions of confessional events accurately describe the assumed characteristics of disclosures (see Section 3.8). According to Hymer confessional activity involves exclusivity, affective quality, changes in self-esteem, risk, identity, specialness, discontinuity, and phenomenology. Previous literatures have focussed on disclosures within professional relationships and emphasised these confessional characteristics. Exclusivity is shown in discussions of shame, stigmatisation, and disclosures as cries for help made to professionals with the power to do something. The affective quality of disclosures and changes in self-esteem are emphasised in discussions of how to facilitate disclosures, how difficult women find it to disclose, and so forth. Risk is discussed in terms of the difficulty of disclosure, but also in discussions of management of disclosures. Identity and specialness are emphasised in the discussions of how to handle disclosures, and the self-labelling component (phenomenology) is emphasised in discussions about reaction to disclosure and guiding the patient through the therapeutic process from victimhood to survivorhood. Some of these characteristics hold true for the disclosures discussed in the fieldwork for this study. However what is not shared is the ubiquitous assumption of the need for professional presence to manage, facilitate, or share the disclosure experience. In fact, the majority (around two thirds) of disclosures were made within non-professional relationships, that is to family and friends, and the majority of disclosures which met with what were perceived as positive responses (empathic, resolving, or understanding responses) were made within these non-professional relationships. The professional take-over of childhood sexual violences (as discussed in Section 4.4) has had a profound impact on the way that disclosure is viewed, particularly in terms of understanding it

through a confessional framework where the woman who has experienced childhood sexual violences is seeking help from the listener-professional. What this work has shown is that, rather than being an unusual event triggered by distress and a need for help, disclosure is, more commonly, an everyday event with few major differences to other stories we tell about ourselves apart from the content. Disclosure stories follow the same linguistic conventions as any other form of storytelling and, indeed, show a large amount of similarity between different women in form and style (see Section 7.5). Therefore, if the difference in the disclosure of childhood sexual violences does not lie in its status as a story, it must lie in the content of the story, that is, in the actual event of childhood sexual violences and, therefore, the distinction created by professional literature between disclosures and other life stories is shown to be false. Thus we must look for a new framework for understanding disclosures of childhood sexual violences, which sees them not as a different sort of story but as an everyday form of storytelling which has particular forms of effects which are not applicable to all forms of storytelling. Within this framework, where disclosures are seen as part of our everyday activity of storytelling, the focus would have to shift from disclosures as unusual events to the content and reactions as unusual in themselves. That is to say that once we accept disclosure as everyday, then the cultural issues involved in these stories being told would become more pronounced, and the cultural permissions that exist which allow childhood sexual violences to exist and the cultural narratives which stigmatise women disclosing childhood sexual violences would have to be examined. In doing so we must therefore examine the role of cultural narratives in the disclosure event, and in particular the power to deploy them. This research has shown that there is a complex relationship between the effects of disclosure and the self-perceived identities of women who have experienced childhood sexual violences. A large component of the experience of disclosure is the way in which it is received and responded to by the listener. The listener both helps shape and control the disclosure and s/he also has the power to impose meanings, identities, and cultural narratives on the woman making the disclosure. As such the listener holds much more power in the disclosure situation than had previously been considered, including some power to challenge the identity of the speaker, through imposition of cultural narratives which represent a limited repertoire of understandings of women who have experienced childhood sexual violences (Section 4.3). The listeners power to deploy cultural narratives also means that they can choose to believe the cultural narrative and dismiss any story which contradicts or confuses it, as Ellie and Lisa both powerfully discussed in Section 7.3.

