How do childhood sexual abuse survivors experience and resist stigmatisation? A survivor community led conceptualisation.
In the last 10 years I have talked to hundreds of people who have experienced sexual violence in their childhood or youth. Some themes come up in different variations in many of these conversations, and there is one that is present in everything we talk about: A deep sense of stigma. A sense that is felt and shared, that is at the same time so obvious that we don’t need to explain it and so confusing that it is difficult to articulate.
With my doctoral research, I am following this sense of stigma, trying to find out more about what it is, what it does, and how we can develop collective strategies of anti-stigma resistance. My overall research is based on a participatory action research approach, and I am currently working with college students and staff on how we can reduce stigma and create a supportive environment for survivors. Before this, I worked together with adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) to better understand the specific stigma that we experience as a group.
In this blog post, originally presented as a paper at the LSE Breaking Silos conference in May 2024, I am going to share a working model of CSA specific stigma based on my initial findings. This is a work in progress, but I hope that it will be useful for those of you who have experienced sexual violence in childhood or youth, and those who are engaged in activism or research around these issues. As a researcher, survivor, therapist and activist, I am counting myself among all of these.
Questions & Methodology
To better understand our experience of stigmatisation, I wanted to know: What is the specific stigma we experience as CSA survivors? What does this do – both to survivors and in its function to uphold structures of oppression? And, most importantly, how can we resist against it?
In the existing literature and research, I could find many references to the psychological impact of sexual violence against children and young people. This was most often framed through the lens of trauma, as an individual and internal experience. However, I am interested in the social and collective aspects of how CSA survivors as a marginalised group experience stigmatisation. For this, it felt important to engage in a shared process of theory building with other survivors.
I collaborated with the Survivors’ Collective, a grassroots survivor activist group that I am part of, and invited survivors who I knew were already engaged in peer support or activism to take part in a focus group discussion. After this, I shared an overview of initial themes and we further discussed these in a conceptualisation meeting for a working model of CSA specific stigma. I then conducted a thematic analysis and presented the initial themes and working model at a Survivors’ Collective meeting.
I will now share this initial working model, focusing on what I learned about the content and function of CSA stigma, and about potentials for resistance.
CSA Stigma Content
Let’s start with the content: What kinds of stigmatising messages and narratives are we exposed to as CSA survivors? Based on my analysis, I propose three main elements of CSA stigma: Dehumanising images, silencing, and denial.
Dehumanising images include stereotypes, assumptions, narratives - things that are said and assumed about survivors and how we are portrayed. A central theme here are multiple variations of portraying survivors as ‘irreparably damaged’. This is contrasted by a theme of survivors being sometimes portrayed as ‘superheroes’. At first glance, this can seem contradictory. However, ultimately both of these narratives are dehumanising and work together as a complimentary unit to reinforce stigma – similar to concepts such as hostile and benevolent sexism.
Silencing can happen explicitly – through directly telling survivors to keep quiet, and implicitly – through how the people around us respond and how these issues are generally talked about or systematically not talked about. Many of the silencing responses of course link with the dehumanising images, as survivors are acutely aware of the risk to be seen and judged through these when we do speak out.
Similarly, denial can happen on different levels, for example denying the experience of sexual violence – ‘it didn’t happen’ / ‘it wasn’t sexual violence’, or denying the consequences – ‘it can’t affect you’.
CSA Stigma Function
So, what do these processes of stigmatisation do? There is a lot to say about what they do to survivors (their impact), but today I want to focus on the function, on what they do within systems of oppression.
To explore these questions, I draw on Tyler’s concept of ‘stigma power’, an understanding of stigma as a form of power that shifts the focus from the experience of stigma to stigmatisation as a practice of oppression. Tyler argues that the consequences of stigmatisation are not accidental but serve to legitimise oppression and exploitation. This happens through influencing both those directly affected, by eroding their sense of self, as well as attitudes of the wider public, by portraying certain groups of people as underserving of support.
Three key elements in facilitating this process are naturalisation, dehumanisation, and responsibilisation. I will now discuss these in relation to my findings on CSA specific stigma, using the example of the narrative of survivors as irreparably damaged and the denial of support.
Naturalisation: By portraying survivors as ‘irreparably damaged’, something that was done to us and its consequences are redefined as a character trait and reframed as internal, essential, and fixed over time.
Dehumanisation: By portraying survivors as irreparably damaged, we are placed outside of an understanding of shared humanity and framed as less than, other, and underserving of support.
Responsibilisation: Survivors are framed as responsible, for the sexual violence we have experienced and/or for dealing with the consequences.
The result is that survivors can internalise a sense of not deserving support and that our communities and institutions can legitimise a refusal of taking responsibility for supporting survivors.
While some aspects of stigmatisation overlap across different forms sexual violence and other forms of oppression more generally, the core theme of ‘irreparable damage’ speaks to a specific aspect of stigmatisation for CSA survivors: I propose that the combination of childhood with the sexual nature of violence is linked to the narrative of this point of no return, in which the ‘innocent’ child who is deserving of protection is turned into the ‘irreparably damaged’ survivor who is seen as a lost case and therefore undeserving of support: If there is nothing we can do, it is easy to justify not doing anything.
CSA Stigma Resistance
Finally, what can we do about this? In short: a lot. Which is why both my engagement in survivor activism and my doctoral research on what many people feel the need to remark is a ‘heavy topic’ makes me hopeful. For today, I want to share two key learnings from my initial findings.
1. Our resistance needs to be intersectional.
One reason for this is that both the structures and the content of CSA specific stigma overlap with other forms of stigma, and often they are used to amplify each other. The other reason is that the strategies of resistance also overlap, and we can learn from what is working in other issues.
2. Our resistance needs to be collective.
As survivors, talking to each other can be the most powerful way to resist stigmatisation and to remedy the effects it has on our sense of self. Too often, there is a pressure and expectation to tell our stories as individual tragedies, which are then received within the framework of a dominant and stigmatising discourse. However, when we talk to each other, we can build a counter discourse of our own and for ourselves. A lot of my research involves listening to survivors talking to each other, and the most joyful moments for me are the ones where I can witness how we are not just challenging stigmatising narratives but already enacting the alternative, just in the way that we are present with each other.
On this note, I want to leave you with two quotes from the focus group conversation:
I think it's more complicated, it's not a black and white thing where you’ll either break or you won't break, it’s like ‘Well I'm a human, I will find some things hard, some things I feel emotional about, some things I need time to recover’.
And I think in a group like ours we can say whatever thing. Because we feel comfortable and we know that we are open about something. And when someone is triggered, we comfort them.