Child Knowledge, Metaphor, and “Survivor Time”: The Ethics of Writing CSA

The second in a series of thought-provoking blogs by our Visiting Scholar feminist ethicist and interdisciplinary scholar Andrea Nicki.

Julie Wheelwright and Ruth Beecher recently developed a digital resource, Writing Difficult Subjects: A Trauma-Informed Creative Writing Toolkit. Its development was funded through Beecher’s British Academy / Leverhulme Trust small grant via workshops delivered at Birkbeck, University of London. This toolkit helps researchers and writers process emotionally demanding material related to sexual violence in supportive writing communities. The authors acknowledge that researchers and writers may also be survivors, and, indeed, many survivor-researchers-writers may feel daunted by writing about their own experiences of sexual violence and worry about being overwhelmed by the subject matter. They may even have been warned by well-meaning others that this will cause re-traumatization or may perceive the small number of published memoirs on this subject as evidence of the psychological dangers, rather than of persistent taboo. The authors aptly show, through exercises and extracts, that writing about sexual violence and breaking silence need not be overwhelmingly difficult but rather gratifying, especially for those who have been invalidated and scapegoated by their families and communities. The authors explore different techniques, such as the use of symbolism and metaphors to promote emotional distancing, as well as physical practices like pacing and grounding to facilitate decompression. As a survivor-research-writer, I find even referring to forms of violence by using abbreviations like CSA can help prevent overidentifying with the traumatic experience and with a trauma identity. As the authors maintain, writing about sexual trauma is a process that can take a very long time, even years. One could argue that this mirrors, but is distinct from, the concept of crip time in disability justice, which emphasizes flexibility and the need to move at a pace that respects individual bodies, minds, and circumstances. This may be termed “survivor time.” In other words, write on your own “survivor time” and don’t rush to make your memoir a best-seller!

In my view, published writing on CSA can serve as a form of counter-archive, supplying interpretive resources that are typically absent from clinical, institutional, and policy-oriented accounts of trauma and recovery. In this way, narrative is treated as ethical evidence illustrating how core moral concepts, such as trust, credibility, care, family, home, and safety, are fashioned under conditions of intrafamilial harm across multiple spiritual, social and cultural contexts. As an applied health ethicist and published memoirist on child sexual abuse, I am particularly interested in the authors’ claim that writers should consider the impact of the writing on others and that “ethical choices” should be made when contextualizing and describing experiences of sexual violence. I elaborate on these ethical issues in this blog, as a contribution to the toolkit.

These ethical choices can include fresh, imaginative similes and metaphors, which offset overly medical, narrow, or stereotypical representations of survivors as “sick,” “broken,” or “poorly integrated.” These are not only techniques that make difficult material easier to depict but serve to preserve and archive child knowledge that could not originally be expressed in conventional adult language. When young children lack understanding of sexual activities, such as intrafamilial rape, they may improvise understanding through metaphor. Indeed, much autobiographical poetry about CSA (e.g. Lucille Clifton, Sapphire) presents the abuse as a bad dream or as happening to someone else or by an animal or another person. While in conventional psychotherapy, this framing is typically viewed in terms of deficiency, as reflecting a psychological symptom of dissociation or denial, it can be understood as testimony: a child’s active, intelligent effort to bear witness within the limits of their conceptual resources.

My poem “Nightcrawlers” testifies to how I, as a young girl trained in Catholicism, interpreted sexual violation theoretically, through catechism and biblical imagery, rather than reflecting psychological dissociation, or a state of passive victimization. I present the phallus as a snake of Eden, a symbol of sin and the loss of purity:

…i thought, large worm, snake
something that disgusts and terrifies
the evil snake that caused adam and eve to lose paradise
taught in catechism class

Interpreting and articulating my experience in this way was my attempt to resist imposed secrecy and shame and to affirm child intelligence and rationality and a sense of innocence, as well as a positive identity as a child scholar, who read voraciously and sought knowledge from teachers and books.

Similarly, my poem “Annie’s Alphabet” draws on my child knowledge of animal biology and experience of playing with insects, as well as other activities, such as swimming, selling lemonade, caring for a cactus in my room, avoiding jellyfish stingers on summer beaches, eating sticky substances like jam and peanut butter, and hammering nails alongside my father in home renovation projects. Without any conception of male bodily processes, I used these everyday objects and creatures as metaphors: the phallus as nail, worm, snake, jellyfish stinger, cactus, and lemon juice. In ethical terms, these metaphors represent not failure or disturbance, but child intelligence and creativity. When I shared this poem in a presentation at a university, some were visibly disturbed and quiet, while another professor shared that he was a survivor and complimented the writing for accurately capturing a child’s view of the experience.

