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Situating Silence in Child Sexual Abuse

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Eating Disorders and Child Sexual Abuse

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Abstract

This chapter examines how the denial of child sexual abuse is still an entrenched norm in society. Indeed, the difficulties that were placed in the way of the women speaking out about child sexual abuse exacerbated traumatic experiences. Being silenced fostered emotions of guilt, shame and worthlessness, and they turned to other ways of coping. I argue that the women used their bodies to speak about their silenced child sexual abuse experiences. The use of drawings allowed the trauma to ‘speak’ in its own language—the visual form. The women experienced multiple levels of silencing, including in eating disorder treatment, as cultural discourses privilege medical explanations of bodily states. This left the women feeling disempowered, and this mirrored the powerlessness they experienced through child sexual abuse.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There has been a vast range of feminist work relating to the body and its practices in the context of gender norms and femininity and it is not my intention to imply that feminists occupy a homogenous or wholly unproblematic position on this (for examples, see Bartky 1990; Bordo 2003; Frost 2003; Arthurs and Grimshaw 1999).

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  1. Institute of Health and Sport, Victoria University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Lisa Hodge

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Hodge, L. (2021). Situating Silence in Child Sexual Abuse. In: Eating Disorders and Child Sexual Abuse. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6296-3_7

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