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Part 1
THEORY
This book is concerned with how the effects of child sexual abuse are understood and how this affects the treatment and representation of abused women and girls. The different ways we understand child sexual abuse give rise to competing versions of reality that have markedly different effects on the lives of abused women and girls. My aim throughout this book is to detail some of these different ways of understanding in order to develop practical strategies that enable, rather than condemn, abused women and girls, and which offer hope, rather than despair. Hence, although this book covers a wide range of concerns in relation to women, girls and child sexual abuse, all these chapters are united by a sustained focus on the relationship between understanding and practice, and by the desire to develop ways of working that are both useful and ethical.
The book is organized into three sections: theory, research and practice. In this first section of the book I begin, in Chapter 1, by outlining the theoretical traditions within feminism and post-structuralism that I draw on to develop my approach in thinking through practices regarding women, girls and child sexual abuse. My aim is to make transparent my own ways of understanding. I then use this framework to critically interrogate the ways in which child sexual abuse is made sense of in mainstream mental health services (Chapter 2), by the mass media (Chapter 3) and by radical political activists in feminism and mental health (Chapter 4). The aim is to make visible the wider cultural and political arenas that contextualize practices around child sexual abuse, and women and girls across the age span, in contemporary culture. These chapters are not only about theory, in terms how child sexual abuse is understood by different sections of society. They also address how these different understandings are implicated in contrasting approaches to intervention.
As noted, my concern is to develop practices around child sexual abuse that are both useful and ethical. I begin this process in Chapter 1 by demonstrating how feminism and post-structuralism can be utilized to develop a practical moral framework for understanding and working with women, girls and child sexual abuse in a wide variety of contexts. The chapter demonstrates how a feminist desire for emancipation can be sustained, even when our political goals are multiple and continue to evolve, and how this can help guide ways of making sense of child sexual abuse in theory, research and clinical practice.
In Chapter 2, I explore the impact of diagnostic systems (qua psychiatry) and functional formulations (qua psychology) on shaping the ways in which women who have been sexually abused are understood and treated in mainstream mental health services. I demonstrate how progressive approaches to mental health that focus concern on the social foundations of individual misery are restricted by an over-reliance on notions of pathology. Particular attention is drawn to the difficulties faced by abused women who are made subject to compulsory treatment.
Chapter 3 critically examines how child sexual abuse is represented in the mass media. Common narrative structures that frame stories about victims and abusers are identified; and normative assumptions about gender that shape public debates about sex and abuse are elaborated. I argue that there is a constant desire to locate child sexual abuse outside of the nuclear family, and that this is achieved through the appropriation of medical and psychological discourse to transfer abuse to pathological outsiders. This chapter also considers the status of children, themselves, in debates about childhood sex.
Chapter 4 builds on this critique to explore changing concerns in feminism and radical mental health activism regarding women and child sexual abuse. This chapter further locates my particular ways of understanding by providing a detailed account of the theoretical and political context I locate myself within, and feel myself to be accountable to. I chart some of the different ways that women have thought through and organized around the issue of sexual violence. The argument is made for the ongoing relevance and impact of radical politics in shaping contemporary approaches to understanding and addressing child sexual abuse, and indeed in directing my work with abused women and girls, as detailed throughout this book.
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1
ETHICAL PRAXIS
Applying a feminist post-structuralist perspective
Introduction
How we theorize, recognize, talk about and act in relation to child sexual abuse changes according to history, geography, culture, law and social policy. As such, in order to understand what child sexual abuse is, it is necessary to be specific about the various issues that shape where we speak from and what we speak about. In this chapter, I begin the process of making my ways of understanding explicit by identifying some of the key theoretical practices that underpin my approach to making sense of, and working with, the effects of child sexual abuse as they relate to women and girls across the age span. This book, therefore, addresses issues that affect adult women, as well as children and young people (with the focus being on girls). As with other books in this edited series, I draw on ideas from outside psychology. In part this is because psychology has a tendency to individualize complex social problems, such as child sexual abuse. Additionally, psychology is too often viewed as an impartial practice, in which perspective is viewed with suspicion. By contrast, not only do I think that perspective is always implicated in our meaning-making, but also my political beliefs are integral to what I want to achieve with psychology.
