Accounts of Innocence: Sexual Abuse, Trauma, and the Self / Edition 1

by Joseph E. Davis

Overview

Since a new sensitivity and orientation to victims of injustice arose in the 1960s, categories of victimization have proliferated. Large numbers of people are now characterized and characterize themselves as sufferers of psychological injury caused by the actions of others. In contrast with the familiar critiques of victim culture, Accounts of Innocence offers a new and empirically rich perspective on the question of why we now place such psychological significance on victimization in people's lives.

Focusing on the case of adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, Joseph E. Davis shows how the idea of innocence shaped the emergence of trauma psychology and continues to inform accounts of the past (and hopes for the future) in therapy with survivor clients. His findings shed new light on the ongoing debate over recovered memories of abuse. They challenge the notion that victim accounts are an evasion of personal responsibility. And they suggest important ways in which trauma psychology has had unintended and negative consequences for how victims see themselves and for how others relate to them.

An important intervention in the study of victimization in our culture, Accounts of Innocence will interest scholars of clinical psychology, social work, and sociology, as well as therapists and victim activists.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226137810
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	01/01/2005
Edition description:	1
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Joseph E. Davis is research assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia.

Read an Excerpt

ACCOUNTS OF INNOCENCE
Sexual Abuse, Trauma, and the Self

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By Joseph E. Davis
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2005 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-13781-0

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Chapter One
Incest and Sexual Offenses before the Social Discovery of Sexual Abuse

There were many remarkable features of the Catholic scandal, but perhaps the least commented upon was the role that past victims themselves played and the understandings of sexual abuse that informed the crisis. The representatives of a victims' support and advocacy group, the Survivors' Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), formed in 1989, became the de facto voice of victims. In the daily flow of coverage, hardly any new development was reported that did not include some commentary from a representative of this group. SNAP Executive Director David Clohessy and three other past victims delivered emotionally charged speeches to the assembled bishops in Dallas, and SNAP President Barbara Blaine led a victims' delegation in a private meeting with the episcopal conference leaders. SNAP leaders wrote op-ed pieces, spoke at symposiums and conferences, issued press releases, held press conferences, led protests, appeared on talk shows like Oprah, and were in every other way a ubiquitous public presence. Following the scandal in the press, one might easily have gotten the impression that such a high-profile role for victim-survivors was nothing new.

Yet even more taken-for-granted was the psychological perspective on offenders and victims. The very focus of the scandal on the Catholic leadership and the public demand for a "one strike you're out" policy toward priest offenders reflected in large part the widely shared view that sexual acts of any kind with children or adolescents are symptoms of a compulsive psychological disorder unlikely to respond to any limited or short-term therapy. That bishops sent offenders to treatment centers or made new ministry assignments on the basis, as Cardinal Law put it, of "psychiatric or medical assessments" was widely derided precisely because it contradicted the view that offenders cannot help themselves and are seldom cured.

With respect to victims, virtually every commentator shared the view that sexual abuse leads to long-term suffering. There was some question raised as to whether such suffering was inevitable, and occasionally articles quoted psychologists or psychiatrists who insisted that abuse victims are not necessarily permanently scarred. "Unfortunately," according to one such professional, "there's this sense that everyone who is sexually abused as a child is doomed for life, which is not true" (quoted in Boodman 2002). There was also an occasional quotation from a clinician suggesting that the degree of harm may be related to the type of abuse that took place. But the idea that sexual abuse of whatever kind or degree typically causes enduring harm informed every aspect of the scandal. The victims who made public statements were outspoken on this point. Mark Serrano, for instance, a board member of SNAP, in an op-ed piece that appeared in USA Today shortly before the Dallas meeting, wrote, "Every day, I relive the sexual terror committed against me as a child nearly 30 years ago.... My memories of my sexual abuse are as real today as they were when I was a child" (Serrano 2002). The four victims who made presentations to the bishops vividly described their childhood abuse and its effects: shame, guilt, promiscuity, substance abuse, and mental illness. In interviews and appearances, many other victims did likewise, describing current problems as the enduring consequences of abuse. The weight of professional opinion was certainly on their side. It seems hard to believe now, but it has not always been so.

A NEW STORY

On April 17, 1971, at Washington Irving High School in New York, Florence Rush, former staff member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and a member of OWL, Older Women's Liberation, took the podium at the New York Radical Feminists' (NYRF) first conference on rape (Rush 1974). The rape conference and the "speak-out" that preceded it in January were concerned with analyzing rape from a radical feminist point of view, giving victims a chance to give a public account of their rape experiences, and fostering the formation of feminist consciousness-raising groups. Rush was unlike the other speakers. She was older-fifty-five with three grown children-and she addressed not adult rape but child molestation, and told her own story of being molested and fondled on various occasions as a child and adolescent. She also briefly quoted from and editorialized on five prominent studies of sex offense victims or offenders (Burton 1968; De Francis 1969; Gebhard et al. 1965; Kinsey et al. 1953; Tormes 1968). Her central point was that each of these studies, with the partial exception of De Francis, was fundamentally morally flawed. These studies were marred, she argued, because they treated most sexual offenses as minor and as having few adverse consequences for the victim. But worst of all, they "blamed the victim" by treating the victim as one who participates in, perhaps even initiates, the sexual encounter. They also implicated the mother. What was needed, in Rush's view, was a new approach to "sexual abuse" that did not blame the (female) child victim, but treated such offenses as part of the broader subjugation of women in a male-dominated society. In a set of recommendations for victims published with the conference proceedings, Rush bid all feminist movement groups to encourage women and young girls to tell their experiences and to identify and expose their offenders.