Disclosure, therefore, must be seen as a co-constructed event, rather than as the transmission of a piece of information from one person, the speaker, to another, the listener (as shown in Figure 1). In viewing disclosure in this way, its position as a form of social relations becomes clearer. If, as I hope I have shown here, the listener plays an active role in disclosure, then that role must be open to exploration and critique in the same ways as the speakers role has previously been. This same sentiment must also hold true for those who are listening within professional relationships, and their responses and attitudes must, too, be explored. If we accept that the listener and cultural narratives play a role in the disclosure situation, then there is also a chance to assess the earlier comment that experiences of disclosure can be seen as historical barometers by which we can gauge changes in how sexual violences are talked about and responded to (Section 4.2). If we assume that cultural narratives about childhood sexual violences are static then we would expect to see women who have experienced childhood sexual violences becoming more adept at making disclosures that circumvent or pre-empt (therefore preventing) the stigmatisation these cultural narratives create. This view would also be supported by the lineal view that women move from being victims to survivors of childhood sexual violences. This notion necessarily leads to the idea that women will experience a similar lineal progression from a victims disclosures (damaged, uncontrolled, inappropriate, and abnormal) to a survivors disclosures (healing, controlled, appropriate, and normalising). However as Kelly, Burton, and Regan (see Section 1.3) have said, this idea of a lineal progression from victim to survivor misrepresents both material and emotional reality (1996, p.91). Similarly, this view of disclosures as moving from damaged to healing misrepresents the experience of disclosures, and yet it is one often proposed by academic and professional literature (see the discussion of Schatzow and Herman (1989) in Section 4.4). Despite the fact that the participants of this study had developed sophisticated strategies of disclosure, all still felt nervous and vulnerable in the disclosure situation. Their descriptions of disclosures in Section 7.2 do not show any form of lineal progression from one state to another, suggesting that the nature of cultural narratives as shifting and unstable prevents women from creating some stable mode of disclosure. As such, disclosure, then, will also be a contested site, which makes women who have experienced childhood sexual violences repeatedly vulnerable to the imposition of meanings and identities. This is especially true where the disclosures are indirect and caused by a previous listener breaking the womens confidences (see Section 7.2).

If this is accepted, then it must also follow that the interpretations, understandings, and deployment of cultural narratives by the speaker should be figured into explorations of disclosure of childhood sexual violences in an attempt to understand, and perhaps change, responses to disclosure. This research is a start of this re-evaluative project. As shown in Section 6.3, around 40% of the stories participants told about disclosure events can be characterised as disclosures being met with a positive response (either an empathic, understanding, or a resolving one). In the remaining 60% of stories, the responses were negative, ranging from being critical of disclosure to re-victimisation, through to explicitly abusive responses. Where responses were positive it was because three major conditions were fulfilled; both physical and psychic space was made for the disclosure to happen, the speaker was treated with respect, and some genuine emotional reaction was shown. These three conditions held true whether the disclosure was being made within a professional or non-professional relationship. As such, this work is also part of the critique of professionalisation of childhood sexual violences, for if no separate or distinctive preconditions exist for a supportive response from professionals then the claim to a specialised status becomes problematic. If the distinction between the preconditions for a positive disclosure event within professional and non-professional relationships cannot be maintained, then the whole concept of a disclosure within a professional relationship is called into question. It could be argued that disclosure within a professional relationship is characterised by the fact that the listener can help the speaker in some way, but this too is reliant on a disproven view of disclosure as being a cry for help when, in fact, it is not necessarily so48. However, the problematic status of disclosures within professional relationships is two-fold; not only are a small group claiming a special status without good cause, but they are also disempowering the wider population at the same time. This is represented in Figure 2 by the stages marked as Situation of Dominance and Salience Diminished. Evidence for this turn of events can be seen in Ellies assertion that she has to be careful what she tells others because they arent trained to deal with it, yet this research suggests that such training is irrelevant. As such the professional takeover of childhood sexual violences has led to the wider public feeling unprepared to deal with disclosures, despite the fact that disclosures are more likely to happen within non-professional rather than professional relationships. The significance of this is that professionalisation has increased the chances of a disclosure being met with the negative response, by assuming greater knowledge of the subject, and reinforcing that assumption in the cultural
48

This is not to say that professionals serve no purpose; as gatekeepers to further services and so forth their work is important. But professional training to respond to disclosures of childhood sexual violences appears to hold no benefit especially if it does not challenge cultural narratives and emphasise the human interaction aspects of disclosure.

