Recovery Histories
Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) is not an illness or a physical wound. And yet recovery is spoken about in a language borrowed from medicine, we seek to ‘heal wounds’ and ‘repair damage.’ The language and ‘logics’ of trauma now dominate public services, emphasising psychological recovery and ignoring other forms of social support that individuals need to achieve emotional and physical equilibrium. In research, survivors’ needs are ignored in favour of measuring the clinical efficacy of specific treatments. Their recovery is frequently hindered rather than helped by medical and social welfare interventions. Their views are given less credence, their ‘stories’ are generalised across time, place and identity. The experiences of the minoritized and structural inequalities are ignored. But context matters in relation to effective responses to sexual violence.
Led by Dr Ruth Beecher, this four-year Wellcome-funded research project is co-produced with survivor and practitioner partners including Survivors’ Voices, Survivors’ in Transition, The Flying Child, and the Association of Child Protection Professionals. This is the first social, cultural and medical history into recovery from CSA in the second half of twentieth century Britain and Ireland. Via a mixed methods approach, it will offer a rare insight into the experiences of survivors and front line practitioners, who are commonly left out of the historical record. It brings the two groups together to learn from past experiences and influence present-day practice and policy.
The research aims to understand how cultural, scientific, clinical and institutional ideas about trauma and recovery from CSA have developed over the second half of the twentieth century and why a medical model of recovery now dominates medical, psychiatric and public discourses of healing. This will be explored via the following research questions:
- How have public, activist and professional perceptions of what makes a ‘good recovery’ from CSA altered between 1950 and 20?
- How do victim-survivors understand their experiences of trauma and recovery following CSA?
- In what ways have practitioners’ attitudes, feelings and practices in relation to the concepts of trauma, recovery and healing after CSA changed over time?
- How do models of recovery connect to structural constraints?
The research will employ mixed methods to paint a comprehensive picture. The research methods include archival research, the co-creation new oral histories with survivors and practitioners, ethnographic interviews and participant observations with survivors and practitioners, and a collaboration with organizations that hold prior research data (surveys or interviews) to explore how it might be ethically ‘re-used’ to contextualize survivor experiences and practitioner responses. Historical research will support the building of a CSA survivor archive of recovery, while fieldwork with survivor participants will provide insights into their lived experiences. Observations of practitioners across various support services and new oral histories from both survivors and practitioners will further enrich the study. The holistic approach aims to explore methods of support beyond medication and therapy, including education, financial stability, spirituality, relationships, play, and creativity.
Bios
Dr Ruth Beecher is the principal investigator on the project. She is an historian and of medicine and child welfare, with interests are in gender, sexuality and sexual violence in Britain, Ireland and the US. In her last project, she investigated the role of health professionals and feminist survivor activists in relation to early intervention in child sexual abuse in Britain, 1970-2000, using archival research and new oral histories. Her book (Community Health Practitioners and Child Sexual Abuse in the Family, 1970s-2010s) will be published in April 2025 by Palgrave Macmillan.
Beecher directed the multidisciplinary Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters (see https://shame.bbk.ac.uk/) project at Birkbeck from Jan 2022 to Apr 2023. Prior to 2018, she was a senior leader in local government children’s services where she developed and managed services and policy initiatives.
Dr Adeline Moussion Esteve is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the project. She is a social anthropologist. Her research focuses on gender-based violence, situated within the framework of critical trauma studies. Her work explores the social and political dimensions that shape the experience of violence, with particular attention to the material and everyday consequences of its aftermath. Her thesis, The Domestic in Violence: Understanding the Experience of Violence Beyond Trauma in Contemporary France, compared feminist ‘expert’ discourses, trauma-informed socio-medical interventions, and women’s perceptions of the aftermath and the experience of sexual and domestic violence. She will conduct ethnographic fieldwork with survivors and practitioners.
Dr Baljit Kaur is a Research Assistant on the project. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of Sussex. Her doctoral research was an ethnographic study of young people’s lived experiences of violence and resistance in East London, and the way in which these stories are narrated through rap music.
Dr Katie Elliott is a Research Assistant on the project. Her PhD thesis explored the gap between media and practice through a feminist analysis of media representations and practitioner perspectives on sexual exploitation of girls and young women. She has extensive experience as a researcher and practitioner in gender-based violence services over recent years.
Contact Information
Email: recovery-histories@bbk.ac.uk
BlueSky: bluesky @recovery-histories.bsky.social