How do fictional representations of child sexual abuse affect readers and viewers?

^{March 30th, 2022}

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Ailise Bulfin (pictured) of UCD School of English, Drama and Film has received a European Research Council Starting grant for her project ‘Investigating fictional representations of child sexual abuse in contemporary culture: myths and understanding’. 

 

Dr Ailise Bulfin had perhaps never expected to research fictional representations of the “really difficult issue” of child sexual abuse (CSA) in contemporary culture. After all, she is a scholar of nineteenth century literature and had originally sought to examine its covert presence there. 

But the CSA survivors she met while scoping her project saw an “urgency” to examine depictions of CSA in modern fiction, TV and film.

“So I went with that,” she says. “Without their input into the way that I'm doing the research it wouldn't have taken this shape. It wouldn't be anything like the way it currently is.”

An estimated one in nine people in the EU will experience CSA but there is still a public reluctance to talk about it, “especially intra-familial abuse. And this is bad for the people who experienced child sexual abuse and it's bad for social efforts to prevent it”. 

As she set about her research, Ailise had not expected to find so much CSA in our modern novels, TV series and movies because of the persisting taboo.

“I was kind of perplexed to find that we do actually engage widely with the topic in culture. I thought I would struggle to find material. But instead I find it is pervasive across many different forms of contemporary culture, perhaps because fiction provides a little distance from the subject and makes it easier to engage with it.”

Ailise’s work investigates both the aesthetic strategies used to represent CSA in fiction and how these representations may impact readers and viewers. These representations seem to exist on a spectrum. Some works “at least attempt to engage sensitively and accurately with the actual real life experience of CSA and you might see this in, for example, issues fiction, or serious literary fiction”. Others, especially in the crime and horror genres, tend to “sensationalise” CSA, by focusing on extreme or unusual versions of it, like ritual abuse or abduction by strangers. 

“They tend to rehash myths about CSA in ways that can be quite unhelpful to survivors and to wider society.”

Abusers are often depicted as monsters in fiction, for example, the creepy clown in Stephen King’sIT, but “we need to be able to see that while the act is monstrous, perpetrators are ordinary”.

Child abusers are people we know in society that “cannot be identified by the characteristics of the monster. If that's who you are looking for you will identify the wrong people,” cautions Ailise. “And you may not notice the abuse is happening perhaps within your family circle or your extended circle of people that your child comes into contact with on a regular basis. That, statistically, is where most abusers lie.”

Ailise is an advocate of “survivor-centred fiction”, where the work explores the survivor’s viewpoint and offers an insight into their lives. She praises the Irish Young Adult novelNeedleworkby Deirdre Sullivan, narrated by a 16-year-old survivor after she has left her abusive father. 

“She was abused from the time she was eight to 14 and it just shows you in a very quiet but quite inspiring way what it is like for her just to try to cope with daily life after this kind of experience – the strategies that she has for coping, the support she doesn't receive from society and the adults around her.”

Ailise has heard survivors say that the book “resonates with their experience” and she believes it may allow readers who have not personally experienced abuse to “understand something of the survivors' experience”.

She ran a pilot study on reactions toNeedlework“and one thing that really struck me was what I call a protective response where people described wanting to ‘reach into the page’ and help the survivor character”. She hopes that this could “transfer to a real world situation, where, for example, if somebody disclosed abuse, the person they disclose to might have a more sympathetic, understanding response”.

In this way, accurate portrayals of CSA might improve bystander awareness and intervention - and perhaps work towards prevention.

Ailise is fascinated with the aesthetic qualities of fiction and “the way it can do things that other forms can’t”. She gives the example of a recent novel that also deals with CSA,10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange Worldby Turkish author Elif Shafak, the title referring to the longest recorded time that brain activity continued after a person’s death. 

“Shafak uses this as a jumping off point to explore the series of memories that flash through the protagonist’s mind just after she realises that she is dead, tracing the impact of her early experience of abuse by her uncle across her whole life up to the point at which she is murdered. And no other form can do something like this. You cannot have this in memoir or any other form of factual material.”

Ailise was also impressed by the 2017 BBC documentary dramaThree Girls, which dramatised the experience of survivors of a convicted CSA ring in England.

“After the series finished airing the BBC received over 100,000 calls to their helpline. So you can see how it was instrumental in inspiring people to come forward for help and presumably some of those people had never come forward for help before.”

It may have been public service broadcasting at its best, butThree Girlsis also “really, really, really hard watching”.

Ailise admits she cannot look at many CSA-themed works in succession, interspersing her research with lighter fare.

“There's a bit of self-care involved in working on material like this. But the survivors are so inspiring that it makes you want to keep doing the work.”

 

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