Download the thesis - South Eastern Centre Against Sexual Assault

is rare to hear or read any commentary from the point of view of the perpetrator that
advances a sincere understanding of the behaviour.
Silence is further maintained through the complicity of those who choose to avert their
eyes from what is a difficult and potentially embarrassing societal problem. If the
trauma is incest, or other childhood sexual abuse, it confronts one of society’s last
taboos. Van der Kolk argues “society’s reactions [to trauma] seem to be primarily
conservative impulses in the service of maintaining the belief that the world is
fundamentally just, people are in charge of their lives and bad things only happen to
people who deserve them” (van der Kolk, McFarlane and Weisaeth 35). This attitude
allows society to believe there is an underlying justification for abuse, thus avoiding an
examination of what is truly at stake should the status quo not be maintained. If this
were examined, the community would be forced to confront the reality of how
widespread sexual abuse is and who perpetrates it. Therefore, it can be observed that
silence is maintained by a number of people: the perpetrator, the victim, the
collaborators and the community.
One consequence of talking about trauma “without being truly heard, or truly listened
to” is, according to Laub, “that the telling might itself be lived as a return of the
trauma” (Felman and Laub 67). This is known as re-traumatisation. Laub relates how
Holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi’s experience of not being heard triggered “a
desolating grief … pain in its pure state …” (67-8).
Questions as to whether an event is factual or fictional, accurate or exaggerated are
commonly raised in response to trauma and are ever present to those who have been
sexually abused. Victims are often questioned in order to provide appropriate help, as
part of an investigation, for example, and sometimes such questions are raised to
undermine a victim, protect a perpetrator or guard the community from facing the
reality of its occurrence. In a legal or therapeutic context, the question of being
believed and having evidence to support a claim of sexual assault or its impact are
different from the context in which I, as an artist, work with the women. I chose as
my guide a story related by Dr Dori Laub of a Holocaust survivor who gave testimony
of her experience at Auschwitz. The survivor told Laub, a psychoanalyst, and a panel
of historians her account of witnessing the destruction of four crematoria chimneys at
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