In 1971, standing up in public and telling a personal story of childhood molestation was a revolutionary thing to do. While anonymous survey respondents had answered direct questions about childhood sexual experiences at least as far back as the 1920s, and psychiatric clinical papers had reported molestation and incest cases for decades, first-person public accounts of such experiences outside a legal context were nonexistent. There simply were no public "adult survivor" stories, to borrow the later designation, before the 1970s.

Why not? For the activists who followed Rush in the 1970s and beyond, it became an article of faith that a "conspiracy of silence"-society-wide but spearheaded by mental health professionals-explained the dearth of public victim testimonies. Yet public attention and the issue of abuse were not new. In 1937 the opening page of a widely cited article announced that "the seduction of children by adults is a recognized social problem" (Bender and Blau 1937: 500). The authors noted a recent Parliament Commission investigation in England and the broader legislative attention given to the problem "in all civilized countries." In 1938, Illinois, in response to a perceived "sex-crime wave," passed the first "sexual psychopath" law. By the early 1950s, twenty states had passed similar legislation. These laws provided for the confinement of certain sexual offenders, including those found guilty of incest and child-molesting, in a state hospital for the insane until such time as they were officially declared "cured" or "not dangerous." By the early 1950s, additional states had also dramatically increased their penalties for persons convicted of indecent or immoral practices with a child.

In fact, sexual offenders were a topic of a great deal of public concern again during the late 1940s and 1950s, a concern described by Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues in one of their now famous studies of sexual behavior as an "hysteria over sex offenders" (Kinsey et al. 1953: 121). Articles decrying the rise of sex crimes and theorizing about the psychology of sex "fiends," "perverts," "psychopaths," and so on, appeared in a wide range of popular publications, including Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, Time, Better Homes & Gardens, and Parents, to name but a few. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, wrote two such articles, lamenting the rise in sex crimes and the lackadaisical attitude of both public officials and ordinary citizens. In response to a concern with sex crimes, New Jersey set up a State Commission on Habitual Sex Offenders, the New York legislature commissioned a sex-crime inquiry, and Michigan convened a special session of the State Mental Health Commission to take "immediate measures" and seek long-term solutions to the sex-crimes problem. Many other states did likewise (Sutherland 1950). Specialized institutions were created to treat sex offenders, and states appropriated funds for research. The California legislature, for instance, allocated $187,000 between 1950 and 1954 for research in sexual deviation, including, importantly, research on the child victims of adult sex offenders. Several influential studies funded by this initiative were published in subsequent years (e.g., Bowman 1953; Mangus 1952; Weiss et al. 1955). In professional circles, a host of studies of incest and other sexual-assault offenders and victims appeared in the psychiatric and sex crimes literature from the 1930s to the 1970s.

However, despite the popular concern with sex crimes, the public testimonies that began with Rush were indeed a new phenomenon. What accounts for the previous "silence" of abuse victims, and what changed to bring about such public storytelling? I want to argue that individuals did not publicly share their "sexual abuse" experiences before the 1970s because no socially recognized story of victimization existed that would warrant such a public telling or provide the terms in which to do so. Stories are always produced and told under particular social conditions. The social norms and conventions operating in various cultural and institutional contexts govern when stories are told (expected, demanded, or prohibited), what kinds of stories can be told (rules of appropriate content), and how stories are told (rules of participation; see Ewick and Silbey 1995). The pre-1970s understandings of sexual offenses and offense victims neither compelled nor justified public tellings (i.e., told to strangers). Nor did they provide a narrative framework by which victims could formulate a public account of sexual molestation or incest that both they and their audience would find intelligible, believable, and relevant. There were no public victim stories, in short, because there was no collective victimization story.

Which brings us back to Florence Rush. What changed in the 1970s, what led to the massive outpouring of victim testimonies, was precisely the construction of a victim-centered collective story about sexual abuse. This construction, I argue, was the strategic work of two social movements-child protection and antirape-and the uniqueness of Rush, indeed the experience that made her testimony possible, was her activism at the intersection of these two movements. In her address at the NYRF rape conference, Rush did not simply share childhood experiences; she also proffered, in schematic form, the plot for a new collective story. In so doing, Rush drew upon the child protection and antirape movements' attention to the victim of abuse and emphasis on victim innocence and injury. Together, these concerns laid the groundwork for a new definition of the victim person-category and its collective story of the experience common to the persons in the category. The collective story became the framework around which adult survivors could interpret their experience and narrate it, including publicly. By means of a new collective story, the repressed returned. A cascade of victim testimonies followed, both ratifying and reproducing the new narrative.