narratives. The fact that professionals are also ordinary people has been forgotten in this situation and, given the findings of this research, that the preconditions for a positive response remain constant whether in a professional or non-professional relationship, this must be urgently considered in the training of professionals. Furthermore, the professionalisation process has disempowered women who have experienced childhood sexual violences as experts about their own experiences. By claiming a special status for knowledges about childhood sexual violences, which can only be imparted by professional training, the process has, in effect, silenced women who have experienced childhood sexual violences and marginalised their knowledges. This research, as well as foregrounding these marginalised knowledges, hopes to challenge these representations of knowledge about childhood sexual violences. As Burt and Oaksford suggest, talking to people who have experienced childhood sexual violences and allowing them to speak freely may reveal things that simply do not appear in textbooks or would not [otherwise] occur to the researcher (1999 p.333). Although nearly all of the women spoke of hesitancy to disclose, all, except one, had sophisticated strategies for dealing with disclosure in some way other than total avoidance (Section 8.3). The exception, Samantha, did also disclose but had much more restrictive grounds on which she based her decision. All of the other nine participants, however, employed strategies that allowed for the possibility that disclosure would be made, although placing limitations on the sorts of circumstances in which it would occur. This is despite a verbal insistence that disclosure was a negative experience and was something the participants avoided. Yet between the ten participants, over eighty disclosure events were discussed, which also suggests that, despite hesitancy, disclosure is a commonplace event in the lives of women who have experienced childhood sexual violence. This factor has previously been hidden in work on disclosures that have synonymised first or childhood disclosures with the term disclosure in general and which have focussed on issues of how to get women to disclose rather than on how disclosures are responded to. Almost 25% of the disclosure events described by participants in this study received abusive responses. The majority of these (57%) related to disclosures made within professional relationships. A re-evaluation of professional responses and training regarding childhood sexual violence must be one of the strongest conclusions of this work. If disclosure of childhood sexual violence, which is exhorted by professionals, is to be received appropriately, then professionals must be challenged on their own preconceptions and powers. In many of the examples given in Sections 6.12 and 6.16, the abusive response comes from an automatic view that a woman who has

experienced childhood sexual violence cannot cope or rationally decide on the best course of action for themselves. They also seem closely linked to the sorts of narratives which imply that psychological or psychiatric intervention is inevitable for the remainder of these women's lives. Yet women who have experienced childhood sexual violence (contact and non-contact sexual violence) constitute at least 21% of the female population in the United Kingdom at the current time according to the prevalence research. The cultural narrative is therefore suggesting that almost a quarter of women are unable to function adequately as adults because of their childhood experiences. The absurdity of this suggestion must be noted. On a much grander scale this research suggests that some re-evaluation of the cultural narratives in contemporary British society is required, particularly because all the narratives identified by participants in this study negatively represented women who had experienced childhood sexual violences. In some of the disclosure events which elicited negative responses the cultural narratives are clearly implicated - for example in discussions of responses which were critical of disclosure (mostly predicated on a variety of cultural narratives) or macho (where cultural narratives about heteronormativity and masculinity were also implicated). Cultural narratives were also implicated in the specifically negative responses received by those women who have experienced sexual violence perpetrated by their mothers (see Section 7.3). Some exposure of these cultural narratives and some examination of them seems to be necessary. It was not, as I stated in Chapter One, the intention of this research to explore cultural narratives about childhood sexual violence, but it was also impossible to ignore their effect in the stories the participants were telling. This research has sought to further narratological understandings of disclosures of childhood sexual violence. As Section 7.5 shows, the stories of disclosure showed remarkable comparative symmetry between participants, and showed coherence as stories in the everyday sense. As such, the suggestion that disclosures are an exceptional form of speech event seems unfounded. Disclosures appear to be simply another story in the narration of some womens lives and storytelling is an everyday activity. However disclosure of childhood sexual violences also tells of a stigmatised identity, as Susan Santoro Tomlin has previously argued (1991). Therefore disclosure must be seen as a risky activity for women who have experienced childhood sexual violence and, I would suggest, it is precisely those notions of risk that women are negotiating when they offer contradictory statements about reticence to disclose but numerous examples of disclosure in their lives. This sense of disclosure as a risky activity is reinforced in the ways in which women talked about disclosure and particularly in the employment of language of compulsion (both internal and external) and spontaneity. The movement between different modes of describing disclosure (from