A is for ants crawling all over you

B is for beetles doing the same

C is for caterpillar inching up your leg

D is for Daddy Long Legs

E is for eel swimming between your legs

F is for feather tickling

G is for gnat buzzing in your ear

H is for hugging

I is for icky

J is for stinging jellyfish

K is for kreepy     k k ?

L is for lemon juice

M is for Mom!

N is for sharp nail

O is for octopus squeezing you tight

P is for prickly cactus

Q is for quietly

R is for roll over

S is for sticky

T is for terror

U is for ugly

W is for wriggling

X is for x-rated

Y is for yell caught in your throat

Z is for zzzzzzzz

Perpetrators exploit child knowledge systems, inculcated in school teachings, by presenting abuse as a game, manipulating children’s values of fun and play and virtues of empathy and cooperativeness. One of my favorite picture books as a child was Richard Scarry’s The Early Bird (1968) where a bird befriends a worm called “Wiggly Worm.” And so, as a child, I framed CSA as “tickle, tickle wiggle worm,” as a game laced with parental lessons like other childhood games with rules, which served to make the abuse feel less disruptive and more easily woven into the fabric of everyday family life. My poem below, published in my book You Can Make Your Own Rose (2018), challenges a stereotypical view of survivors as sexually precocious “Lolitas,” or young temptresses, a view which survivors may internalize:

Tickle Tickle Wiggle Worm

A friend tells me that when she was four

her father taught her how to play

tickle tickle wiggle worm

She still feels shame for having played

the game with him

says she must have been “a young slut”

I ask her: “Should you feel shame for having

played other games that he taught you—

Simon Says, puppetry, hide-and-go-seek

pin the tail on the donkey

catch, monopoly, cards?”

For survivors of CSA, violations can be lived first as family experiences, mixing with other family experiences. A child who is being regularly sexually abused and who lacks an understanding of the concepts of consensual versus non-consensual sex may experience the sexual activity literally as an unpleasant duty or chore, as no more shocking, shameful or “dirty” to the child than ironing or watering the garden. They may intelligently situate their experience within the only categories available to them: respect for parents, duties, and routines. Indeed, non-sexual chores may feel more burdensome to a child if these require more effort and energy, such as hanging out a huge load of family laundry on the clothing line. This work could be more subject to public scrutiny and critique from any member of the family who sees the clothes drying in the sun and finds fault. In virtue ethics terms, an unknowing child’s compliance with their father’s demands, both appropriate and inappropriate, does not reflect moral deficiency or vice, but the virtues of obedience to parental authority, work ethic, tenacity and stoicism, as well as a form of practical wisdom in navigating intractable power imbalances with the least disruption.

While others might find these explicit references to male sexual abuse disturbing, and be worried about secondary trauma, such a reaction may be, in part, because the experience of CSA continues to be thought of as too “unthinkable,” outside the realm of human possibility and containability. It is useful to note that, in contrast to CSA, sexual violence in the workplace has become very culturally legible, with weaker taboos of silence, disgust, and disbelief and familiar language and institutional policies to address it. Personal narratives have been published and circulated so widely that they have helped produce a movement, the MeToo movement. Poems like the ones presented here, which present CSA as a chore or work, help others understand how the sexual abuse of children occurs along a continuum with the sexual abuse of adults in the home and workplace, within relationships of authority such as those between employees and supervisors. In both contexts, abuse can mix with mundane, pleasant and unpleasant everyday experiences, such as employee tasks. Children’s processes of sense-making in contexts of CSA show that they, like adults in situations of sexual abuse in the workplace, struggle to preserve goods like mutual trust, cooperation, and integrity within their family’s moral world.

While it is important to protect writers and researchers from overexposure to difficult material like CSA, it is crucial that we create conditions in which more survivors are able to speak and write and be grasped as “real memoirists,” so that this becomes more normalized. Life narratives about such abuse—people’s real lives—may then become less “disturbing” and sensational, or less likely to be dismissed as general health topics. For example, Sophie Olson has noted in a LinkedIn post that her memoir on CSA, The Flying Child, has been placed in the library in a section on complementary medicine. My own poetry books, which include the subtitle “Poems,” have been placed in the section of the library on adult non-fiction. These books, which have been seen as musical and imagistic, and as reflecting my training in singing and painting, cover a range of unrelated topics, and include nature poetry. Thus, even writers who are survivors who have been researching and writing about CSA for years, such as myself, can always benefit from an inclusive intellectual community where they can talk about the emotional and ethical difficulties of the work and public reception. But as CSA has become more normalized for them, their experience of others’ stories may be much different from that of those who haven’t experienced CSA, and less likely to involve secondary trauma. Instead, like myself, they may experience them as similar family stories, reducing isolation and creating a sense of camaraderie and fellowship.