Hazel Da Breo

It’s My Party, I’ll Cry If I Want To: Interpreting Narratives of Sexual Abuse in Childhood

This chapter is based on narrative research with ten women survivors of child sexual abuse. It explores narrativity as a coping strategy and the ways in which women used storytelling to construct positions of survivorhood and victimhood. We aim to provide deeper understandings of the impact of childhood sexual victimisation but in doing so also examine the subjective location of the researcher. We argue that, despite the importance placed in narrative research on the concept of the co-construction of meaning based on interaction between participant and researcher, the emotional presence and impact of the researcher is often underplayed. Drawing on our own wide-ranging professional and personal repertoires, we suggest that claims of authenticity are only really authentic where they recognise not only the voice of the storyteller but also of the listener.

Victimisation, violence perpetration, and attitudes towards violence among boys and girls from Barbados and Grenada

Interpersonal violence is widespread in the Eastern Caribbean, which may be a remnant of the violent colonisation history noted in the region. Although official statistics on the occurrence of interpersonal violence are collected in Barbados and Grenada, such acts tend to be under-reported. As such, the aim of this project was to gain a better insight into the prevalence of violence victimisation and violence perpetration, as well as the level of acceptance of interpersonal violence, including gender-based violence (GBV), among girls and boys from Barbados and Grenada. To overcome the problem of under-reporting and to understand how violence is perceived from the children’s perspective, the current study used self-report, anonymous survey methodology.

Collective Complacency and Engendering Community Action

This chapter is concerned with two of the system boxes in the systems model for understanding the social drivers and determinants of abuse (see Figure 1.1): the lack of awareness of the seriousness of the effects of child sexual abuse and the lack of collective outrage and community action (see Figure 6.1).

The Roots to Violence

This chapter explores some of the interrelating factors implicated in transactional sexual abuse and the prostituting of children, both of which are manifestations of child sexual abuse (CSA). In this chapter we use, sometimes interchangeably, the terms sex trading, transactional child sexual abuse and the prostitution of children; although these terms carry different connotations, all refer to the commercial sexual exploitation of children. The chapter derives its theme from the first box in Figure 1.1, ‘A systems model for understanding the social drivers and determinants of abuse’. An environment in which abuse flourishes includes cultural sanctioning of sex trading, social acceptance of vio- lence, consumerism (linked to sexual commoditization), poverty and community violence (see Figure 2.1). These topics, explored as contem- porary realities, are set against a historical backcloth which is distinctly Caribbean and which provides the spawning ground and institutional structures that continue to influence values and behaviours to this day. These issues have been identified from research in the Eastern Caribbean (Jones and Trotman Jemmott 2009) as being crucial to tack- ling CSA. Such factors influence the perpetuation and impact of CSA in particular environments and periods and within particular relational interactions (in a space, a time, a community; in interactions between children and adults); they intersect in unobtrusive yet powerful ways. A systems approach can help us identify the interplay of harm factors and disrupt the various routes to the sexual harming of children.

The Elephants in the System

The chapter focuses on two interrelated system/processes identified as crucial for addressing child sexual abuse in the Caribbean (Jones and Trotman Jemmott 2009): officials who by inaction, denial and evasion can be regarded as part of the problem of ‘collusion’; and ineffective systems, laws and policies (see Figure 5.1).-

Women’s Spaces, Voices and Action

The Trinidadian artist Candice Sobers depicts the gendered roles of a woman in her painting Self Sacrifice. The woman’s inability to escape her lived realities of suppression is portrayed; they are overwhelm- ing and all-encompassing, but hope and renewal are also manifest. Disadvantage, oppression and a yearning for betterment intersect in a Caribbean milieu; her arms outstretched and reaching for her- self — outward and within. Sobers describes ‘Self Sacrifice’ as a ‘silent suffering and repressed existence’ (Candice Sobers, personal com- munication, 14 January 2014).

An Integrated Systems Model for Preventing Child Sexual Abuse

She was nine when he first raped her, though he wasn’t the first to try. Of her four brothers, two had tried but this brother, older by a decade, succeeded. And so it went on and on, raped by him repeatedly for years. Though she was the only girl in the family, she did not have the support she might have expected from her mother. Mummy was simply swamped by the dominance of males in the household, by their incessant demands and expectations and by her own economic dependence, which kept her trapped in subservience. Protecting Amber was too much a call on any leftover strength she might have had. Becoming mute, deaf, unseeing and unfeeling was, she believed, the only option she had for getting through each day. She could not hear Amber’s story or feel Amber’s pain.

Sexually Harmful Attitudes and Male Privilege

Readers, how do you take this? If you saw this sign on a billboard as you drove home at night, what would you feel? What does the message evoke in you now? This is an advertisement for a help line for sex abus- ers in Montreal, Canada (CIVAS; Centre d’intervention en violence et abus sexuels de L’Estrie, Montreal). Who do you imagine would need help, support or referrals for tormented sexual desire? What if it were your brother, father, husband or son? Your daughter or your mum? What if it were you?

Deconstructing Narratives of Childhood Sexual Abuse

This chapter draws from narrative research conducted as part of a larger UNICEF commissioned study of child sexual abuse (CSA) (see Chapter 9 and also, Jones and Trotman Jemmott, 2009). Feminist scholars have reconceptualised the narrative as an epistemological and ontological concept arguing that it is through narrativity that ‘we come to know, understand, and make sense of the social world’ (Somers, 1994, p. 3). Narrative research enables us to capture rich information about everyday lives that might not be possible using other methods (Lawler, 2002) and as participants locate themselves within a ‘repertoire of emplotted stories’ (Somers, 1994, p. 11), the story-ing encounter between the researcher and the participant becomes a constituent of the experience. In narrative interviews, participants choose how much to reveal and in retaining control of their emotional investment in a study can safeguard themselves from inadvertent re-traumatisation (Carson and Fairbairn, 2002). Rather than seeking ultimate truths, narrative research produces contexted understandings through meaning construction which privileges situated subjectivity (Hardy et al., 2009; Lai 2010). Somers (1994) identifies four features of the narrative that were relevant to this study: n n1. n nrelationality n n n n n2. n ncausal emplotment n n n n n3. n nselective appropriation n n n n n4. n ntemporality, sequence and place