REVIEW OF: Accounts of Innocence: Sexual Abuse, Trauma, and the Self by Joseph E. Davis (University of Chicago Press, 312 pages, $27.50)
“I was not sexually abused. Yet I was sexually abused,” Ellen Bass wrote in an anthology of survivor accounts called I Never Told Anyone. “We were all sexually abused. The images and attitudes, the reality we breathe in like air, it reaches us all. We are all in need of healing.”
Perhaps so. But in Accounts of Innocence, Joseph E. Davis points out that the widespread application of the victimization model to our own experiences is a relatively recent phenomenon. On April 17, 1971, Florence Rush stood at a podium at Washington Irving High School in New York and shared her story of her sexual abuse, as part of the New York Radical Feminists’ first conference on rape. According to Davis, before this conference, abuse survivors lacked a public forum through which to share their stories. The act of sharing stories broke “the conspiracy of silence” surrounding abuse, while each new story helped create a wider narrative through which survivors could frame their own experiences.
This article was first published in First Things (January 2007). Read the rest of the article: here.
