Child Sexual Abuse in Contemporary Culture: Developing Cultural Studies Approaches

Posted 1 September 2020 

This interdisciplinary Wellcome Trust-funded project (PI: Dr Ailise Bulfin) explores how child sexual abuse is represented in contemporary culture in works like novels, films and TV series, and seeks to understand how these representations affect both survivors and general audiences. This work is important because cultural representations potentially inform social understandings of CSA, which in turn affect survivors’ health outcomes. Strand one of the project consists of a seminar series and workshop which bring together CSA survivors, cultural, social science and medical scholars, and healthcare practitioners to develop a research agenda and build a research network for investigating this topic. Strand two entails a pilot empirical study of reader responses to different types of literary representation of child sexual abuse. 

For details of the project see here, and for the latest news, see here. 

Project contact: ailise.bulfin@ucd.ie