I am explicitly concerned with illuminating hidden assumptions about femininity that are implicated in constructing familiar representations of women and child sexual abuse, and which sustain normative gender hierarchies. My aim throughout this book is to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about femininity that restrict how women’s and girls’ experiences of child sexual abuse are understood and how they are responded to. The politics I draw on to enable this process are feminist. I am aware that feminism covers a vast terrain and that any overarching approach (whether feminism or psychology) fails when its ability to ‘speak the truth’ is unquestioningly assumed. It is here that I use post-structuralism to guard against the automatic acceptance of any grand narrative or ideology by maintaining a space for critical reflexivity. And it is this intersection, between feminism and post-structuralism, which is at the heart of the work I do with, and in, psychology.
This book, therefore, provides a sustained argument for the applicability of feminism and post-structuralism within psychology. Each chapter uses the framework outlined here to think through how we work with, and represent, abused women and girls. Hence, although this book covers a wide range of issues, service contexts and clinical practices in respect of women, girls and child sexual abuse, it is united by a common theoretical approach. In this sense the book is polemical. It does not seek to cover all the disparate literature that reflects the many different methods that are used to make sense of work in this area. Rather, this book aims to demonstrate that when thinking through child sexual abuse, in terms of culture, research and clinical practice, feminism and post-structuralism can be used to provide a clear and compelling guide regarding what we do, and how we make sense of what we know. This chapter represents the first stage in building this argument. Specifically, I detail ideas from feminism and post-structuralism that inform my sense of ethics and morality, which embed my practices as an academic and clinical psychologist, and which shape the ways in which I make myself accountable for the work I do.
Feminist and post-structuralist intersections: recognizing the limits of women’s knowledge base
As noted, feminism represents a wide array of political strategies and theories (some of which are discussed in Chapter 4). Whilst these may be highly contested, there are some recurring concerns. These can be described as being with the systematic subordination of the female subject and a desire to challenge gender inequalities by providing an emancipatory framework for social transformation. Hence, feminism, as theory and practice, has focused on identifying wrongs perpetrated against women and strategies for addressing these wrongs (Ramazanoglu and Holland 1999). It is little wonder, therefore, that feminism has demonstrated a sustained concern with the sexual exploitation of women (and children) within patriarchal systems and societies. In this sense, gender has been a defining construct in determining feminist politics. However, there are problems with assuming gender differences are intrinsic, stable and distinct.
If we assume gender is defined by born-with characteristics, and that there is some essential value that can be attached to masculinity and femininity, assumptions of similarity within gender categories can be overstated. Differences between women may then be underestimated, and dominant westernized, heterosexualized versions of femininity may then be taken to represent the norm. Indeed, when either difference or similarity is assumed, gender ultimately acts as a mechanism of exclusion (Butler 1990). Hence, ‘[t]he category women (as well as the more obviously contentious Woman)’ (Stanley 1997:274) cannot be thought of as an unproblematic term or as a stable social category. This is an important issue because when women are understood to be a disparate and shifting group, it calls into question the automatic right of any woman to speak about issues such as sexual violence on behalf of all women, as we will experience things differently. Additionally, it also challenges the assumption that women have greater access to the ‘truth’ about sexual violence.
Hence, if we are to claim a feminist voice, whilst not denying our differences, it is crucial to theorize, rather than simply accept gender distinctions. This is where post-structuralism begins to intersect with feminism. According to post-structuralism, reality is understood to be socially constructed through language (Foucault 1978, 1991, 1971/1992). Thus, all knowledge is understood to have epistemological equivalence in that all knowledge is socially produced and regulated. Therefore, post-structuralism, as with feminism, challenges the assumption of a natural social order. Language use is understood to be strategic, rather than transparent. Hence, the production of knowledge can never be benign. Knowledge, then, is more verb than noun: it is a practice that does things (Grosz 1995). Such approaches directly challenge the modernist assumption of an objective world, and with this the implication of any singular understanding of women and child sexual abuse, or the automatic right of any one group (of women, men, etc.) to define the truth about sexual violence. Therefore, normative values are no longer hidden (as natural), but exposed (as regulatory fictions) and, in this way, are opened up to critique (Deleuze and Guattari 1984).