forced disclosure to risk taking disclosure to free choice disclosure) was constant throughout women's histories of disclosure. Therefore we can assume that in each disclosure situation the negotiation of risk and stigmatisation occurs anew. Previous feminist works on disclosures have tended to view the decision in terms of silence and speech (see Section 4.5) yet, it seems, this is to focus on the end result rather than the processes of disclosure. Given that over previous decades a language for childhood sexual violences has been created, although it is an imperfect and sometimes imprecise one, the issues of find / create / redefine words (Kelly and Radford 1996 p.20) should be replaced in research with new issues facing women who have experienced childhood sexual violences. Stigmatisation and the negotiation of the risks involved in disclosure are certainly a starting point. Within the negotiation of disclosure, issues of responsibility were also brought to the fore, and in particular the evasion of responsibility by the listener for their responses / actions resulting from the disclosure. Partly, this seems predicated on an understanding of disclosure as something needing work and thus better suited to a professional (the same cultural narrative which I critique above), but also it is based on an understanding of childhood sexual violence as something stigmatising, and the stigma is transferable to those connected with women who have experienced childhood sexual violence, as well as the women themselves. This is part of the sense of being judged to which most of the participants in this study alluded (Section 7.7). Finally the overwhelming message of the findings of this research must relate to the appropriateness of response and to the concept of discussing disclosures. Childhood sexual violence is discussed in many fields, but almost always in a way that excludes the specific knowledges of women who have experienced it. In fact most of the discussions have characterised and constructed women who have experienced childhood sexual violence in particular ways (see earlier discussions of the Mullen et al. and Schatzow and Herman articles). Talk about childhood sexual violence, it appears, goes on around women who have experienced childhood sexual violence, but does not involve them. We could see these discussions as both cocooning and smothering the knowledges women who have experienced childhood sexual violence hold. Although women who have experienced childhood sexual violence are exhorted to speak about it, those exhortations rely on an unspoken understanding that those speech events will be contained to specific fields; the psychologists office, social workers interviews, and (more positively) police interviews. Instead disclosures are largely made within non-professional relationships (part of their everyday-ness I refer to above), and the restructuring of cultural narratives seems to be an urgent and important consideration. One

way of achieving this would be to encourage discussions of childhood sexual violence and in particular a disclosure situation where some of the more negative cultural narratives can be challenged. Present understandings of the disclosure of childhood sexual violences are not developed enough to allow us to understand the full complexity of disclosure in the lives of women. This work can only represent a starting point in trying to understand disclosures of childhood sexual violences, yet it tells us much. From ten womens stories much has been learnt in terms of the experiences of disclosing childhood sexual violences, but with the most recent research claiming prevalence rates of around 21% (Cawson et al. 2000) there is obviously much more to understand. 9.2 Implications for Future Research

This work has focussed exclusively on the disclosure of childhood sexual violences and in particular on the lifelong experiences of disclosure. It has, in doing this, not widely explored the links between disclosure of childhood sexual violences and other stigmatising disclosures, either in terms of other violences against women or disclosure of sexual status, health status, or similar. However, it is obvious that there are fundamental similarities between different disclosures, not only in their treatment in academic literature, but also in the very experience of carrying out a speech act which by its nature may stigmatise the speaker. Many people49 at different times engage in the act of disclosure; an act which carries a great deal of risk with it, in terms of how others perceive them, but also in how they themselves perceive their relationship with the event or status they are disclosing. Secondly, and more narrowly focussed on childhood sexual violences, we need to have more understanding of the way disclosure operates in specific circumstances. For example, we have very little information on the impact of disclosures in terms of whether it is a precondition for revictimisation of women who have experienced childhood sexual violences. Despite a wealth of information about patterns of revictimisation, there is no discussion as to whether disclosure plays a facilitating role in that, and if so, what that role is. There are important issues involved here. If disclosure is a precondition to revictimisation, then the debate as to whether women who have experienced childhood sexual violences seek out subsequent (generally male) partners capable of violence is shown as based on inadequate theoretical understandings. The more important question becomes one of which cultural ideas give these partners the idea that revictimisation is acceptable if
For example women disclosing experiences of domestic violence, rape and other sexual violences, and people disclosing HIV status, gay, lesbian, bisexual, or other queer identities, and so on.
49

a woman has already experienced childhood sexual violences (although this question should, anyway, be considered). In fact it shifts the paradigm for understanding revictimisation and the same is true for many of the issues highlighted in this research. Additionally, the role of cultural narratives in the disclosure event needs much more attention in research work and, particularly, some understanding of the range and nature of common cultural narratives operating about women who have experienced childhood sexual violences would be useful. Such a mapping project was beyond the scope of this work; however it would provide a useful basis for re-evaluating the nature of stigmatisation and responses to disclosure in contemporary British society.

