Accounts of Innocence: Sexual Abuse, Trauma, and the Self

Extract

Joseph E. Davis, Accounts of Innocence: Sexual Abuse, Trauma, and the Self , Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. pp. 340. ISBN 0226137813.

Accounts of Innocence is a thoughtful and sensitive rethinking of the origins of modern society's investment in contemporary narratives of sexual victimisation. What circumstances, Davis asks, have encouraged us to tell the story of sexual abuse as we do? And why, in this particular cultural moment, do we imbue sexual victimisation with a psychological significance that reifies the causal and explanatory power of sexual trauma? One of the many strengths of Davis' sociological analysis is his treatment of victimisation as something at once real and historically situated, an ‘actual experience’ inseparable from the constellation of ideas, individuals and events that give it meaning. He demonstrates that while sexual abuse has had a long history, its social discovery occurred only in the 1970s, following Florence Rush's public disclosure of her childhood and adolescent molestation at a 1971 New York Radical Feminists' conference. In a political and social milieu newly attentive to the importance of family therapy, child protectionism and feminism, Rush's revelation paved the way for a wave of public testimonials that, over time, helped construct and cement a collective victimisation story. This story provided a new moral and political framework in which survivors could narrate and interpret their experiences.