Like feminism, therefore, post-structuralism is concerned with how the landscape of reality is constituted through the relationships between power and knowledge (Foucault 1991, 1971/1992). For some, including modernist/ realist feminists, power is depicted as being a negative force, in that men’s power over women is understood to be the thing that maintains patriarchal control. By contrast, in post-structuralist terms, power has no intrinsic value, and as such can be both ‘a generative force, as well as a restrictive opportunity’ (Ramazanoglu 1993:109). Power is understood to be a practice, rather than a possession. As Deleuze and Guattari (1988:27) argue, ‘[p]ower has no essence; it is simply operational. It is not an attribute but a relation.’ The question of whether power is nefarious or benign, therefore, is rooted in the particular forms of knowledge it sustains, and the types of cultural relationships it affirms. In this sense, power forms a mutually constitutive triad with knowledge and subjectivity (Henriques et al. 1984).
From this perspective, human subjectivity is understood to be produced through culture, rather than something that exists before culture. In this sense, post-structuralism mobilizes a more complex reading of femininity that allows difference and similarity to be theorized rather than assumed. When woman as a natural category is rejected, women’s essential epistemic advantage over men is also called into question (Bordo 1990). Women can no longer claim to have access to a purer form of knowledge about social and personal oppressions, such as child sexual abuse; rather, feminism, alongside other bodies of knowledge, such as psychology, is treated as part of the discursive mechanisms through which the reality of women and child sexual abuse is constructed.
This means guarding against the belief that feminism can, in any absolute fashion, determine what constitutes the right way to understand sexually abusive experiences. This is why it is crucial that feminists make their own ways of understanding explicit and the positions from which we (or I) speak visible. Hence, I call the therapeutic approach I describe in Chapter 9 Visible Therapy (Warner 2000, 200la, 2003b) in order to highlight the need to account for both what is talked about and how talking proceeds in therapeutic relationships. ‘Visibility’ remains partial because all knowledge is selective and incomplete. Nevertheless, in aiming for visibility I commit myself to, as far as possible, making the interests and ideas that inform my work clear and explicit (in other words, visible). This is in contrast to abusers who deliberately hide their interests and the operations of power in order to trick and manipulate others.
Post-structuralism invites this type of critical reflection precisely because it calls into question the right of any group to determine the truth. Hence, whilst feminism guides my analyses throughout this book, post-structuralism acts as constant mediator that reminds me to question the assumptions that feminism sometimes invites me to make. This is why I argue that both feminism and post-structuralism are needed to enable the development of a morally dense approach to working with women, girls and child sexual abuse.
Moral maps for mobile subjects: feminist ethical praxis
Post-structuralist revisions of feminist theory have, over the years, invoked concern and suspicion from some feminists (see Benhabib 1995; Jackson 1992), mainly because relativism has been criticized for leading to nihilism and paralysis (Weissen 1971/1993). The concern is that deconstruction of a knowing feminist subject leads to political indifference because it undermines women’s sense of collective history and knowledge. Hartsock (1990:163–4) typifies this concern in the following lament:
Obviously, as Haraway (1991:79) notes, ‘[a]n epistemology that justifies not taking a stand on the nature of things is of little use to women trying to build a shared politics.’ And speaking from principled positions is necessary to any political enterprise (Kitzinger and Perkins 1993). It is possible, however, to maintain a political stance whilst retaining a post-structuralist perspective. This is because although all knowledge is seen to be epistemologically equivalent, in that it is socially constructed, this does not mean that all knowledge is necessarily ideologically, or morally equivalent (Curt 1994). Hence, whilst hierarchies of knowledge and power are no longer fixed, a feminist ethic...