Recommendations for Policy and Practice The following are recommendations arising from this research for policy and practice across several fields. Although addressed specifically to practitioners, the recommendations are just as relevant to those who may hear disclosures within non-professional relationships. General Recommendations 1. Disclosure of childhood sexual violences has long been treated as a special type of story rather than being seen as part of the normal human activity of narrating our own lives. This special status has suggested that all disclosures are requesting intervention or a change in perception for the speaker. Instead disclosures should be seen in the general sense as part of the everyday human activity of telling self-stories with no hidden agenda. 2. Similarly, disclosures have often been seen as events that happen once within a womans life. In fact, women who have experienced childhood sexual violences will disclose their experiences many times over the lifecourse. In this sense it is not the case that professionals must know how to get it right first time, but rather must be aware that this is the disclosure of an experience like any other and should be responded to appropriately. The experts on why a disclosure has been made, how to respond to a disclosure, and what further action (if any) is required are the women who have experienced childhood sexual violences. Asking for further guidance empowers the speaker and ensures they retain control of their story. 3. Disclosures should not be seen as something that cannot be discussed with the speaker. Instead discussion can be crucial to understanding why a disclosure has been made and whether any intervention is being requested or what action the speaker is seeking following the disclosure. 4. If a woman who has experienced childhood sexual violences does disclose to you then an awareness of your own understandings of childhood sexual violences and cultural narratives about childhood sexual violences is important. To respond from a stereotyping or stereotyped position will, again, suggest a failure a deal openly with childhood sexual violences. This is particularly true of disclosures where the childhood sexual violences experienced contradict or confuse dominant cultural narratives. 5. There is no such thing as a universally applicable good response to a disclosure. Instead the responses to disclosures must be appropriate to the disclosure, the speaker and the situation of disclosure. 6. Empathic responses were seen as most positive and appropriate. An empathic response to a disclosure contains three elements: space is made to allow the disclosure to happen, the speaker is treated with respect, and the listener shows or communicates a genuine emotional reaction.

7. Making space for the disclosure means both physical and psychic / emotional space. Listeners must acknowledge the power they have in the co-construction of stories and be aware of their reactions to the story being told to allow the disclosure to happen. 8. Treating the speaker with respect means not denying choices, not passing on disclosures without permission, and not infantilising the speaker. The experience of childhood sexual violences should not diminish the status of the speaker as a rational, competent person, able to make decisions for themselves. 9. Showing or communicating a genuine emotional response to the disclosure means relating to the speaker firstly as a person and later as someone within a professional relationship. 10. It should be remembered that experiencing childhood sexual violences is not assuming an identity that overrides all other accomplishments or identities. As Ellie said It's only part of my life and it's not kind, it's not my defining issue". 11. The veracity of a disclosure of childhood sexual violences should not be prejudged. If this is a disclosure from a child an investigation needs to be carried out by appropriate professionals (social workers or the police). If it is a disclosure from an adult then casting doubt upon or dismissing the disclosure will only constitute a failure on the part of the professional to acknowledge that children experience sexual violences. Recommendations For Specific Professions The following two sections of recommendations are aimed at the teaching profession and healthcare professions respectively. These two sections arise directly out of the stories told by participants in terms of challenges to current practice. Recommendations For the Teaching Professions 1. Although school policy to designate a Child Protection Officer may be useful in administrative terms, all teachers should have training in how to respond to disclosures of childhood sexual violences. 2. No matter what the situation a childs disclosure of childhood sexual violences should not be passed on without their knowledge and if possible their permission. 3. The removal of power and choice from a child disclosing sexual violences can only damage their own conception of the trustworthiness of adults. Children who have experienced childhood sexual violences will generally have come to some understanding of those experiences before disclosure and may well in many cases be more mature than their contemporaries. Trusting a child to make a reasonable decision if options are explained to them, and allowing a child to be explicitly informed of and involved in the statutory processes

which must follow a disclosure will help the child see the experiences as something that happens rather than something stigmatising. Recommendations for Healthcare Professionals 1. Particularly within the mental health system professionals should be aware of the use of restraint and removal of choice from patients who have mental health problems and who have experienced childhood sexual violences. Explicit exercise of power (involved in abusive responses to disclosure) reinforces a sense of powerlessness and anger. 2. Whilst within the mental health system there seemed to be few instances of disclosures not being believed, there were issues raised about childhood sexual violences then being seen as an explanation for all the problems a woman may have. For example, Lisa talked about the fact that she was never offered bereavement counselling whilst engaged with the mental health system because the childhood sexual violences were seen as a total explanation for her problems even though she herself admitted and talked about the death of her sister as a child from illness. Disclosure of childhood sexual violences cannot be seen as over-riding all other events in a persons life. 3. The medical profession as a whole needs to review its professional ethics in terms of where the boundaries lie in relation to childhood sexual violences in patients notes. My own experiences of the blatant and explicit exercise of power by a Consultant because of the indirect disclosure in my medical notes poses a challenge to the medical profession to be ethical enough to realise when such issues may be relevant and when they are not.

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