The creation of a new, victim-centered story altered the existing formulations of sexual offenses, offender, and victim. I begin, therefore, by examining the older understandings from which the new understandings would depart. Using every major study, I identify the definitions of offender and victim, incest, and sexual offense used by researchers and clinicians before 1977, and the interpretative paradigms that inform these definitions. Because the characterization of victims is directly related to the question of their harm, I explore how the effects of sexual offenses and incest on the child, both in the short and longer term, were understood. And, because the definitions of deviant behaviors are directly related to how much of those behaviors there are, I also review the understandings of the incidence of sexual offense and incest victimization. The next two chapters describe how all these understandings-of sexual offense/incest, offender, and victim-changed and why. Because my concern is with the movement away from the older definitions, I do not explore the social processes and practices that led to their construction. However, the reader should be aware through these three chapters that the old categories also reflect and reproduce specific institutional, cultural, and political conditions. They too are historically contingent and morally constituted.

DEFINITION AND PREVALENCE OF INCEST AND SEXUAL OFFENSES

The literature on adult-child sexual relations produced before the mid-1970s is large and diverse. Early writings in anthropology were largely concerned with the incest taboo and its explanation. Biologists studied the effects of inbreeding and posited various theories of biological disturbances as causative factors in sexual offenses. Sociologists produced a small but influential number of research studies on incest. The psychiatric literature, by contrast, was large, with one strand concerned principally with incest, especially father-daughter incest, and another strand concerned with a much broader range of sexual offenses. The criminological and legal literatures, too, were considerable, and focused on a wide range of legally defined or socially proscribed sexual offenses, contact and noncontact, in and outside the family. Similarly, there were many general studies of sex offenders and a number of general studies of sexual behavior, the latter often including information about preadolescent sexual experiences with sex offenders. Over the decades, both the incest literature and what might collectively be termed the sexual offense literature focused on the pathology and background of the father/adult offender and causative factors of the offense. The number of studies that considered the role of and outcomes for the child victim was much smaller, though it began to expand in the 1950s.

In the period I am concerned with, the definition of incest in most research and clinical reports, both sociological and psychiatric, was strictly limited. In cross-cultural studies, anthropologists had found a seemingly universal prohibition on father and daughter, mother and son, or brother and sister having sexual intercourse or marrying (Murdock 1949). Following this understanding of the prohibition, researchers and clinicians typically defined incest as genital intercourse between blood relatives. Relatives included all members of the nuclear family, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, but never cousins. Some clinicians, especially after 1960, broadened the range of sexual contact in their incest definitions, adding such sexual behaviors as sodomy, oral-genital contact, genital fondling, mutual masturbation, and attempted coitus. They also extended the range of relatives to include those by marriage. But whether they defined incest narrowly or more broadly, researchers and clinicians treated incest as its own category of deviance. Influenced by the anthropological studies and Freud's theorization of its role in mental life, they treated incest as the violation of a uniquely powerful and developmentally significant taboo. Incest, therefore, was not simply an expression of or reducible to other types of sexual deviance, and writers in the incest literature made little reference to the broader sexual offense literature.

Researchers and clinicians-even those with the broadest definitions-believed incest, absolutely and relative to other forms of sexual deviance, to be rare. As part of their polemic against the older literature, writers in the 1970s and beyond routinely asserted that the annual incidence of incest was earlier believed to be less than 2 cases per million in the United States (e.g., Butler 1978; Forward and Buck 1978). But this low figure refers to the incidence of incest in criminal statistics. Kirson Weinberg, for instance, in his classic study, Incest Behavior, reported that U.S. average rates of incest conviction were 1.2 cases per million persons in 1910, 1.9 cases per million persons in 1920, and 1.1 cases per million persons in 1930 (1955: 39). Robert Masters reported in 1963 that in no U.S. state was the annual rate of convicted incest offenders greater than 2 per million (1963: 63). Criminal statistics on incest reported for other countries were similar (see Greenland 1958; Maisch 1972: 86-90). In Sweden, for example, only about 30 cases per year came to the attention of the courts (Riemer 1940). Virtually every author, however, was quick to point out that the actual incidence of incest must far exceed the rate of detection by law enforcement authorities (cf. Meiselman 1978: 29; Weiner 1962). Some even thought that incest was common in certain social classes (Riemer 1940: 566), between brothers and sisters (Klein 1932), or among certain specialized subgroups, such as prostitutes and sex delinquents (see studies in Weinberg 1955: 147-48). The more general agreement, though, was that incest was rare, even when underreporting was taken into account.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One - Defining a New System of Meanings
1. Incest and Sexual Offenses before the Social Discovery of Sexual Abuse
2. Constructing Sexual Abuse 1: Family Therapy and the Child Protection Movement
3. Constructing Sexual Abuse 2: The Antirape Movement and Victim Activists
4. Interpreting Abuse: From Collective Story to Psychological Trauma Model
Part Two - Defining Client Experience
5. Therapeutic Rationale and Therapeutic Persuasion
6. The Victimization Account
7. From Victim to Survivor and Beyond
Part Three - Victimization and the Self
8. Memory Wars
9. Accounts of Innocence
Methodological Appendix
Notes
References
Index